Words from Others on this Topic

The way to be bored is to know where you are going and the way to get there.

Hippolyte Taine

There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don’t like their families very much. And this appears to be just as true of present-day hunter-gatherers as anybody else. Many seem to find the prospect of living their entire lives surrounded by close relatives so unpleasant that they will travel very long distances just to get away from them.

David Graeber and David Wengrow, 2021, from the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

Raymond Chandler, 1945, from the book The Simple Art of Murder

There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers among the bored than among the exploited and suppressed. To a deliberate fomenter of mass upheavals, the report that people are bored stiff should be at least as encouraging as that they are suffering from intolerable economic or political abuses.

Eric Hoffer, 1951, from the book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements