Still Air

Free time is rarely restful.

I once had the job I had always wanted. Or so I thought. Among many perks, it required constant travel. Every couple of weeks, for three years. I could not believe my luck.

Airports were full of possibility. The departures board was a promise of adventure. I liked the smell that comes off duty free. I read magazines I would never read at home. I liked watching the man in the helmet signal to the planes in silence.

In this place, nobody knows you and nobody will see you again. Three seats down, someone is leaving for good while someone else is coming home. That was fascinating.

But by the third year I knew most terminals by heart. The board had faded into the background. People were just people. I had three hours until boarding.

I walked the length of the concourse and back, ignoring the duty free by the corner. I checked my gate number. I read a page and a half into a book. I stood by the window and stared at a plane being loaded. I sat down and checked my watch. Only fifteen minutes had passed.

The terminal had become the most boring place on earth.

Boredom is supposed to be the absence of something to do. But is it?

Novelty wears off, that much is true. Repetition flattens excitement and nobody needs a study to know that. But flattening should leave indifference behind, and indifference is comfortable.

The commute we have driven a thousand times passes without our noticing. So does folding a week of laundry or the weekly supermarket run. But the wait at the boarding gate is not comfortable.

***

There is a set of studies where people sat alone in a bare room for six to fifteen minutes with nothing to do but think. There was no suffering. No bad news, no conflict, nothing to grieve. Yet they did not like it.

In one version there was a button that delivered a mild electric shock. Everyone had already tried it and said they would pay money never to feel it again. Many pressed it anyway.

Fifteen minutes were enough to make a small pain preferable to an empty mind.

***

Put boredom beside sadness, anger and frustration and it separates from all three in one way. It carries the sense that what you are doing does not matter.

Sadness is about losing something. Frustration is about being blocked. Boredom is a judgement on the worth of the time being spent.

That is why it appears where it does.

The largest study of boredom in everyday life, drawing on more than a million reports from nearly four thousand people, found the highest levels during work, study, and whenever someone else determined how long an activity would last.

That is what the terminal became. A corridor between two obligations, entered on a schedule someone else set, on the way to a room where the agenda was already written.

Bored people reach for things that make them less aware of themselves. Difficulty does not end boredom, and interest does not really do it either. Being slightly absent from yourself does. That is why the escape is usually so trivial. Nobody wants the neck pillow. They want the eleven minutes spent pricing it.

Søren Kierkegaard called it rotating the crops. When one field stops yielding, you move to the next, then the one after that. It never ends, because the moving is what exhausted the ground.

If you refuse to move, something else happens.

Martin Heidegger separated boredom into three forms. Two of them have a cause you can name. A delayed train. An evening you sat through and wanted over. Remove the cause and the boredom goes with it. The third has no cause. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is interesting either. He thought this last kind was worth enduring, because it is the only condition in which a life appears as a whole rather than in the pieces we handle from day to day.

Getting there takes time. Past the point where a small electric shock starts to look reasonable. We rarely stay that long, because there is always duty free.

Boredom is life with nothing left to hide behind. Stay in it long enough and you hear what you think of it.

***

The departures board is still there. Some version of it is in every airport. It does not change. Neither does travelling. What changed was my ability to mistake movement for meaning.

Empty hours removed the noise that usually answers questions for me. Boredom asks, without apology, whether this is the life I want to return to.

What lives in your boredom?

^{This is a space for exploration and reflection, not medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice. Each reader’s situation is unique and deserves the right kind of support. If you are struggling or in crisis, please contact a licensed mental health professional. This edition contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we may earn from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.}