Department of English

See this coverage as it originally appeared in Penn's Arts & Sciences Magazine, OMNIA: https://omnia.sas.upenn.edu/story/three-ways-reframe-boredom-lilith-todd

Three Ways to Reframe Boredom

By Ev Crunden

Anyone without an exciting answer to what they did over the weekend may be familiar with the sensation of creeping shame. Maybe they did nothing notable—a popular pastime on a day off, but being idle can feel socially unacceptable. After all, it’s boring. But is boredom actually a bad thing? Not necessarily, says Lilith Todd, Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English.

This semester marks the first time Todd has taught How and When to be Bored: Literature and Attention, a course geared toward, well, exactly what it sounds like. The class prods students to inspect not just why boredom feels like a vice, but also the evolution of boredom as a concept. “Cultural historians have noticed that boredom emerges from particular historical circumstances and media environments,” says Todd. “In fact, it is somewhat counterintuitive to think that doing nothing is bad or feels bad. Shouldn’t it be relaxing or restorative?”

Since we can’t all attend Todd’s class, she has advice for anyone looking to revisit the much-maligned art of doing nothing. Here are three ways she says we can approach—and maybe learn to appreciate—boredom.

1. Look at History

To fully understand how our modern aversion to boredom developed, Todd says we need to gaze back to the time when it first became a concept: 18th-century Britain.

For much of human history, unless you were extraordinarily privileged, life was an endless cycle of labor. But the 1700s ushered in a new culture of idleness. Todd’s class posits this was possible due to several factors, including an increase in distractions and entertainment alongside the rising importance of inner life—spurring activities like self-improvement and avoiding being idle. But she also points to notions of individual personal responsibility for one’s own happiness, born out of Europe’s cultural and intellectual Enlightenment period.

That shift plays out in poems and novels from the time. Todd has her students read William Cowper’s “The Task,” for example, a poem that discusses being distracted while resting and that coined the phrase, “Variety is the very spice of life.” She also has them read Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina, which maps the desire for new entertainments onto dating.

Understanding the history of boredom also means understanding its class implications, Todd adds, including “how these elite authors frame their idleness and boredom compared to the activity of laboring people.”

2. Read Boring Literature

The inspiration for Todd’s course stemmed from observations she sometimes made while teaching. “I noticed that students often came into classes with a sharp sense of when a text interested or bored them,” she explains. Which characteristics might lead a novel or poem to feel boring are now a key part of Todd’s class, along with pondering what can be learned from slowing down while reading sections a reader might be inclined to skip over.

Take Jane Austen, who was often dismissed as a dull author by critics who found fault in her focus on romantic entanglements and the social realities women of her time faced. Todd’s students read Austen’s Emma, where so much of the pursuit of happiness is wound up in finding an un-boring romantic match—a chief focus for the titular heroine, who herself has time on her hands and, ultimately, a boring happy ending.

Emma, one of many such books,invites readers to mull both their own boredom and its depiction in history, along with class and gender implications. “Most of the time, we try to approach boredom as a description of an experience,” says Todd. “But we also notice how it is used as a negative judgement against others—to cast writing as technically failing or to create cultural scripts for women.”

3. Assess the Present Moment

Todd says we shouldn’t lose sight of the present even when studying the past. “How is a social media platform different and similar to a newspaper filled with miscellaneous stories and gossip?” Todd asks, while also pondering the appeal of the classic lazy day, something that can feel as frivolous now as it did 300 years ago. “Why might we want ‘doing nothing’ to feel good today?”

That answer is all around us: Modern life is fast-paced and grueling, with unending information and activities constantly at our fingertips. It can all be wildly overwhelming, yet the prospect of taking a break to luxuriate in nothingness, to rest the mind and body, is more likely to earn a raised eyebrow than social acceptance. That’s the dichotomy Todd hopes her students wrestle with, regardless of any conclusions they ultimately reach.

“My overall goal has been to help students see that their boredom has a rich content to it,” she says, “and give them a variety of tools to unpack it.”