Living Through Change: Boredom and the Rhetoric of Modern Experience

After a brief meditation on how a pluralistic and anti-essentialist approach to Boredom Studies can help us navigate challenges that characterize interdisciplinary knowledge formations more generally, this paper takes up the theoretical and practical problem of thinking boredom as a historically situated, embodied experience (or failure of experience): not as a timeless crisis of meaning, but rather as a historically specific configuration of empty, meaningless time. As I show, boredom’s seeming ubiquity amidst the ongoing social, cultural, and technological transformation that defines the modern world is at once historically and philosophically significant. As an index of the problems of meaning that accompany the challenges of living through historic change, boredom today at once resembles and differs from past forms and permutations of the experience. Expanding our sights to encompass the intertwining varieties of malaise in the contemporary world—not just boredom, but loneliness, anxiety, depression, despair, and all their siblings—can help counter the personalization of alienation by revealing the axes connecting individualized suffering to the social, political, and ecological challenges of our time.