"I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures. If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored" - Eric Fromm
Has there been any significant philosophical studies on the issue of boredom as a problem of humanity, as a root of all evil(and good) in some sense - because it makes you do things.
How does western philosophy take on the problem of boredom?
Well, this dude named Erich Fromm talks a little bit about it...
No, but seriously, it's a big deal among certain critical theorists like himself and Martin Heidegger who argue that boredom is a common pathological response to highly industrialized societies. Their criticisms draw from the traditional Marxist school of thought, arguing that these types of societies force people to engage in alienated labor, pulling them away from things that naturally belong together as part of the systematic oppressive process of capitalism. As dogmatic capitalism begins to erase individual identity, boredom becomes a systemic problem. Fromm specifically argues that the never-ending search for novel thrills that characterizes consumerism in industrial capitalist societies is not seeking a solution to boredom, but rather a distraction from the problem of boredom, driving it further into our subconscious minds. And drawing it one step further, Fromm cites boredom as being the driving force behind "aggression and destructiveness today" in his paper, the Theory of Aggression.
Heidegger takes issue with the mechanization of capitalism and how it contributes to boredom. He gives the example of an automobile assembly line, which requires continual physical engagement on the part of the operator, but no real conscious thought. One looks "busy", but really is just perpetually waiting, waiting for the tedium of the job to be over, waiting for someone else to finish a task, etc.
For more on this line of thought, I strongly suggest reading Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. It's a great introduction to the Frankfurt School and their thoughts on the culture industry and capitalism, while remaining somewhat uncharacteristically lucid. It introduces the idea of "consumerism" as a form of social control, which is truly revolutionary.
And taking a slightly different angle, it's also a notable concept in existentialist literature. Heidegger himself picks up the topic of boredom a second time in his writings on "nothingness" and the meaning[lessness] of existence. To him, boredom reveals a lot about Dasein. In Being and Time, his most famous work, he writes:
Even and precisely then when we are not actually busy with things or ourselves this “as a whole” overcomes us — for example in genuine boredom. Boredom is still distant when it is only this book or that play, that business or this idleness, that drags on. It irrupts when “one is bored.” 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. This boredom reveals beings as a whole.
That is, this boredom works to create a pervasive state of anxiety in which Dasein begins to truly reveal itself. Heidegger and the question of psychology is a great introduction to this line of thought that doesn't require actually reading Heidegger's own characteristically dense (perhaps impossible?) prose.
Arthur Schopenhauer (notable, among other reasons, for his profound influence on Nietzsche) also takes up the topic of boredom, arguing that it actually proves the vanity of human existence. He reasons that if life was truly possessive of positive value and real content, then there should be no such thing altogether as boredom. He asks, shouldn't mere existence be enough to both fulfill and satisfy us? The entire book containing this discussion (Essays and aphorisms) is actually available online through Google Books. You might consider reading through it some time when you're, erm, bored.
And if you have access to scholarly periodicals through a site like SpringerLink, you might try and ferret out a copy of Patrick Bigelow's The ontology of boredom, which seems like it might be a direct answer to your primary curiosities.
Why only Western philosophy? I see meditation as an intentional engagement with boredom. If we consider how a monk say an immured one, is different from a prisoner locked in a cell, the difference is clearly about attitude, rather than circumstance. I would argue meditation helps to investigate non-conscious sources of impulses.
I see boredom as our biological drive, pushing us to practice and keep skills and faculties accessible. So we see children experience it most strongly, fitting with their neural plasticity, e.g. rapid language learning capacities. From antagonistic pleiotropy (a gene is considered to possess it if it controls more than one trait, where at least one of these traits is beneficial to the organism's fitness early on in life and at least one is detrimental to the organism's fitness later on due to a decline in reproductive impacts there) that behavior that stops influencing reproduction will stop being selected for. Boredom is a universal trait among children, so we can interpret as serving biology. Over time being selected for conditions of needing to tolerate boredom, we could expect a species to adapt to be more comfortable with it, e.g. in domesticated animals, a dog's brain is 15% smaller than a wolf's which we can relate to different selection pressures. We enrich the lives of children with toys and education, in order to enhance their development of capacities, and their tolerating boredom more would mean their learning less.
Edited to add
Biologist Denis Noble argues from the opposite direction to this 'gene's eye' view, that genes which code for open-ended creative behaviours are the most useful for serving the needs of organisns, like say FOXP2, the 'language genes' seem to stimulate babbling which enables language development, rather than hard-coding language like say the Universal Grammar hypothesis describes.
Boredom is the catalyst for creativity, if you look at at any human who welcomes it in their life you will see that this person has a rich imagination and a teeming need to fill this void. Modern life provide everything we need to not be bored, and this is why the quality of media is increasingly becoming repetitive and mundane.
There is a virtue that may be associated with boredom -- patience. (Please bear with me, I will use the language of tedious moralists, and say words like "virtue" and "patience", but please pretend you hear all this for the first time, perhaps as an effete aesthete, perhaps as one of Kierkegaard's "higher-level" aesthetes, rotating through their daily diet of dialectics -- or Twitter-feed --, or perhaps simply as a bored child.) There is perhaps a virtue associated with boredom: patience. Someone who is patient suffers and waits. (A great writer of small sketches, writing a column in a national daily in a small country near the North Sea, once wrote: "I like waiting. You do nothing and yet you do something." Not very deep, perhaps. He also wrote things like "He mainly looked drowsy and tortured, like someone who has gone through hell, but who had looked around so badly that he was only able to tell it had been rather warm there.") The patient suffers and waits. Patience.
Nietsche wrote:
Träumen. — Man träumt gar nicht, oder interessant. — Man muss lernen, ebenso zu wachen: — gar nicht, oder interessant.
To dream - We either don't dream at all, or have interesting dreams. - We have to learn to also be awake like this: -- not at all, or with interest.
Nietzsche is still a little tedious here, since it seems he cannot help expressing himself in moralistic terms ("man muss lernen", "one ought to learn" -- "Ahum. Jawohl, Herr Professor."). Translating this aphorism, in my clumsy fashion, I become aware that "ebenso zu wachen" sounds more active than "to be awake"; it suggests "to be alert", to adopt an active stance. And "interessant" applied to "wachen" is subtly (deliciously) ambiguous: both passive and active. I could suck on that for a while. (I cannot find a good way to capture this ambiguity in English.)
In an apocryphal, dreamed-up quote attributed to Gauss, he is made to say:
Whenever philosophers says something true, it's trivial. Whenever they say something interesting, it's false.
So, should we try to escape boredom, live life like a dream? Or embrace boredom, suffer through it, wait, and try to find some amor fati? Do we have a choice? Perhaps we can do both? -- In dreams we don't seem to have a choice. But actually, there is a special, extremely interesting sort of dream, a lucid dream, in which I am fully aware that I am dreaming. It's hard to maintain those dreams because a too enthousiastic attempt to explore, a too focussed attention, seems to rip apart the spiderweb of the dreamed reality. I have to attend, be aware and alert, and at the same time be detached, relaxed and cool about it. What does it mean that we can have those kind of experiences? Does it mean that our "sense of reality" when awake is itself an illusion, something created out of thin air by our brain? At least it means that we (well, some people) are able to simultaneously experience two radically contradictory views, "this is real" and "this is an illusion". The experience is even more radical and indescribable than synesthetic perceptions. -- Should we learn to live as in a lucid dream? If we do so, are we then like bored tourists in our own life -- drowsy and tortured, not able to tell much more, afterwards, than that it seemed a bit heated sometimes --, or ... like what? It could be the reverse of that -- similar perhaps to what some Eastern traditions call "sitting and forgetting"?
This post is rambling like a common, incoherent dream - and I'm losing interest again. Time to stop.
Boredom - is the best opportunity to connect your personal Avatar with your guide and with your true purpose.
Naturally, boredom causes a lack of endorphins, putting you in negative balance.
You could be doing the same activity: typing something on the computer. In a neutral/default state, it would be some forum or news site. And you will be getting the least amount of endorphins. You will feel lack of energy and even frustration.
But at other, maybe rare moments, by doing the same activity: typing on the computer, you will feel a flood of endorphins, great energy and desire. You would be willing to continue this activity all night long.
So, what is the difference?
In my opinion, we are getting extra doses of endorphins when we connect to our guide (God or the Matrix) and perform something for our true purpose.
Where should one begin if one is interested in the philosophy of boredom? A natural place to start is with overviews of the history of boredom. Kuhn 1976, Goodstein 2005, Spacks 1995, and Svendsen 2005 offer the reader surveys of the rich history of boredom and an appreciation of how historical and social factors have shaped the experience and understanding of boredom. For examinations of how boredom interacts with sociological and cultural forces, the reader should consider Healy 1984, the essays in Dalle Pezze and Salzani 2009, and Svendsen 2005—the latter meant to offer a philosophical introduction to the topic of boredom. The religious importance of boredom is discussed in detail in Raposa 1999. Finally, brief and accessible overviews of the history of boredom can be found in O’Brien 2018, Ros Velasco 2017, and Toohey 2011.
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0419.xml
No-one has ever said anything interesting about it.
As one is free, one must presume that boredom comes from lack of novelty in the world (generally, correctible by travel or venturing into the Unknown) or lack of passions (solvable with a mate or getting off drugs).
Which one is the problem?
