CHAPTER 7
THE SEARCH FOR MEANING
The talk seemed promising from its title. But fifteen minutes in, you fail to even recall what the title was; something to do with the bacterial ecology of the Thames. Not exactly your area of expertise, but close enough to make it worth your while. Or so you thought.
You had been alert and eager to begin with, the introduction engaging and meaningful enough in its own way. But somehow the point of the whole talk had unraveled; perhaps the speaker’s monotonous drawl was to blame, or maybe the topic was a bit too advanced for you. Either way, now you find yourself shifting in your seat, slumping down one minute, then leaning forward, head cradled in your hands the next. You look around at the other audience members. Incomprehensibly, some seem to be enraptured with what you’ve now decided is pointless, bereft of any semblance of meaning for you. Others are also shifting restlessly, unable to maintain a decorous posture.
That’s when you spot your colleague Dr. Galton sitting one row ahead, to your right. He’s scribbling some notes, and you try discreetly to peer over his shoulder to discern what he could possibly be getting out of this long, tedious lecture.
Galton seems to be studiously observing the audience more than attending to the speaker. What could he be doing? You scan the audience, trying to see what he sees.
Later, when you run into Galton, you ask him what he was doing.
“Trying to gauge the audience’s satisfaction with the presentation, my dear man. I didn’t find the thing to be altogether very engaging, and my posture was a dead giveaway. I realized I was not alone. When attending deeply, rapt by the meticulous information presented, our colleagues sat upright and had minimal sway. But when they failed to adequately focus their faculties on the poor fellow schooling us on the precise constituents of that trail of mud we call the Thames, they began to fidget and sway.”
Galton had chosen to spend his time eking meaning not from the topic of the talk itself but from something he habitually derived pleasure from—the measurement of human behavior.1
We live in an interpreted world: all that we see, smell, hear, taste, and touch is colored by the meaning we assign to it. We see patterns. We see purpose, value, and significance. Sensations are judged as good or bad. We expend resources, relinquish large amounts of personal time, and in some cases give up our lives, all in the quest for meaning. Firefighters put themselves in harm’s way, terror groups commit numerous atrocities, and the über-wealthy donate large portions of their net value. We may come to different answers, but it seems impossible for any of us to refrain from giving meaning to our experience. Boredom is integral to this core need. It tells us we have lost meaning and can motivate us to find it again.2
Lars Svendsen from the University of Bergen asserts that we live “in a culture of boredom” reflective of a crisis of meaning in society more broadly. “Boredom,” he suggests, “can be described metaphorically as a meaning withdrawal. Boredom can be understood as a discomfort, which communicates that the need for meaning is not being satisfied.”3
Our motivation to seek and find meaning is perhaps most poignantly demonstrated by Victor Frankl’s harrowing account of life in a Nazi concentration camp. What he calls a “will to meaning” is essential for enduring the most inhumane circumstances. Further, this will to meaning holds the key not just to survival but also to human flourishing. When meaning is absent, we are left with an inner void or emptiness, which he calls an “existential vacuum.” According to Frankl this absence of meaning is at the root of much of human suffering and misery. Boredom, he suggests, is a central player—“the existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.”4
Philosophers, theologians, and writers have been wrestling with these themes for a long time. Reinhard Kuhn, for example, in his now classic book, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature, has insightfully traced the idea of boredom across history, exploring how it both reflects and shapes our reality.5 In contrast, scientists are relatively late to the game. What does the relatively recent research tell us about the relation between our need to make meaning and the experience of boredom?
Meaning Lost
Wijnand van Tilburg, a social psychologist at King’s College London, and his mentor Eric Igou at the University of Limerick are leaders in the experimental study of the relation between boredom and meaning. In a set of foundational studies, they asked people to recall a boring time as well as a time they felt sad, angry, and frustrated. In another study, they elicited boredom by having people copy out bibliographic entries about concrete. In each case, boredom was uniquely associated with feelings of meaninglessness.6 For van Tilburg and Igou, a lack of meaning is the defining feature of boredom.
In our view, if a person is bored, they will indeed feel that what is happening is pointless and has no significance. This lack of significance is the result of not being engaged with a desired activity in the moment. If you had a job like Humphrey Potter’s (Chapter 3), pushing one button at the right time and then another some time later, it is hard to imagine how you would find meaning in that monotony. However, we believe it is possible to feel that an activity we are engaged with—and therefore not bored by—can lack significance. So there is an asymmetry in the relation between boredom and a lack of situational meaning.
Researchers have also explored the link between the broader sense of life meaning and boredom. To illustrate the distinction between situational and life meaning, imagine those who generally feel as if their life has a great deal of meaning and purpose. They have a coherent set of values and beliefs that make sense of their experience and guide their actions. Yet, on Saturday morning as they wait in line at the grocery store, they feel that they are wasting time doing something pointless. We would say that they possess a great deal of life meaning but find standing in line to lack situational meaning. The key difference is the reference point for the feeling of meaninglessness. In one case, the reference point is one’s life as a whole, and in the other, it is tied to a particular situation. To be clear, the exact boundary is not always easy to find. One might bleed into the other, sometimes in imperceptible ways and at other times more obviously. Think of doing something menial in your job, such as filling out a record of the day’s activities for billing purposes, in fifteen-minute increments. You like your job and find it contributes to your sense of life meaning, but this particular situation may make you doubt yourself. Nevertheless, we contend the distinction is important for understanding the relation between boredom and meaning.
People who feel that their life lacks meaning also frequently feel bored.7 This is true in younger and older adults and can be seen using both direct and indirect ways to define and measure meaning in life. Individuals who are politically engaged report less tendency to feel bored, and people who report achieving their goals, political or otherwise, also report less boredom.8 Boredom and meaning are tied together regardless of how an individual succeeds or fails to make meaning.
In our lab we found that people’s beliefs about how meaningful their life is predicts their likelihood of feeling bored in the future.9 This finding is important because it shows that boredom and meaning are related over time and points to the possibility that beliefs about the meaningfulness of life may actually cause boredom. Our findings are backed up by other research. For example, on the basis of clinical case studies researchers have noted that the people who often felt bored were distinguished by the fact they had all failed to find a large-scale project that gave their lives meaning.10 We don’t all need to build a multimillion-dollar computer software empire that enables us to found a philanthropic organization to feel we have meaning in our lives, but some broader, long-term goals are helpful.
Richard Bargdill of Duquesne University argues that having compromised an important life project is the key source of chronic boredom.11 He conducted in-depth interviews with people who often felt bored and discovered that they had never come to terms with having given up on important life projects. They claimed others and life circumstances, such as poor teachers or illness, prevented them from pursuing their dreams and goals. But under the surface they were also angry with themselves for giving up and not following through. They were not able to fully engage with life because they were not doing what they really wanted to do. Moreover, they became pessimistic about the possibility of future life satisfaction. Eventually, as time went on, they became more passive, defensive, and withdrawn.
Studies like this provide a tantalizing hint that a lack of life meaning causes boredom. But they are correlational, and as all budding young scientists are taught, correlation is not causation. It’s impossible to know whether a host of other things that the researchers didn’t ask about might explain why life meaning and boredom are associated.
The question of causation is difficult to test. It is not ethical, or possible, to experimentally alter the meaningful events of a person’s life, such as weddings, funerals, and the birth of children. However, it is possible to ask people to think about a time in their past when they felt either a high or low degree of life meaning. Doing so temporarily biases their thoughts and feelings about life meaning, and we can then look to see if this impacts in-the-moment feelings of boredom.
We brought people into the lab and gave them a detailed definition of life meaning. Next, we asked them to recall, and briefly write about, a time in their lives that was particularly meaningful to them. Others were asked to recall and write about a time that was meaningless. Then, after temporarily altering peoples’ feelings of life meaning, we measured their levels of boredom. As expected, people who were asked to remember a meaningless time reported higher levels of boredom compared to those who were asked to remember a meaningful time. It seems a lowered sense of life meaning can cause boredom.12
When we have a sense of meaning and purpose in life, options for engagement with the world are evident and compelling. On the contrary, if we lack meaning and purpose, the value or significance of our options for action start to fade. It becomes difficult to find a reason to do one thing over another when there is no reason to do anything in particular. Meaning tells us to do things because those things are important. Without life meaning, we are directionless, caught in the desire conundrum, and bored.
Taking a different tack, we made people bored, then asked them about their sense of life meaning. It turns out that making people bored did not make them feel as though their lives were meaningless.13 Sitting through a boredom-inducing four hours of a Christmas recital at your child’s school in order to catch the five minutes that your son or daughter is on stage does not diminish your sense that parenthood is meaningful and worthwhile. Thus, diminished life meaning may cause in-the-moment feelings of boredom, but the same is not true in reverse. On first glance, this might seem inconsistent with our earlier claim that boredom is associated with the feeling of purposelessness. This contradiction disappears with the distinction between life meaning and situation meaning. We found no evidence that boredom changed people’s sense of life meaning, despite the likelihood they felt that the situation they were in was meaningless.14
People who lack meaning and purpose in their lives report that they often feel bored. Lacking meaning and purpose in life can actually cause boredom. But being bored doesn’t mean you will inevitably feel your life lacks meaning. This makes intuitive sense. It’s hard to imagine why any given episode of boredom would result in changes to one’s thoughts and feelings about life more generally. However, it might be the case that chronic experiences of boredom can, over time, shift people’s views of the meaningfulness of their lives.
So, research findings both corroborate and refine earlier thinking about boredom and meaning. As we’ve argued throughout, we see boredom as a signal that our mind is unoccupied and that we are caught in a desire conundrum—in short, we are unengaged. Our own view is that a lack of engagement is more central to boredom than a lack of meaning.15 Nonetheless, activities that do not occupy our mind and that do not flow from our desires are typically experienced as worthless and lacking in value; when we’re bored we experience the situation as meaningless. That assessment may then push us to search for something that is meaningful.
Meaning Found
What do nostalgia, generosity, extreme political beliefs, and aggression toward people we judge to be different from us all have in common? They are things people turn to for relief when bored. At first glance, it is difficult to see why boredom is related to such a diverse range of outcomes. But the key to them all is meaning. It has been known for some time that people will use these outlets as a defense against the threat of meaninglessness.
Van Tilburg and Igou conducted a program of research to see if people will engage in these meaning-regulating behaviors if they are made to feel bored in the lab. If so, they reasoned, this would provide compelling evidence that boredom is not simply associated with feelings of meaninglessness but also induces a drive to regain lost meaning, which can express itself in a variety of ways.
For example, that drive to find meaning can push us into states of nostalgic reverie. People who were asked to recall any memory they wanted after doing a really boring task brought to mind more nostalgic memories compared to people who completed a less boring task. Meaning was the linchpin that brought boredom and nostalgic memories together. People who were bored were also more strongly searching for meaning, and this search was related to an increase in nostalgic memories. It would not make much sense when searching for meaning if you thought back to what you had for breakfast that day. Instead, you tend to recollect those pivotal moments in life, such as when you met your life partner, for example. These memories have a greater sense of personal relevance and meaning to you. Finally, to complete the picture, when recalling nostalgic memories, we see an increase in feelings of meaningfulness.16
Being bored can also make us more generous. Research shows that people are more willing to make larger contributions to a charity when they have just completed a boring task compared to when they have completed an interesting, engaging task. Furthermore, these bored individuals were willing to give more if the charity was notably effective. In contrast, non-bored individuals’ willingness to contribute was not impacted by the effectiveness of the charity. Perhaps bored people were particularly interested in effective philanthropy because their boredom drove them to seek out prosocial behaviors to reestablish their lost sense of meaning. At the very least, it shows that they were not simply seeking stimulation or trying to buy their way out of the boring ordeal. Rather, they were taking pains to make sure their money was actually making a difference in the world.17 Maybe Milton Berle was on to something when in 1949 he launched the first-ever telethon—an ordeal so boring that it has raised millions of dollars for charity. Unfortunately, however, the pursuit of meaning does not always lead to positive ends; in fact, it can have a decidedly dark side.
Jingoism—extreme patriotism involving an aggressive stance toward outsiders—is arguably the cause of much suffering in the world today. And boredom may be one cause of this devastating social phenomenon. People who were made to be bored in the lab, compared to those who were not bored, expressed more positive attitudes toward the names and symbols of their own culture. They also assigned stiffer punishments to people they did not identify with (i.e., those from a different cultural background) and more lenient punishments to those from their own culture. It appears that boredom can drive people to regain a sense of meaning, which in turn causes a shift in behavior—a shift that can be directed toward strong symbols of identity.18
Boredom may also push our political views to the extremes. When self-identified left wing / liberal and right wing / conservative university students were asked to complete a boring task, they subsequently rated themselves as more extreme on the political spectrum compared to similar individuals who did not complete a boring task. Being bored did not, by itself, make people more right wing or left wing. Boredom simply accentuated the preexisting political differences between people.19 A strong, uncompromising sense of identity certainly provides a sense of meaning and purpose in life and helps keep boredom at bay. We are not claiming that the ever more polarized (and polarizing) world of politics is primarily the result of an epidemic of boredom. But boredom and the attempt to find meaning in identification with a tribe might indeed be part of the story.
The push toward establishing some sense of meaning casts boredom—at least in terms of political extremism and the vilification of the “other”—as a driver of tribalism. Making matters worse, we know that people who often feel bored are also more likely to admire and be inspired by heroes as they search for something meaningful in the world.20 This is a potentially dangerous cocktail. Worldwide, at any given moment there are many people who are bored. They may feel as though there is no point to what they are doing, and they may be urgently looking for answers. A charismatic leader, one whose rhetoric polarizes people into “us” and “them,” may gain dedicated followers, despite his (such leaders are most often male) obvious foibles. From there it is a short step toward ever-greater extremes in political and world views. The leader has given their lives meaning, and they will not relinquish it easily. Unfortunately, both history and current events are replete with such frightening scenarios. The theologian Nels F. S. Ferre perceptively noted that “A man who experiences no genuine satisfaction in life does not want peace. Men court war to escape meaninglessness and boredom, to be relieved of fear and frustration.”21
In fact, a recent sociological analysis implied that exclusively seeking peace is short-sighted. To minimize war, we must ensure that people are able to author their own lives and find meaning. Otherwise boredom will flourish and, in turn, give rise to a fascination with violence and the glorification of war. Clearly, boredom is not enough by itself to trigger a war, but it may set the stage and give permission for aggression that inflates a flagging sense of meaning.22 When bored, we cast about looking for something that will make us feel as though our lives have purpose. To “fight for King and country,” to blame immigrants for all manner of social ills, or to join well-defined groups that denigrate others, all fit that bill. Boredom isn’t a judge and jury and cannot warn us that these attachments may be morally indefensible or have catastrophic outcomes.
Boredom ignites the desire to reestablish meaning. Whether our attempts to do so lead to positive actions or outcomes (nostalgic reverie, philanthropic largesse), or push us toward destructive pursuits (extreme political views, aggression toward others) is ultimately up to us. The onus is on us to respond to boredom in ways that are good for society and ourselves both in the short and long term.
Meaning in Progress
So far, we have emphasized meaning as a product; that is, we lose or find meaning in specific situations or in our lives more generally. This might be a personal meaning that we realize as an individual or a collective meaning, rooted in larger social structures, in which we participate in as an individual.23 A deeper understanding of boredom is possible when we consider its relation to the process of meaning making. Although lacking meaning is a problem, merely having meaning may not be enough, either. Over time, what was once fresh and compelling can become stale. Personal convictions and life projects need to be reevaluated, changed, or reaffirmed. Like an intimate relationship that needs continual cultivation to thrive, meaning making is an ongoing process.
We are capable of making meaning even where none objectively exists. The most benign (and perhaps banal) example of meaning making is cloud watching, where we see faces and mythical animals in the shapes that drift and morph across the sky. Even more extreme, if you stare at white noise (such as the “snow” on a television) for long enough, most of us will eventually start to see shapes—shapes that simply aren’t there.24 This shows the human brain to be a meaning-making machine, seeking meaning in everything we experience. In a study from the 1960s, researchers asked people to read proverbs after undergoing a period of sensory deprivation. In one instance, the proverbs were written correctly, and in another, the words of the proverbs were mixed up. Boredom was highest when reading the unjumbled proverbs, the situation in which there was no challenge to meaning making. In contrast, when there was an opportunity to engage in the process of making meaning from the jumbled words, people were less bored.25 When we stop collaborating with the world to create meaning, we are more likely to be bored. There are two sides to the coin of meaning as a process. On the one side, a situation must invite and support our participation; it can’t be predetermined, fixed, or chaotic. The reverse side is about us; we must actively participate rather than passively receive.
Consider, for example, Figure 7.1. What do you see in the image?
Figure 7.1. The rabbit-duck illusion. Created in 1892, the image is ambiguous. While the physical image does not change, our interpretation of it can. If you can’t see it yet, the duck’s beak is also the rabbit’s ears.
The image is one you have probably seen before. It highlights the fact that we bring something to the process of meaning making. Although the physical image does not change, we can interpret it as either a duck (beak facing to the left) or a rabbit (snout to the right, ears to the left). Contrast this with the symbols used to denote male and female public toilets. These are unambiguous and require little on our part to interpret them.
A situation is boring if it can be engaged with and understood in only one specific way. Sort of like the difference between a toy—a spinning top, let’s say—that permits only one form of play versus modeling clay, with boundless opportunities. Any situation that leaves no room for us to shape meaning is quickly felt as meaningless and boring. In other words, when the meaning of a situation or object is fixed and predetermined before we arrive on the scene, what you see is what you get, with no possibility of anything more. And what you see is what everyone else sees. And what you see now is what you will always see tomorrow and the next day and the next.
It could be said that boring situations fail to abide by the Japanese garden design principle of miegakure—hide and reveal. The Japanese promenade garden is meant to draw you in with the promise of more. There is no single vantage point from which the whole garden is revealed. Instead, aspects of the garden are discovered or unveiled through the observers’ movements through it. It is the promise of discovery that makes the garden enticing, like a burlesque show that is more engrossing than explicit nudity. To be bored is to lose the allure of the possible, to feel stuck in a dense, interminable present. The flow of time stops so that there is no momentum to carry into an unrealized future; instead, the future is just more of the present.26
Whether a situation offers a predetermined or fixed meaning is only half of the story. Imagine attending a university lecture on quantum mechanics. You know nothing about physics. A jumble of technical words washes over you to no effect; nothing makes sense. You simply can’t understand what is being said. In short order you find yourself mind-numbingly bored—out of your skull with boredom. The flip side, then, to predetermined, fixed meaning is that extremely complex information also impedes meaning making. These two ways of preventing meaning as a process could be labeled redundancy and noise.27
Some redundancy is good. If every public toilet chose dramatically different symbols for signifying male and female, there would be some serious confusion. But if the movie we are watching replays the same scene over and over again without variation, most of us will wind up bored. Variety is said to be the spice of life because it attracts our attention and pushes us to expand our knowledge. But too much variety eventually becomes noise, so much “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”28 The lecture on quantum mechanics is fine for the expert, but for the novice it is just too far beyond anything we are familiar with. It is 0 percent redundancy and 100 percent variety. It’s so novel we can’t make sense of any of it and it is relegated to mere noise. Either too much redundancy or too much noise prevents us from effectively making meaning (an idea we unpack in Chapter 8). Situations that do not draw us in and allow for meaning making are boring. More than that, these situations render us impotent.
Boring situations impoverish us as meaning makers. Svendsen expressed it well: “Man is a world-forming being, a being that actively constitutes his own world, but when everything is always already fully coded, the active constituting of the world is made superfluous, and we lose friction in relation to the world.”29
Superfluous is a key word in that quotation. Any situation that is fully coded renders our own capacity to interact with the world unnecessary. Boring situations objectify us, rob us of agency, and essentially make us interchangeable with any other observer. We can’t customize the experience in any meaningful way. The icons for males and females on public toilets provide a good example: there is no need for us to make interpretations because we do not create the meaning.
The fact that we are incapable of participating in the meaning-making process makes us feel not only superfluous but lacking in control. We lose the sense of agency we first spoke of in Chapter 2, and we become passive recipients of meaning rather than active creators. The spinning top does only what it was designed to do, and we must accept that limitation. Worse than that, we are prevented from imbuing the toy with any other meaning that might match our needs, desires, or intentions. As Andreas Elpidorou, a philosopher from University of Louisville, puts it, “the world of boredom is, in a sense, not our world, it is not the world that is in line with our projects and desires.”30
As humans, we have an inherent ability and need to make meaning, and boring situations deny us the chance to exercise this meaning-making capacity—it is in this sense that boring situations impoverish us. Indeed, in a very real sense we become unnecessary. This experience may, in part, explain the indignation and contempt we feel when we are bored. Boredom is an affront to our personhood.
Meaning Uncertain
Boredom alerts us to the absence of meaning. And when things work well, boredom’s signal guides us toward activities that utilize our abilities, express our passions, and ultimately help us find meaning in life projects. But it does not always work out so well. Boredom is an inefficient spur to meaning. In fact, the absence of boredom does not ensure the presence of meaning.
There are ways of dampening boredom that do not involve the creation of meaning, activities that are ever present and beguiling. It may be that technology has short-circuited the adaptive relation between boredom and meaning. Binge-watching Netflix or wasting hours on Candy Crush are not likely optimal tools for creating meaning. Contemporary society is full of easily accessible, quick acting, and temporary relief from boredom. But it is reasonable to wonder if our attachment to these forms of relief is actually making boredom an even more pressing concern. Are we, as has often been claimed, in the midst of a boredom epidemic?