came across a somewhat interesting article on boredom in terms of creativity. how it has been perceived, faced, dealt with, etc. i say somewhat interesting because although i enjoyed the article it answered no questions at all and only left me wanting.

i searched for more scholarly worked on the subject and came up empty. most google results for boredom are blogs advertising boredom as impetus (ultra-snore-zzzzzzz) and sites full of crappy time killing games. boredom breeding boredom.

i tend to be of the opinion boredom is a luxury, and in the modern world it has risen to scourge levels because that is what the modern world is all about, luxury, free time, wealth, passive entertainment, etc. our world is one of raised living standards and extend life spans. nice. but it is also one which as a by product has divorced us from the reality of animal survival and social interaction. it has abstracted the basic aims and processes of life to the point that we are only passively involved in our own survival… we have the time, and more reason than ever to ask “why am i here?!” anyhow, i can’t provide a deep examination of it’s causes, but boredom, like every state of mind, is personal and as such is best examined, i’d say, through the thoughts of those that experience it, thus:   

Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face. - Jean Baudrillard

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty, his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure. - Aldous Huxley

Living, just by itself - what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom’s the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you’ve got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that’s terribly exciting or he’ll come along and nibble your brain. - Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Boredom: the desire for desires. - Leo Tolstoy

The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life. - Henry Miller

The so-called conscientiousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. - Eugene Delacroix

Boredom is ... a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it. - Bertrand Russell

Someone’s boring me. I think it’s me. - Dylan Thomas

Might not the beatific vision become a source of boredom, in the long run? - Samuel Beckett (or…)

The pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience, and Boredom ... that must be considered as the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils. - Samuel Beckett

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale, Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man. - William Shakespeare

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.- Norman Mailer

Sundays kill more men than bombs. - Charles Bukowski

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. - H. L. Mencken

Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always. - Guy Debord

Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. - Soren Kierkegaard

Against boredom even the gods struggle in vain. - Friedrich Nietzsche (or…)

In compensation for considerable disgust, despondency, and boredom, such as living in solitude without friends, books, duties, or passions necessarily entails, we are given those quarter-hours of deepest communion with ourselves and nature. Those who completely barricade themselves from boredom, barricade themselves from themselves as well: they will never get to drink the most refreshingly potent draught from the their own innermost fountain. - - Friedrich Nietzsche

To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do. - Heraclitus

Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It’s a symptom of security.- Eugene Ionesco

This Ennui, for which we Saxons had no name, this word of France has got a terrific significance. It shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which is static and repetitive is boring. That which is dynamic and random is confusing. In between lies art. - John A. Locke

I hate small towns because once you’ve seen the cannon in the park there’s nothing else to do. - Lenny Bruce

Love fed fat soon turns to boredom. - Ovid

If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. - Henry David Thoreau

Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness. - Blaise Pascal

Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right. - Gustave Flaubert

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. - Susan Sontag

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in extreme boredom…Make no mistake; all intellectuals are deviants in the U.S. - William S. Burroughs

painting bores me like everything else. Unfortunately, painting is one of the activities—it is bound up in the series of activities—that seems to change almost nothing in life, the same habits are always recurring. - Rene Magritte

Is boredom anything less than the sense of one’s faculties slowly dying? - John Berger

The cure for boredom is curiosity.There is no cure for curiosity. - Dorothy Parker

When I get real bored, I like to drive down town and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I’m leaving. - Steven Wright

so, uh… there you have it.