How Boredom Kills

Here’s a different take on Aaron Bushnell. He didn’t kill himself for a righteous cause. He killed himself because he was bored. 

Let’s put a pin in that for now. 

Boredom is one of the least boring topics in human history, but it doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves. One reason for this is: It’s sort of invisible. Historians, journalists, social scientists, filmmakers, and other chroniclers of the human experience look at the things that people do. But people very often do things as a way to fight off boredom. Here’s a weird way to think about it. Figuratively, we’re all minutes away from dying from a kind of internal poisoning. But there’s an antidote that we have to consume every few seconds or minutes or we’ll succumb to it. The antidote is called “air,” specifically “oxygen.”

You might say we’re all dying from boredom poisoning. Boredom is like a lethal invisible background radiation that will be held back by action. We don’t talk about this omnipresent threat for the same reason that fish don’t talk about wetness. Instead, we talk about the things people do to keep the enemy at bay. That’s good, in moderation. Being productive, engaging with life, is what life is supposed to be about. 

But there’s a reason we say “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Those most allergic to boredom are often the drivers of history, yet—outside of biographies—we rarely discuss the drivers of their exertions, we just talk about their exertions. When we read about the Marquis De Sade, we focus on all the perverted (or sadistic—from whence we get the word) things he did and wrote about. But we often forget that his twisted schtick was fueled by a profoundly unhealthy desire to fend off the demons of boredom. In the 19th and early 20th century the “social question” dominated intellectual discourse because the new liberal order didn’t provide the sense of the heroic the romantics craved. “Shock the bourgeoisie!” was the rallying cry of artists thirsty for transgressive relevance in an age of peace and prosperity.

There’s a reason most revolutionaries come from fairly comfortable backgrounds. Few of the Jacobins and Bolsheviks actually rose from the ranks of the impoverished masses they claimed to speak for. The bourgeois Lenin was driven to revolutionary zeal to ward off the nauseating anguish of boredom. The Port Huron Statement begins, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” “It wasn’t the children of auto workers who pulled up the paving stones on the Left Bank in 1968,” writes Deirdre McCloskey. “The most radical environmentalists and anti-globalists nowadays are socialist children of capitalist parents.”

I don’t think it’s an accident that philosophers have written a lot about boredom. Historians look at the outward things people do to fend off boredom, the adventures launched for the conquest of nature or nations. Boredom drives philosophers to launch their adventures inward. “Philosophy,” Martin Heidegger wrote, “is born in the nothingness of boredom.” In What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger talks about boredom as simultaneously a kind of revelation of the fundamental nothingness of existence and an illumination of one’s own being (or the state of be-ing). “Profound boredom, like a silent fog insinuating itself in the depths of existence, pulls things, others and oneself into it altogether with remarkable indifference. Such boredom reveals be-ing as a whole.” 

Indeed, Heidegger wrote explicitly about boredom more than any modern philosopher, though I think you could say that Nietzsche wrote more about it implicitly. But both shared a view that boredom—the sort of ennui that produces anomie—can spur us in a quest for authenticity and self-understanding. And they had a point. The loss of boredom is a real problem for kids today. How many of us born before the internet and iPhones forced ourselves to acquire new passions, get past the first pages of a book that ultimately changed our lives, simply because we had nothing better to do? “He who fortifies himself completely against boredom fortifies himself against himself too,” Nietzsche writes. “He will never drink the most powerful elixir from his own innermost spring.” 

But again, everything is moderation. Some have suggested that Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism was inspired by a deep desire to find a cure for his existential boredom. Indeed, at the heart of Nazism was the romantic infatuation with the idea of “struggle” as the true source of authenticity and meaning in life. The struggle of the individual (Mein Kampf means “My Struggle”), the struggle of the race and nation. 

Okay enough about philosophy. Let’s talk about psychology. It turns out that the allergy to boredom is not just a metaphor. Excessive boredom in kids is correlated with all sorts of negative health outcomes. But it’s also correlated with bad psychological outcomes. Boredom can be experienced as pain. And for some people, pain is preferable to boredom. Some would literally prefer to be electroshocked than bored. In one study, “67% of men and 25% of women chose to inflict it on themselves rather than just sit there quietly and think.”

Again, boredom can spur us to productive pursuits. But it can also spur us to behavior that merely feels productive. 

“One of the things that makes boredom distinct from other negative emotions,” science writer  Bahar Gholipour notes, “is that it’s uniquely associated with a strong desire to engage in more meaningful behavior.” 

“Meaningful” is the key word. We may have all sorts of ways to keep us occupied and distracted these days, but doom-scrolling Twitter and playing Minecraft won’t build up our sense of meaning. It’s like people are gorging themselves on food that provides no sustenance, drinking from a fire hose that never quenches their thirst for meaning and purpose.

We have taught whole generations of Americans that politics is one of the last legitimate places to pursue meaning—so long as it is the right politics. Indeed, so totalizing is this concept of politics, it is colonizing art, sports, education, religion, even family. “Meaningful” art must speak truth to power—not beauty. The heroes of Hollywood and athletics, we are constantly told, are those who use their fame to advocate for change—in political terms. Professors are lionized when they are political proselytizers. Children from kindergarten to graduate school are taught that organizing and protesting, often in cos-play of 1960s civil rights activists, is the highest and best use of their time. Millions still look to religion as an outlet for meaning, but that idea is continuously mocked by much of the culture. 

Indeed, the political antipathy to religion has resulted in religion becoming increasingly politicized for many people. When self-described very religious people say that Donald Trump is a person of faith, secular opponents of religion should rejoice. They’ve turned religion into precisely the creature they always claimed it to be. The Christian nationalists are simply becoming the right-wing version of the politicized left-wing churches of social justice. The politics of meaning has metastasized into politics as meaning.

I have written a great deal about the “politics of meaning”—a phrase popularized by Hillary Clinton and coined by Michael Lerner—and none of it was positive. I loathe the term. Not because I don’t think politics is a realm where “meaning” is a relevant term nor because I think a rightly ordered political system isn’t essential to the quest for meaning. No, I despise the “politics of meaning”—as elucidated by Clinton and her guru Lerner—because it places the state and “politics” at the center of our lives. The pursuit of meaning, like the pursuit of happiness, is an individual struggle. It’s achieved with others—family, friends, work, community—but definitions of a rewarding life vary from person to person and group to group, and the state’s role isn’t to deliver a one-size-fits-all conception of meaning, purpose, “the good life,” etc. We can debate how much the state should make the good life possible, but it has a very minor role in telling us what the good life is. The role of the government (a more republican, democratic, and pluralistic term than “the state”) is to protect liberty and fair rules for people—and peoples—to discover meaning on their own. 

Civil society is the place outside of government where this happens. But according to Clinton’s “politics of meaning” it means the opposite. “Civil society,” Clinton writes in It Takes a Village, is just a “term social scientists use to describe the way we work together for common purposes.” Or as countless progressives liked to say during the Obama years, “government is just a word for the things we do together.” We don’t need to wade back into nationalism, but it’s worth noting that this is almost a definitional understanding of the state according to nationalists. It turns out that meaning for some people only has oomph if it lets you impose meaning on others. 

The point of this detour is that the politics of meaning is the kind of thing very bored people come up with to find purpose and meaning in their own lives. Liberal democratic capitalism is great for improving the lives and expanding the liberties—material and political—of humanity, but it is constantly threatened by boredom. Francis Fukuyama recognized this in his sorely misunderstood book The End of History. Liberal democracy is the best system we’re going to get, he argued correctly. But what happens when the dog of humanity catches the car?

But supposing that the world has become “filled up,” so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. [Emphasis mine] They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

It shouldn’t surprise us that studies find that boredom encourages more extreme political views. In a society where the role and function of politics is settled and nobody thinks the opposition is an existential threat to society, politics is kind of boring for people who, like monkeys in a lab, want it to provide evermore cocaine pellets. 

“One of the things boredom does is that it essentially wakes up people to the realization that what they are doing at the moment is utterly purposeless,” Wijnand van Tilburg, a researcher from King’s College London told Bahar Gholipour. “And expressing political ideas or being connected to a particular political group is one way in which people gain a sense of purpose.” That’s fine when the ends of the political struggle are just and warranted. But when politics simply becomes the means to indulge in struggle as an end in itself, politics becomes deforming, even self-immolating. 

Which brings me to Aaron Bushnell. He deliberately set himself on fire in solidarity with terrorists who set Jewish families on fire. He believed lies about genocide because the lies offered an opportunity to cast himself as a hero-victim in a great cause. How mentally disturbed he was is debated, but unknown. But as Thoreau said of the trout in the milk, some circumstantial evidence can be quite strong. What seems obvious to me is that Bushnell wanted his name to ring out, to be a martyr, to find meaning in performative death because he found so little in his actual life. He wanted to be a kind of Hamas-stan Horst Wessel who died in a struggle against oppression. That so many celebrated his “sacrifice” is a symptom of societal sickness, of politics-poisoning, particularly given how much we know about the mimetic power of such acts in the age of social media. The epitaph “Rest in Power” clangs off my ear like a parody of all that plagues the post-Christian mind. 

But he’s just an extreme symptom in a society wracked with less extreme symptoms.  The right-wing keyboard warriors wish-casting about civil war and secession and winking about “what time it is,” the more literal warriors who found it necessary to beat up cops with flagpoles in service to a lie, the privileged idjit kids who throw paint on works of art, the federal workers who stage meaningless one-day hunger strikes (skipping lunch for justice!), the postliberal scriveners of the left and right thumping their dog-eared Marcuse or Schmitt into a drumbeat of war against the rule of law and the liberal order, the Instagram tradwives who find happiness not in matrimony but in likes, the testicle-tanning roid ragers, the trustafarian maroons who compensate for their inadequacy in the face of luxury by purchasing political activism wholesale, the Putin apologists drunk on his nonsense, the “white supremacy” obsessives, and the conspiracy theorists and fantasists of oppression of all stripes: They all want to live in a world where they are heroes struggling in a just cause. Lacking one, they struggle against the just and call it oppression all the same. Anything to keep the silent fog at bay.