Most of our podcast episodes are about “big” issues, “interesting” topics, “provocative” conversations, or “important” matters… but the truth is that the overwhelming majority of our day-to-day lives is dominated by ennui. Boredom. Tedium. Lethargy. Lassitude. Or, in more common parlance, “the blahs.”

Voltaire famously claimed (in The Prodigal Son) “all genres are allowed, except the boring genre.” It’s easy to see why this is the case for artistic works of fiction, but it also seems to have been true for topics of philosophical reflection as well. Given that boredom is such a ubiquitous part of our human experience, why don’t we have a better theory of it?

The curious thing about reflecting on the topic of “boredom” is, of course, that the very act of reflecting upon it makes it “interesting.” To wit, is it even possible to reflect on the experience of boredom as such?

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/texts/ideas/etc.:

• Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside our Heads
• doomscrolling
• The Fugs song “Nothing”
• Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture
• John Duns Scotus
• Spinoza, The Ethics
• glossary of golf terms
• Franz Kafka, The Trial
• Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
• Albert Camus, The Stranger
• Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Sufferings of the World
• Margaret Atwood’s poem “Bored”

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