Because, in one sense, people’s lives are so much busier today than, say, fifty years ago, because there are not only so many things to do but so many seemingly good things to do, we might not see another more telling situation, namely, that as civilization has advanced scientifically and technologically, boredom has increased. What does it mean that with each successive generation, it seems our culture becomes more bored? What does it suggest that my friends and I were more bored than my father and his cronies were at the same age, just as I sense my children’s generation is more inclined toward boredom than was mine? What does it forecast that today’s children become bored easier and earlier in their lives? This despite the fact that each generation has more and more: more toys (for adults as well as children), more personal possessions and private property, more choices, more channels on our televisions and radios, more links on our computers, more opportunities, more expectations, more freedom to do more things, more access to more types of entertainment, more occasions for leisure, more chances to travel, more ways to communicate with more people, and more money to make it all possible. More. More. More.

Historically, boredom is always the pathological luxury of the middle and upper classes. It is rarely the predilection or predicament of the poor. I remember when I was in graduate school in New Jersey how the children of the students from Africa, who had spent most if not all their life’s savings on shipping their belongings to America and on airfare to get their families to the states, used to entertain themselves for hours with wire-automobiles complete with steering mechanisms they had ingeniously constructed from nothing more than coat hangers. America, in particular, the wealthiest and most indulged nation on this planet is a bored land. Our anthem would be no less true if we sang “and the home of the bored.” Can you imagine a malnourished child in Darfur, or a poor child in Haiti or Mexico (or for that matter in Mississippi or Vermont or Idaho) being bored? We can imagine them saying, “I’m hungry” or “I’m scared” or “I want to go to school,” but not “I’m bored.”

This particular predicament of contemporary American culture is perpetuated by a vicious cycle of creating and sanctifying needs that are, at best, only temporal, and at worst, not indigenous to full human living or supportive of genuine holiness. The cycle is endless, continually completed and set in motion again by promoting newly invented means to satisfy these fabricated needs (I give you the Pet Rock, the Cabbage Patch Kid, Tickle-Me-Elmo, Beany Babies, Furby, Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, ad infinitum or ad nauseam take your pick). Adults are not immune to this. We have our comparable yearly list of new toys we stand in line for or order online.

The seriousness of this ailment and the madness of this condition are seen in the fact that the more bored our society becomes the more artificial means it produces to counter the boredom it helped create. Increasingly, boredom is a condition propagated in corporate boardrooms and marketing offices though rarely recognized or named for what it is. From there it becomes the subliminal anti-message pushed, plugged, and promoted on billboards, in magazine ads and television commercials. Eventually it becomes part of our very makeup, continually bred in the gated communities and spoiled suburbs of America where, fueled by an invisible hole in the soul and the reckless pursuit of happiness, it comes to its predictable end in the twin national pastimes of consumerism and amusement. This is ritualized in the contemporary practice of pilgrimage to that supersized symbol of restlessness and frivolous spending, that modern day mecca called— the mall.

The sad irony is that society’s patent sickness is obscured for a time because it comes with its own silver lining: IT’S MARKETABLE. Although they cannot identify and name it for what it is — the cycle of death — the bored board members and marketing department’s sell (while the others buy into) the vicious cycle even as it is killing them. While spiritual ennui is a sure sign that the bored are not really living, some make a living off of it which makes it temporarily bearable or justified and prolongs their denial. The problem, of course, is that this materialistic prosperity and excessive consumerism is no answer to spiritual bankruptcy. The cost is too high and, in the end, the soul sickness is not assuaged but perpetuated.

In a culture of concocted needs, the more we have the more we want. The more we want the more we need. The more we need the more needy and wanting we become and, in the words of Rabbi Abraham Heschel, “Short is the way from need to greed.” The merry-go-round goes unmerrily round and round because the source of boredom lies hidden not in Madison Avenue boardrooms or marketing meetings or shopping malls but in whatever is spinning unattended at the deepest center of our being like a lonesome draydl.

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