When the city of Cleveland instituted a partial lockdown in October 1918, shuttering nearly all businesses after 8 pm, a writer for a local newspaper observed that life had become “ just a big vacuum, a great monstrous wad of nothing.” To curb the Spanish Flu, Cleveland was not nearly as aggressive as cities like St. Louis, but even just an evening curfew was a bridge too far for many residents. A subsequent news article noted the city’s impatience for an end to social distancing: the “long stay-at-home-for-there’s-nothing-to-do period is expected to bring a reaction of wildest indulgence.”
Sweeping the city of Cleveland was a palpable sense of boredom, as Haakon Bjoershol explained in a master’s thesis on the city’s response to the pandemic. Shut in their homes, wrestling with their own mortality, waiting out a deadly flu that would soon infect 28 percent of the US population, Clevelanders went for weeks without much opportunity to deflect their growing panic. Their state of mind is not dissimilar to the one we are living in today. A survey conducted last week of close to 3,500 adults living under national quarantine in Italy found that “boredom” was among their most commonly cited negative side effects of the restriction. Boredom appeared even more frequently in their answers than “loneliness” or “lack of fresh air,” and trailed only “lack of freedom” as a source of misery.
It may be hard to muster much concern over this particular consequence of the coronavirus outbreak, especially when there are so many more immediate and mortal threats at hand. At moments when we are inclined to spare a thought for boredom, we tend to disparage it as a sort of failing—more like a symptom of someone’ lack of imagination than their flagging mental health. But that attitude, at best, is ungenerous. At worst, it overlooks the known science of a somewhat serious condition.
“It sounds absurd to say that we’re bored in a pandemic,” said Erin Westgate, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida. But the stress of this moment, she said, “changes our ability to pay attention.”
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Westgate is a boredom researcher, part of a small cohort of academics who are sounding the alarm about the spiking levels of boredom across the world right now. That state o