When waiting in line at the DMV or listening to Muzak while on hold… one may think, please
someone kill me, if only to make it stop. This kind of brutally senseless monotony may
cause some people to question: Is boredom worse than death?
For Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard there are few things worse than boredom- death included.
Writing under one of his many pseudonyms, Kierkegard went so far as to say that,
“The root of evil is boredom, and that is what must be kept at bay.”
You see, boredom isn’t just being all dressed up with nowhere to go, it isn’t just down time.
It is a symptom of a much larger problem —boredom is a genuine malady of the soul.
For Kierkegaard there are a few ways that people tend to live. They either live the life of
the Aesthete, the ethicist, or the religious person.
Each type of person deals with boredom differently. The aesthete is primarily concerned with their
personal experience of pleasure and pain, they prefer shiny new toys, rollercoasters,
and frat parties —they are the sort of thrill seekers who are constantly looking for new
ways to make life interesting. Their solution to boredom is akin to planting new crops each season—
to keep the soil of life rich, they chase new experiences.
For Kierkegaard the Aesthete doesn’t understand that the search for new pleasures is futile.
By concerning themselves with sensual experiences and finding humor in life—they refuse to
focus on the real problem—themselves.
The aesthetic life is a selfish life—they aren’t concerned with others.
Boredom is the symptom of this spiritual deficiency
—and to Kierkegaard, their very soul is at stake.
The Ethicist seems to deal with boredom in a better fashion, they construct philosophical
answers to the problems they see in life—they create entire systems of ethical relations.
Commendable, but for Kierkegaard this isn’t enough. The ethicist’s work is still inadequate
because it is missing the spiritual element.
Basically, the ethicist and the aesthete both desperately need Jesus. Kierkegaard claims
that the cure for boredom isn’t constant activity, it isn’t in losing yourself in
abstract philosophical problems—the cure is in your relationship to a higher power.
The reason most people are bored is because they have no purpose. Christianity creates
significance in every moment—the concept of Agape—or love—fills the emptiness of
every moment with the realization that people’s work shouldn’t be directed towards selfish
ends or sensual experience, but should be directed towards eternal salvation.
Faith restores meaning to the vacuous moments of dread and pointlessness that people experience
in boredom. The idea isn’t to find the most extreme experiences possible to combat boredom—
it is to live a life in witness of the divine, to care for others deeply, and to cultivate
a passionate concern for others.
Truly Kierkegaard takes the wristband approach, so when bored, dear viewer just ask yourself:
what would Jesus do?