A History of “Boredom”

Teenagers whine about it constantly. Office mates step out multiple times a day to Starbucks to escape it. Parents die of it every night as they try to get small children to fall asleep. We use the word “boring” so often these days, it’s hard to believe it appeared for the first time relatively recently, in 1853, in the Charles Dickens novel Bleak House.

While some historians believe the term “boredom” emerged as a response to the Industrial Revolution (when people in the Western world, who were becoming less religious, had more free time—including more time to feel, yes, bored), it’s only common sense to presume that the feeling has existed since the dawn of man. (Well, maybe cavemen who lived in fear of everything didn’t get bored.) As one of my listeners, Deacon Michael G. Hackett of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana, told me, boredom “has been around since the desert fathers, who lived as hermits, and were very often bored in their caves.”