Follow @yaleSCIbooks

What with the tents that have been pitched in parks all over the country and the slogans to be found on everything from Twitter feeds to t-shirts, it is starting to seem like everything in America is occupied. Yet for those of us far from Wall Street, the longer and colder nights that precede the holidays might have us feeling just the reverse.

Luckily, Peter Toohey can relate. In his book Boredom: A Lively History, Toohey acknowledges that he has “been bored for very large tracts of [his] life,” and turns to psychology, neuroscience, and the humanities in the hope of deriving a better understanding of the so-called “noonday demon.”

The bored among us are part of a long and well-documented tradition. Toohey finds boredom in the works of nineteenth-century painters, Chekhov’s plays, and literature more broadly; he notes the way Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary and Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse are both motivated by the need to make something happen in their confined, routine-driven lives.

Toohey divides boredom into two categories: the “simple boredom” associated with repetitive tasks and long periods of inactivity, and “existential boredom,” the all-encompassing feeling we refer to as ennui. Although simple boredom may seem trivial when compared to the specter of its gloomier big brother, Toohey insists that we do not dismiss it out of hand. In fact, he argues, boredom of this variety may very well serve an adaptive function, working as an early warning sign that alerts us to “worse things to follow unless there’s a change in lifestyle.” Moreover, boredom “intensifies self-perception,” encouraging us to delve into our own minds, and can even spark creativity—Andy Warhol’s oft-declared boredom with consumer culture led him to make artworks that were utterly new.

Much as we might complain at the prospect of doing the laundry or sitting through a dry presentation, then, Toohey manages to convince us that in many cases, that feeling of boredom we dread might be a blessing in disguise.  At the very least, he remarks, it means we don’t have bigger things to worry about: “Boredom is a condition of…the well fed.”