Boredom
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- "There is nothing they won't do to raise the standard of boredom" --Guy Debord
- "Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other." --Arthur Schopenhauer
Boredom is a condition characterized by perception of one's environment as dull, tedious, and lacking stimuli. There is an inherent anxiety in boredom; people will expend considerable effort to prevent or remedy it, yet in many circumstances it is accepted as an inevitable suffering to be endured. A common way to escape boredom is through creative thoughts or daydreaming.
The first record of the word boredom is in the novel Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, written in 1852, although the expression to be a bore had been used in the sense of "to be tiresome or dull" since 1768.
Time often seems to move more slowly to someone who experiences boredom; this results from the way in which the human mind measures the passage of time, combined with the infrequency of events perceived as notable.
