While fervently tuned into the news in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we might not have realised that two crises were brewing. . . One crisis was spawned by a ravaging disease that ended up cutting millions of lives prematurely short. The other crisis, paradoxically, was that millions of people were also presented with an unbearable excess of time.
As lockdown orders spread across the globe, the tyranny of COVID-19 morphed from a purely biological disease into a cultural dis-ease with attendant spare time and looming boredom. For instance, in a WIRED magazine article entitled ‘This Pandemic is Perilously Boring’, Michael Waters cautioned: “It is far from being the most important source of human suffering. But the rapid spread of boredom across the world is a crisis of its own.”
How are we to understand this ‘crisis’ of boredom and where should we look to seek out its roots? Clearly, the isolation and de-routinisation engendered by the pandemic contributed to the problem. Sequestered at home and cut off from the usual intercourse of daily living, many people experienced coronavirus boredom as a form of social death – a painful form of marginalisation which, as anthropologists have noted, frequently afflicts people on the fringes of society who lack the economic means to gain recognition and fully participate in the social rituals and spaces of late capitalist society. Indeed, when we look at the measures that people took to combat the threat of boredom during the pandemic, most of them centred around attempts to overcome this feeling of marginalisation and re-establish a connection with a world beyond the self. People congregated together on Zoom, held socially distanced driveway parties, and in many urban cities embraced evening balcony concerts to escape their sense of tedium and isolation.
However, while the pandemic may have played a role in exacerbating the boredom crisis, it certainly did not create it. The crisis of boredom is endemic to life in the era of digital capitalism, and it conjures fears not only of social alienation but of psychic alienation – an inability to use our own minds as a source of stimulation and pleasure. Indeed, when we look at the psychoanalytic literature on boredom, we find that the experience of boredom is almost always accompanied by an inability to fantasise or turn inwards for mental stimulation. While psychoanalysts understand this as a by-product of intrapsychic conflict, I want to ask: How is the era of digital capitalism exacerbating this problem? How do we understand boredom not just as an intrapsychic conflict but as a condition that is produced by the extractive logics of our current era of accumulation?
Over the last several decades, digital technologies have become central to the accumulation of profit. Proponents of digital capitalism like to emphasise how these technologies are gifting us new forms of convenience, connection, flexibility and a constant stream of information and entertainment at our fingertips. With our smartphones in hand, the world becomes our oyster. With the touch of a button, we can order anything we want, and Amazon will deliver it just days later. What the titans of tech are less forthcoming about, however, is that these ‘gifts’ come with strings attached. In exchange for convenience, we sacrifice our autonomy; in exchange for connection we throw privacy to the wind; in exchange for flexibility we silently agree to become slaves to our devices, carrying them with us everywhere we go. In fact, this is precisely what the titans of digital capitalism bank on. Their goal is not to emancipate us but to enmesh us in 24/7 webs of extraction. They extend their digital tentacles into as many nooks and crannies of our everyday lives with the singular aim of keeping the circuits of capital accumulation in motion.
Moreover, they pursue this end aggressively, devising ever new ways to highjack our dopamine systems so that we will not want to put our devices down. As social scientists Luke Fernandez and Susan Matt observe in their 2019 book Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter:
Americans have become far less tolerant of boredom and dullness over the last century, particularly so over the last decade. Whereas in the nineteenth century, people were resigned to experiencing tedium and monotony in their lives, contemporary Americans are primed for constant change, novelty, and excitement. In fact, in the digital age, they have become so accustomed to constant stimulation that in a recent study, psychologists found that individuals would rather administer electrical shocks to themselves than sit bored and alone with their thoughts.
Thus, despite the promise that digital capitalism will banish boredom to the dustbin of history, and gift us with a world of constant stimulation and excitement, it seems more likely that the opposite is true. Digital capitalism is intent on candy crushing our minds so that we no longer desire moments to be alone with our thoughts or take pleasure in acts of daydreaming and reverie. Digital capitalism does not banish boredom, it systemically creates it as a lurking threat that needs to constantly be defended against with the use of ever more technology.
Jenny Huberman is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and an Associate Academic Candidate at the Greater Kansas City Psychoanalytic Institute.
Boredom in the age of COVID-19: the unsettling dis-ease of late modern life by Jenny Huberman for the Journal of Psychosocial Studies is available on the Bristol University Press website here.
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