Boredom

In conventional usage, boredom, ennui, or tedium is an emotion characterized by uninterest in one's surrounding, often caused by a lack of distractions or occupations.

It seems to be a specific mental state that people find unpleasant—a lack of stimulation that leaves them craving relief, with a host of behavioral, medical and social consequences.

"[7] A popular misconception is that Charles Dickens coined the term "boredom" in his work Bleak House, published in 1853.

[9] "The German word for "boredom" is Langeweile, a compound made of lange "long" and Weile "while", which is in line with the common perception that when one is bored, time passes "tortuously" slowly.

[11] Boredom has been defined by Cynthia D. Fisher in terms of its main central psychological processes: "an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest and difficulty concentrating on the current activity.

"[12] Mark Leary et al. describe boredom as "an affective experience associated with cognitive attentional processes.

People who are absent-minded tend to show signs of memory lapse and weak recollection of recently occurring events.

In addition to absent-mindedness leading to an array of consequences affecting daily life, it can also have more severe, long-term problems.

Lethargy can be a normal response to boredom, inadequate sleep, overexertion, overworking, stress, lack of exercise, or a symptom of a disorder.

When part of a normal response, lethargy often resolves with rest, adequate sleep, decreased stress, and good nutrition.

There is an inherent anxiety in boredom; people will expend considerable effort to prevent or remedy it, yet in many circumstances, it is accepted as suffering to be endured.

During the fin de siècle, the French term for the end of the 19th century in the West, some of the cultural hallmarks included "ennui", cynicism, pessimism, and "...a widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence.

Like Pascal, they were interested in people's quiet struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom.

[26] Søren Kierkegaard remarks in Either/Or that "patience cannot be depicted" visually, since there is a sense that any immediate moment of life may be fundamentally tedious.

Heidegger states this idea as follows: "Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference.

"[29] Erich Fromm and other thinkers of critical theory speak of boredom as a common psychological response to industrial society, where people are required to engage in alienated labor.

[30] Above and beyond taste and character, the universal case of boredom consists in any instance of waiting, as Heidegger noted, such as in line, for someone else to arrive or finish a task, or while one is travelling somewhere.

People ranked low on a boredom-proneness scale were found to have better performance in a wide variety of aspects of their lives, including career, education, and autonomy.

In a learning environment, a common cause of boredom is lack of understanding; for instance, if one is not following or connecting to the material in a class or lecture, it will usually seem boring.

A study found results consistent with the hypothesis that pathological gamblers seek stimulation to avoid states of boredom and depression.

This theory was first expounded in 2007 in Diagnose Boreout, a book by Peter Werder and Philippe Rothlin, two Swiss business consultants.

[46] The protagonist in these works is an indecisive central character who drifts through his life and is marked by ennui, angst, and alienation.

[47] Grunge lit is an Australian literary genre of fictional or semi-autobiographical writing in the early 1990s about young adults living in an "inner cit[y]" "...world of disintegrating futures where the only relief from...boredom was through a nihilistic pursuit of sex, violence, drugs and alcohol".

It was typically written by "new, young authors"[48] who examined "gritty, dirty, real existences"[48] of everyday characters.