Boredom Series — Episode 7 | 10 articles

In the 4th century, in the deserts of Egypt and Syria, men and women chose to withdraw from the world to contemplate it differently. They lived in cells, prayed, worked with their hands, and kept silent.

And yet, in the writings they left us, a complaint of astonishing modernity regularly recurs: the inability to stay where they were, the desire to go elsewhere, tiredness of everything, the impression that time would never end.

They had a word for that. This word tells us a lot about what we are experiencing and what we no longer know how to name.

Acedia: the boredom that gnaws at the soul

The Greek word ἀκηδία (akêdia) literally means lack of care, indifference. In the Christian monastic tradition, acedia is described with remarkable clinical precision.

A 4th-century monk, Evagrius Ponticus (what a name!), considered one of the first psychologists of the West, painted a portrait of it that a contemporary psychiatrist would not have disowned: inexplicable weariness, inability to stay in one place, distaste for routine work, eyes wandering out the window, a desire to be elsewhere, the feeling that days never end, the wish for someone to arrive to break the emptiness.

What acedia refers to is not simply boredom in the common sense. It is a deep disaffection, an anesthesia of desire, an inability to let oneself be touched by what usually holds value.

In the original list of the "eight evil thoughts" compiled by Evagrius, acedia occupied a central place: it was seen as the noonday demon, the one that attacked monks in the middle of the day.

What is remarkable is that this tradition did not simply name acedia as a moral failing to be fought. It recognized it as a spiritual trial to be gone through with discernment, with support, and with a certain humility in the face of one's own vulnerability.

Buddhism and the impermanence of boredom

The Buddhist tradition approaches boredom from a different but convergent angle. One of the three fundamental characteristics of existence according to Buddhism is anicca: impermanence. Everything changes, nothing lasts.

Boredom, in this perspective, occurs when we resist this flow: when we want something to last when it is passing, or something to end when it persists. Buddhist contemplative practice proposes to reverse this relationship: instead of fleeing boredom or fighting against it, it urges us to observe it. Treat it as an object of meditation... pay attention to it, note its texture, its progression, the resistance it arouses.

This approach aligns with what contemporary psychology calls distress tolerance: not the absence of discomfort, but the capacity to go through it without reacting automatically.

Recent studies on boredom in meditation contexts confirm that experienced practitioners experience boredom differently. Not that they do not feel it, but they no longer get lost in it.

The crisis of meaning that boredom reveals

What contemplative traditions have in common is that they do not treat boredom as a problem of stimulation. They treat it as a problem of relationship. Relationship to oneself, to others, to meaning, to time.

Clinical approaches tend to view boredom as a deficit: a deficit of dopamine, of stimulation, of engagement. Spiritual traditions see it rather as a rupture: something has broken in the subject's connection to what gives them value and meaning.

These two interpretations complement each other. A patient suffering from chronic boredom may not just be suffering from a neurobiological difficulty to engage. Sometimes, they also suffer from no longer knowing why they should engage.

This "why" cannot be treated with behavioral exercises alone. It requires a broader space of reflection that philosophy, spirituality, or a quality therapeutic relationship can offer.

What modernity has lost

The monastic tradition had an answer to acedia: perseverance in routine work, the support of the community, attention paid to the little things of everyday life, and, paradoxically, the acceptance that emptiness is a full experience in its own right, not a failure.

We have lost, in our hyper-connected cultures, this capacity to go through the emptiness without erasing it.

→ We have lost the rituals that gave structure to idle times.

→ We have lost the communities that made it possible to name weariness without feeling ashamed.

→ We have replaced all this with a permanent stimulation that protects us from boredom but also protects us from ourselves.

The wisdom of contemplatives is not an invitation to monastic life. It is an invitation to rediscover a more balanced relationship with emptiness: not to fill it compulsively, not to flee it anxiously, but to learn to stand in it for as long as it lasts.

What this changes in practice

The boredom that arises in moments of silence (a walk without music, a meal alone, an evening with no plans) is not always a problem to be solved. It can be an invitation to wonder about what, in ordinary life, has lost its flavor.

Contemplative practices (meditation, prayer, yoga, mindful walking) are not reserved for believers or initiates. They offer concrete tools to learn to stay with one's own internal states, at one's own pace.

If boredom is accompanied by a widespread loss of meaning, a feeling that nothing is worth anything anymore, or a deep disaffection towards daily life, this may signal a depressive episode that warrants a consultation with a doctor or psychologist.

To conclude

The desert monks did not have smartphones. But they had something we have lost: the time to experience their own emptiness, and the tradition to inhabit it.

What they teach us, fifteen centuries later, is that boredom is not a sign that something is missing from the outside. Sometimes, it is the sign that something is missing from the inside, and that this lack, if given a voice, can be the start of a question worth asking.

Next episode: Learning to be bored: a practical guide