Boredom is a flight from what is important. Like workaholism and perfectionism, it is a way of distracting yourself from inner experiences. It occurs when you look outward and do not find anything to engage your attention. Instead of feeling your emotions - becoming aware of the functioning of your energy system - you become bored. Boredom ... is a flight from your higher potential. It is fear of the transformation that wants to occur, and will occur in you, when you explore your emotions. It is your resistance to spiritual growth.

In an episode of boredom, our current goal or situation is perceived as unpleasant and unappealing, often as devoid of meaning or significance; on the contrary, alternative goals and situations are made salient and appear to us to be attractive. Boredom thus facilitates the pursuit of alternative goals: it “pushes” us out of this non-stimulating, uninteresting, or unchallenging situation and into another. In motivating us to pursue a situation that is different from our current one, boredom ultimately promotes the restoration of the perception that one's activities are meaningful and congruent with one's overall projects.

Boredom is connected naturally with time, with the horror of time, with the experience and the consciousness of time. Those who are not aware of time do not become bored. Basically life is only possible if one is not aware of time. If one should happen to want to experience consciously one of those moments that pass, one would be lost; life would become unbearable.

Boredom is in some ways the most sublime of human feelings. It is not that I think an examination of this feeling gives rise to those consequences that many philosophers have claimed to have inferred. Nevertheless, not being able to be satisfied with any earthly thing or, so to speak, with the whole earth; considering the immeasurable extent of space, the number and the wonderful size of the worlds, and finding that everything is small and petty in comparison with the capacity of one's own mind; picturing to oneself the infinite number of worlds, and the infinite universe, and feeling that the soul and our desire must be still greater than such a universe; always accusing things of insufficiency and nothingness; and suffering a huge lack and emptiness, and therefore boredom — all this seems to me the greatest sign of grandeur and nobility which there is in human nature. And so boredom is seldom seen in men of no account, and very seldom or never in other creatures.

Boredom, rooted in a fundamental discomfort with the self, is one of the least tolerable mental states.

We define boredom as the pain a person feels when he’s doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something he wants to do but won’t, can’t, or doesn’t dare. Boredom is acute when he knows the other thing and inhibits his action, e.g., out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just the chronic boredom, for a person can’t learn, or be intelligent about, what he’s not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere. (Another large part of stupidity is stubbornness, unconsciously saying, “I won’t. You can’t make me.”)

Boredom is certainly not an evil to be taken lightly: it will ultimately etch lines of true despair onto a face. It makes beings with as little love for each other as humans nonetheless seek each other with such intensity, and in this way becomes the source of sociability.

Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

Boredom is just “What’s the use?” in disguise. And “What’s the use?” is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair.

Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

Boredom is so endemic to our culture, particularly among youth, that we imagine it to be a near-universal default state of human existence. In the absence of outside stimuli we are bored. Yet…boredom is virtually unique to Western culture (and by extension to the global culture it increasingly dominates).…greed like boredom is absent in most hunter-gatherer cultures based on a more open conception of self.

Think of boredom as an internal alarm. When it goes off, it is telling us something. It signals the presence of an unfulfilling situation. But it is an alarm equipped with a shock. The negative and aversive experience of boredom motivates us – one might even say, pushes us – to pursue a different situation, one that seems more meaningful or interesting, just as a sharp pain motivates us not to put pins into our bodies.

Finally, one learns that boredom is a disease of civilization. It seems to me that what boredom mostly is is that people have to keep themselves entertained or occupied, because if they aren’t, then certain anxieties, frustrations, discontents, and so forth, start coming to the surface, and it makes them uncomfortable. Boredom is almost nonexistent once you’ve become adapted to life in the woods. If you don’t have any work that needs to be done, you can sit for hours at a time just doing nothing, just listening to the birds or the wind or the silence, watching the shadows move as the sun travels, or simply looking at familiar objects. And you don’t get bored. You’re just at peace.