ACFM - ACFM Trip 58: Boredom

Episode Date: March 29, 2026

When was the last time you were bored? Nadia, Jem and Keir wonder if ennui is a feeling that belongs in the past – and what a boredom-free life might be missing. Is compulsive scrolling a modern symptom of boredom? Why are spiritual practices often based around tedious repetition? Do bored workers make better organisers? What […]

Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Kea Milburn, and I'm joined as usual by my very good friend Nadia Idol. Hello. And my other very good friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're talking about the very topical topic of boredom. Guys, why are we talking about boredom at this moment, a moment in which there seems to be a lot going on and a lot of stimulation, lots going on politically,

etc. Why are we talking about boredom? Yeah, well, I wanted to talk about it, partly because at the last, the world transformed in Manchester where Keir and I did the ACFM session. There was another session that I organised with friends of the show, Tom Williams and Juliet Jakes, who do the Pro Revolution Soccer podcast, which in the first episodes of which featured Keir. actually. So it's all in the family. We did this session sort of discussing quite broadly sort of issues around like the politics of culture, of artistic production. And I found myself saying at one point in the process of the discussion emerging that I thought one of the

demands we needed to make for a sort of socialist politics that could revive the arts and creative sectors, the right to boredom. Because I was thinking about how historically I think experience of boredism had been a really had been a sort of creative stimulus for lots of people and partly boredism is a historical product of an experience of people having like quite high levels of social security and quite high levels of economic security and being able actually being able to have the space in their lives to be bored is one of the things that stimulated a lot of really important cultural and artistic innovation so I think that's quite an interesting idea to potentially explore. The first thing is, is to try and define kind of what boredom is and perhaps some of the things

that are construed with the idea of boredom and ideas that are extrapolated from boredom, but also kind of unpicking, have people always felt this way? And do people really mean they are bored when they say they're bored? Or are there other things going on? Are there other socio-political factors contributing to that internal or external feeling that people attribute to boredom? I want to talk about boredom for a more personal reason, really. I was doing a talk about radical abundance yesterday in Manchester with my friend, comrade and co-author Kai Heron. We were interchanging between us, you know, Kai were talking and I were talking.

And I did a big long bit. And someone in the front row fell asleep and started snoring incredibly loudly. It was like really quite funny. But now I'm struck by an existential crisis. am I actually, am I actually boring? Am I a boring person? Please, dear listeners, write in tell me just how goddamn interesting I am.

I've got an existential crisis going on. That thing about falling asleep, though, I always think, I think it's wrong. It's a mistaken sort of categorisation that we take that as somebody being bored because a lot of us have had this experience that you get, if you're a bit undersleved, which everybody has had the experience,

are being underslept sometimes, you'll start to fall asleep when you become mentally engrossed in a thing. You know, that's why people love to like listen to, you know, stories and stuff on apps to fall asleep, you know, podcasts like this one and others because actually getting engrossed, like, can, you know, it helps you physically relax and it helps your brain waves change and it, and it helps you fall asleep. So, I don't think it doesn't mean boring. And boring, being properly bored implies a level of sort of sort of tension, I think,

that doesn't, you know, isn't conducive to sleep, actually. So I don't think it does mean that. But it is a cliche. It's a cliche that if something so boring you'll fall asleep. And now I'm trying to think where does it come from? And I suspect it proceeds from a whole sort of, I don't know, a sort of an anti-intellectualism that it can associate like intellectual stimulation with the idea of being like a way and excited.

But it can't really imagine it being a form of pleasure to the extent that you could actually, it could help you relax. you know, therefore fall asleep. Thanks, Jeremy. You're a very good friend, but I don't believe you. No, me and Kai were laughing about it afterwards, and Kai was going, look, it was a nice warm room. We'd reassure him that the problems of the world, we could sort them out if we followed our strategies.

We just relaxed into him. Anyway, we're going to get to this stuff a bit later. We're going to explore boredom in a lot more detail. I'd also want to talk about whether boredom is the same. now as it was back in the good old days of the 70s, etc. We might get into that, but just because of, you know, the kinds of hyper-stimulated lives that we live now, produce a different form of border,

perhaps something like that. Before we get into that, though, let's just do the, our little messages that we do at the beginning. The first one is about our newsletter. It comes out once a month. We do little bits of additional writing in there, collect up interesting links, etc., interesting stuff.

So if you want to subscribe to that, and we do recommend you do. Please go to navara.media forward slash ACFM newsletter. We also have their every expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify. Just go and look for ACFM there. All of the music we've ever played on the show

and discussed on the show is there, and it's quite an eclectic mix now. Might have to fast forward through a few of those songs, but you might enjoy some of them. Then we always ask you to leave us a five-star review. Perhaps in your next review, you could just explain just how God I'm interesting I am and how I hold your attention. That would be that would solve my existential

crisis. And finally, we always ask you to support Navarra Media as they host us, etc. And we want to keep growing the Navarra Media empire because we think it's absolutely vital in an era in which far-right oligarchs are pouring money into insanely boring right-wing news shows, etc., etc. So you can support our host Navarra Media for a little as a pound a month by going to navara.combe. Okay, I guess on this episode we're going to be playing a fair amount of punk rock. It is the great cultural expression of the critique of late 40s boredom. But Keir, who is your favourite of the classic British 1977 punk bands?

The adverts? Correct, correct answer. Yes, my favourite of those classic first. wave British punk bands is not the class, it's not the pistols, it's not the damned, it is the criminally overlooked, the advert. Really recommend their album, Crossing the Red Sea with the advert and their classic anthem from that album is this, bored teenagers. I think a way into the definitions is I'd like to ask you guys a personal question first. Are you ever bored? Yes. Yes, I have been bored. Yes. So I think this helps us be, once we get into

definitions, we're going to talk about what boredom can mean and so whether we're all going to land on the same plane or not. According to my own, what I would call my emotional, psychological and kind of cerebral plane, I don't think I've ever been bored. Like, I find it bizarre that anyone could be, although I accept that many people can be bored. What I do find is I can find things boring. But that doesn't, is not the same as being bored because I'm highly entertained by the external and internal world. And we're going to talk about this later in terms of how this interfaces with overstimulation, which I think is a completely different thing. But I would say is, you know, if I suffer from any problem, it's from that. But from where I'm standing,

I don't understand how if you have, if you have, if you wonder and have curiosity in the world, how you can't have wonder. So if you wonder with an A, how you can't have wonder with an O, I find the whole world intensely stimulating and entertaining basically all of the time. And if I find something boring, I find something in my head entertaining. So maybe by way of starting on that level or by that my own self-experience,

and you guys can tell me an example of when you have been bored, and then we can help define what we're talking about here. I think I sort of fear boredom. I don't suffer from like chronic boredom. A little bit later on I want to make this distinction between like simple everyday boredom and then sort of more existential boredom or chronic boredom, something like that. And there are times when you get bored, basically. One of the things with boredom is can you walk away from it, if you know what I mean?

So if you wanted to start to define boredom, it would be something like, you know, a lack of stimulation, sort of like a monotony of experience, etc. But also confinements, you can't just walk away from it. So when you're thinking about those sorts of experience, you're talking about confinement as in prison as one, or work, or I don't know, I've been bored stiff during exams and these sorts of things. In fact, invigilating exams is one of the most boring things I've ever done, basically. That is a sort of thing where you don't really have to do anything

so you can let your mind wander a little bit. I just find, yeah, when I had to invigilating, Exams, just walk around, you know, walk around and sort of like, make sure a nobody's cheating, but you're not really looking for that. You've basically just got to be there. It's incredibly boring. I've also been bored and I've just done monotonous work. Those are two things you can't really escape from. You can't walk away because you contraction obliged to be there, basically. And I sort of fear boredom in the, or empty time. I think it's not, I don't think it's a, I think it's a bad habit of mine. But I always, you know, when I go to bed, I always read

until a moment I fall asleep and I fear like lying there with my, with nothing to do with my mind blank and then my mind going wandering, etc, etc., that's, so I think I do sort of fear bored to some degree.

Yeah, well, I often say my overriding memory of my childhood up to the eight or about 15 is being bored, like nearly all the time. And that was despite the fact that a lot of it, objectively,

it was pretty traumatic. You know, we moved around loads. My parents got divorced and I was eight. I was the oldest of three, three siblings, I had to sort of help look after my little sisters quite a lot. And despite all that, you know, my overriding memory is just being just bored, like nearly all the time, like painfully bored, like hating it.

And I think it is entirely to do with what Keir said in terms of not being able to, not having any capacity to get out of the situation you're in, not having access to any resource that would sort of stimulate you. Yeah, I guess it was partly to do with living in. places but there wasn't you know there weren't places i could go to that were that were kind of easily accessible that were even sort of aesthetically particularly stimulating or interesting i also associate the period of my kids being really small with having to endure like quite a lot of fairly intense boredom there's there's quite a lot of time when you're just too tired to do anything and you're

just having to sit there while they crawl around the place making sure they don't cut of themselves but they're not really interested in doing anything with you at that moment and you can't really but you're not there isn't really anything to do you're watching pepper pig for the hundredth time and yeah i mean the falling asleep to read thing i was like i'm like i'm in my early 20s and i was basically you know i was sleeping with other with another person oh i should try that like who didn't want the light on and then for years and years i could only fall asleep smoking weed and then eventually you know i did a learning of yoga and meditation to make myself go to sleep but i still if i'm strong out i'll like listen to an audiobook or something

Is this boredom we're talking about, or is it something else? It's to do with that fear of boredom. Yeah, fear. It's the fear of boredom. And that falling in sleep thing, we talked about this when we talked about the sleep episode, didn't we? I mean, that's something you see people referring to going back almost 200 years. Like, it's really common.

I think it's probably less common now because indeed it's a lot more practical for people to listen to an audio book or something on special headphones. So I think that falling asleep to read thing is dying out. But that is, yeah, it is to do that fear of boredom. For me, and it does have to do with that childhood experience, it's like the kind of terror of boredom. But also, I think more importantly, though, outside those windows, outside that kind of my now distant childhood and that experience of my kids' early childhood, I am also really conscious in some ways. Boredom and even the legitimate fear of boredom are things, then our memories, they're not things I really experience. And when we were talking about this theme for the episode, like producer Charles,

said, yeah, the last time I was bored was like 2002, like just before MySpace. I sort of relate to that. There's something about the way in which the online world has made possible, like, an accessible various forms of stimulation for better or worse. That means it's really difficult to feel bored. And it's something that we're really aware of with, like, young people, like with kids, that they don't really, they don't have the experience of being bored the way we did. Certainly the way that seems to, I think, was certainly was normal for like people mine in kids age. now look back on and say we were still sort of in the long post-war period. It was a cultural

cliche of that time and it's something we'll talk about in a lot more detail, the idea that somehow boredom was one of the sort of product of that culture, like for better or worse. And its absence is felt now in ways that are sort of, we're mostly, I mean, mostly we tend to focus on as negative because it's to do with young people just being unable to relax, being understimulated, like having really short attention spans. I mean, boredom does help you cultivate a long attention span. Like, if you've got nothing else to do but read that book, you learn to see it and read a book for hours.

Whereas if there's like 50 other things you can be doing, it's physically much harder for people to learn the quite peculiar kind of neurological practice of concentrating on a book for hours. And now it's a really notorious phenomenon that the proportion of young people, even in like elite universities, who are physically capable of sitting and reading a printed book for more than like 20 minutes

at a time is vanishingly small. And I think that is all to do with not having actually had that sort of disciplining experience of boredom. I've just got a different perspective on this, which is that going back to what I was saying earlier, like that doesn't resonate with me that experience. So I have not, you know, I have had issues, a lot of issues in my life of not being able to fall asleep, but I don't, that doesn't resonate with me as being related to bored. And for me, I would call that overstimulation or like a fear or, you know, anxiety or various different things of that ilk. I wouldn't call it being bored because I've never experienced my internal self in a way that had that much space.

From my perspective and my experience, there's a difference between what I would call like an interesting. internal and external attribution. So internally, I don't think I've ever been bored, but I can attribute boringness or things being boring to other things. So I have had experiences where I thought this is boring. But if I think this is boring or this experience is boring or this person is boring, I've always got my own head or other things that are happening in the environment. That's the point I was trying to make. So I think it's like a different way of understanding boredom. But even in contemporary life, there aren't like situations in which you're confined in a predictable and monotonous environment. So places where people used to experience boredom such as waiting for a bus,

you would just get your phone out, wouldn't you? Or taking a long journey, etc., etc., perhaps we listen to a podcast, etc., etc., etc. But there are times, you know, when you're confined, you know, I've been arrested a few times and have to spend a bit of time in the cells. I've normally just got my head down and had to sleep, basically, exists for God else to do. But also like work environments as well. Like lots of people's work is still incredibly boring and you cannot get your phone out in those sorts of environments. Yeah, I'm agreeing

that these things exist. I'm just saying I'm, you know, I'm flying the flag for the people out there who just don't get bored. I probably enjoy monotonous environments because my brain is wondering anyway. Yeah. I think there are people who are more prone to born

to being bored and people who are less prone to being bored. I think that's probably just true. And I think there's also, you can train yourself to watch long, boring films, etc. I'm quite prone to them myself. And read long boring books, etc. I particularly like long, boring lectures about radical abundance.

I can't snagled down at the front. Drop off. Hopefully don't snore too loud. Yes, well, in an episode about boredom, we should definitely hear a piece of music, by Japanese psychedelic, noise rock, avant-garde, experimentalist, boredoms. So let's hear their 2004 track, Seedrum. I think there are other aspects of boredom, though, that we haven't got into.

One of the ways to talk about this is to talk about the terms, terms which are associated with boredom, or phrases that are associated to boredom, which might give us a clue about some of the other sort of dimensions to boredom. I was thinking about it earlier. And so there's obvious ones like enuit, the French, and tedium, which is like, which has a root in the Latin teedia, which does sort of indicate that there, that even though the concept of boredom was invented around the time of the Enlightenment,

etc, the experiences of boredom are probably longer than that. I've been reading this book, Bordom A Lively History. It's quite a boring book, actually, by Peter Too He. He cites this bit of graffiti, it's in Pompeii. which says, wall, I don't know how you're still standing with all of the tedium

of all of these tedious graffiti on you. It's like critiquing all the boring graffiti that people have put on the wall, basically. You know, what that word tedia means, I'm not sure, but the idea that you would be bought, the wall would be so bored by the repetitive graffiti

that it'd fall asleep or fall over. It doesn't indicate some continuity of experience. I like tedium. I like tedium. I kind of feel like it's, it says, it says a little bit more. So like I could,

that resonates more with me. I think about like, like, like it's something can really be tedious. Like life adamant is so fucking tedious. It's like it's such a waste, things that, but I still attribute like an active emotion to that.

Like I get frustrated that I'm spending any time in my life, like dealing with fucking gas bills or whatever. And I feel like it's a waste of my intellectual capacity or like, you know, I could be dancing or, you know, recording ACFM or having a nice meal or something. But what I get from that is frustrating because it's so tedious. I get frustrated.

I don't get bored. I think frustration is one of those things that you associate with boredom, particularly that confined boredom. Like the classic image of like a bored kid or something like that is, looking out the window, etc. And it's a nice sunny day. In fact, there's an episode of The Simpsons where all our great philosophical lessons originate where Bart has got, he's got detention from Principal Skinner and Principal Skinner's making him

lick envelopes or stamps or something like that. Bart's looking outside and it's like a sunny day and you know, all the kids are playing. You probably have the mute. And like basically it's that episode where he, like he's looking at the clock, which is moving incredibly slowly, timer slowed and all of a sudden he looks at the clock is moving backwards. But that is like, you know, that frustration that you could be, that you could be somewhere where you could be having a good time is like one sort of form of boredom, I think. I mean, that term enui is interesting because we tend to use it in English because we associate French terms with philosophy and philosophical attitudes.

We're the sort of almost philosophical or almost an existential sense of, you know, of pointlessness. But actually, in colloquial French, enwe, the word Candace, annoyance and to be the word to be bored and the word to be irritated by something like the same. So it's sort of to do with frustration and I think that's true. I think boredom

it also has to do with the sort of relationship to the future because I was thinking about Nardi saying she doesn't get bored and having said in the past she doesn't also look forward to the future boredom is partly about anticipating the end of this condition and wishing it would come sooner. It's about anticipating something more interesting

happening. Yeah the clock took it backwards for Bart, yeah. I sort of think Inardi's saying she doesn't get bored, I think she's evoking a really, a sort of very purest idea of boredom. There would be a kind of a complete, a sort of non-state. And that is something that historically,

like some people have been sort of interested in aesthetically. You know, like Andy Warhol, have those films like Sleeper, which is just like somebody asleep for hours, and said he was genuinely interested in the aesthetics of boredom. And there's this almost sort of quasi-zen idea of what it would mean to just have a complete, empty and an afateless condition in a given moment. And then, you know, you can relate that to

ideas around, you know, sort of meditation and contemplation. I mean, one of the, one of the first benefits of learning meditation is supposed to be where you're never bored, because you can always just, you know, you just start meditating, basically. And that will, and that will, that makes the moment into something completely different. I think you're right. I think you're right. And that does resonate with me. Like I'm, you know, just to be clear, like I'm not at all an introvert and I love being out with people and out in the world and stuff, but it doesn't take much for me to be entertained. So somebody who looks at, you know, a lot of my life or how I spend my time, it might just look like pottering or it might be looked like I'm doing nothing or I'm bored and

I'm not bored at all. I can be highly entertained by just watching the birds on the trees in my garden, like the entire day and then thinking, like, developing an idea for a podcast or a lecture that I'm going to do or something. I don't need much stimulation because I feel like the world is stimulating enough. It doesn't necessarily look the same from the outside as it is experienced from the inside. I mean, the thing with, like, you know, Zen meditation and stuff like that, there's lots of other religious practice, which is sort of based around TD. Such as like the... Those repetitions.

Yeah, but okay, yeah, so it's like monastic life, etc. There's lots of writings from monastic life about this really incredible teetium. But like a teedium that they were completely prepared to put up with because it had meaning. The state you're supposed to cultivate in monastic life is what an artist is describing. It's a state where you're finding meaning in every moment so you don't require, you're not dependent upon some kind of external stimuli to feel sort of. of, you know, to feel satisfied, to feel engaged. But I think it's important to understand that is a kind of ideal of,

an ideal of happiness within the way a lot of people have thought about what it is to be like a truly or happy human being. Like going back centuries, thousands of years. I think is, you know, I think it's interesting. I think that is interesting. I mean, the idea of monasticism there, that is really interesting because to a lot of people, that monasticism seems like a complete, like an image of a kind of nightmarish existence

because it would be so boring. But I think, you know, I mean the whole point is whether it's like a Western or a theistical tradition where you're doing a lot of praying and singing or whether it's like an Asian tradition where you're doing a lot of sort of form of sitting meditation or something like you're actually, you're supposed to be doing all these exercises,

which if you do them properly, they cultivate a kind of blissful affect sort of all the time. It's all calm but blissful. Affair. And so from that point of view, you're supposed to cultivate that exactly like state where you're not able to be bored, like you can't be bored. But also you're not stressed. It's completely divorced from any, the kind of frustration and stress of sort of ordinary existence. I think that's a really interesting point, Jeremy. And I think what would be, I was trying to

think about how this would work for me as you were speaking. And I think the thing that's missing for me becomes is connection. So I need people because I need to connect and engage with human beings, not just kind of nature or, you know, my own head or whatever. So connection comes in, but I absolutely have experienced tedium and some of the other things that we've put down there, like, you know, mind-numbing shit. But I experience it actively as frustration. I think of boredom as a cool affect or experience. Maybe it's because I'm thinking about it that way, that I think, oh, I don't get bored. Maybe you guys are thinking about boredom as more like an active, kind of frustrated, you know, like hot emotion, so to speak.

Well, I think it can be either, can't it? Because people talk about like the paralysis of boredom, that you cannot, particularly like chronic boredom, existential border, you cannot like raise yourself to do anything. Do you know what I mean? That's depression, isn't it? Yeah, but like I, but like people talk about it as existential boredom as well. Do you know what I mean? It's sort of linked to, to boredom, I think.

I think it helps us to think about like boredom also having that element of like, because what you're, especially when you're a kid, like what you're wanting is, it's like your experience like a lack of desire. You want or, you know, you don't know what you want to do. What am I going to do with myself, etc? That I can't be both to do any of it. You know what I mean? That's the sort of boredom as like chronic or existential boredom. It's almost like a wish for some sort of desire to come along. When you put it in that way, you can see that like contemporary forms of boredom, which are much more like hyperstimulated, compulsive boredom. That's a paralysis you get, you know, the paralysis you get from from that compulsive scrolling, etc.,

or compulsive interaction with the meaningless interaction that you get on in social media or, etc. I find myself paralyzed as I cannot stop doing this thing that I don't want to be doing and it's boring, basically. But it's not boring in the same way as like the empty boredom, that simple form of boredom, which I did experience a lot as a kid. Yeah, I think all that's true.

for me I think it has something to do with learning. Like I'm bored in a moment when I'm not learning anything. You know, a book can be boring. A lecture can be boring if I'm not learning anything. I know all this. I already know all this. They're not saying in a new way. And I think as a kid, you know, it was a lot of the time I was bored when I just, you know, I wasn't learning anything.

I think the idea of learning anything, the way I'm using it here, it's really expansive. Like you might, you might, you can learn something just by, you know, going down the street you've not been down before. or going down as you've been down before, and there's a plant growing there that wasn't there before. Exactly. But that was my, that was going to be my question to you, is that, you know, if you're cycling down the same route over and over and over again, like exactly what you just said, you will always notice if you allow yourself new things. But you might not have the capacity to notice those things. There might be all sorts of really good reasons about how you experience the world and your day that you are unable, because you're either stuck in your head or whatever,

to notice these things or you're worried or you're scared or, you know, and these are like totally legitimate. But, you know, for example, I walk, I've been walking the same route in the nature reserve near my house for like five years. Like, I'm never bored of that same route. I'm the same with my cycling. Yeah, I'm the same my running route. Those are situations which are not boring because things change and because you are always, even at a really subtle ever learning something. And, you know, part of the point of, you know, meditative and contemplative practice is partly the idea that, well, like it takes years, like decades, like to sort of get through this process. Like, it's a huge thing to learn. And you can always be working on it. So there's

always something to learn. And, you know, the situations I was describing before, I think I've been really bored. I mean, the situation where you're having to watch Pepper Pig for the hundredth time. Which I've not experienced, to be fair. You should try it, Maddie. A form of meditative training. Strangely, I've made my life decisions in a way. that I wouldn't have to, quite deliberately. I think this thing about learning and the human desire to learn, like being a real motivating factor, it's one of my worries about video games.

As I think about computer games, my worries that computer games kind of play on the pleasure of learning, well, giving you just a completely pointless set of things to spend hours learning. And I worry that a lot of the time they're training young people, especially not to enjoy learning things that are actually useful and giving them a kind of dopamine, the dopamine hit you get from learning something just by learning how to go through that imaginary door in that imaginary scenario.

But that doesn't mean, you know, competing games are bad, because a lot of the time you're learning something good by doing it. I'm not really sure you are. But anyway, but like I think that term mind numbing is a really good, just thinking about different terms in which we use to describe being bored. But mind numbing is that, isn't it, it's like that thing of like, I'm not learning anything. My mind has just become numb.

It's being made numb. It's not just that. It's being made numb by this thing. Yeah, but that's different to like watching paint drive, isn't it? Watching paint drive is when nothing's going on, where it's just, you're under-stimulated, etc. But you can have that sort of mind-numbingness of interaction. You know, it's like playing candy crush or something really compulsive,

but like pointless and meaningless to get to the stage where it becomes mind-numbing, but in a compulsive way, basically. And it has those things such as paralysis, basically, or compulsion or confinement by compulsion, etc. I just think it's a different form of boredom, basically. I was also interested, Jim. Earlier you said that you were painfully bored. Like, where's the pain come from in that?

What is the pain? Yeah. Is that frustration? Well, it was like extreme frustration, yeah. Just extreme frustration. and the sense that there are all kinds of things that one could do in the world, but I wasn't old enough to do them

and didn't have the resources or the people to do them with. The thing is, that was objectively true. I was a very, I was a precocious kid in a poor family where nobody really had time or inclination to sort of do anything with me. You know, there were really limited resources available. Like it was kind of materially true.

It was really boring. I think from the perspective of a woman, like I could imagine saying that there's a lot of experienced sexism and misogyny, which could be boring, but I don't experience it as boring. I experience it as like frustrating and it fills me with rage that, you know, I can't walk down any street that I want to at any time that I want to. And it makes my life much more boring than it necessarily needs to be. And that's, but I experience that as frustrating, right? The limits that society puts on me because I'm, you know, born in, on this body and, and, and, and, and,

and, and, and, and, and, and, fear, fear, going back to fear again, fear of assault, getting in the way of, you know, staying out in bars to 3 a.m. by myself and then walking back home or whatever. So, but again, that's, like, frustration and anger, and I don't think it's boring. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, you know, anyone's got any, you know, any, that can, that'll be, that'll be, that'll be, that'll be a, that'll be a, that'll be a, an art project where you can dare me to do it for 24 hours and I'll do it. The musical genre most associated with boredom and the critique of boredom and the expression of boredom is of course punk rock. And you cannot have a show about boredom without playing Bordom by the Buzzcocks from 1977. It was off the Spiral Scratch EP. So this is sort of like almost

the birth of the connection between punk and DIY. our culture because it was an EP put together in a DIY manner by the Buzzcocks who were the most famous members at Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto, etc. Keir, Keir, you've misnamed the band Buzzcox. Fuck it is Buzzcox, is it? It is Buzzcox. Let's hear it. Boredom by the Buzzcocks.

Boredom. Boredom. Another punk song about boredom is I'm so bored with the USA by The Clash. It's got an interesting story attached to it actually. When I think it was Mick Jones wrote the song, he first wrote it with the lyrics, I'm so bored of you.

And then they thought that they ought to politicize that up a bit so they changed it to I'm so bored with the USA and wrote it as a critique of like these American bands, etc, etc, etc. The other interesting fact about this is that the bass line comes from SOS by the non-punk band ABBA, which is also where the Sex Pistols song Pretty Vacant's riff comes from copying SOS by ABBA.

A little glimpse into the various tastes of 1970s punk bands. I want to just think as well about the physiological effects of boredom. Yeah, that's a good one. Because it's like, well, yawning is one of them, falling to sleep and snoring maybe another, but yawning is this sort of like, that's that desperate attempt to get some oxygen in, isn't it, because your brain has become numbed?

You know, if you want to have an image of somebody who's bored, it would be somebody who's got their head in their hands, etc. Elbows on the table, head in the hand, eyes unfocused. You know what I mean? I've had that thing where I'm so bored, I can't fucking focus my eyes. Falling asleep is a bit like that as well, isn't it, basically? Your eyes become unfocused and that sort of stuff.

But it is that almost like shutting down sort of thing, isn't it? I think that's where people talk about paralysis or something like that. Or being bored stiff, basically. The lack of an ability to get up and do so and to move or something like that. A sort of self-imposed confinement, something like that. One of the other terms I wanted to say, seeing as nobody's jumping in, I wanted to talk about,

and you may not agree that this is a synonym for bored, but like being fed up, it's like such a fucking strange term being fed up. being fed up is like being miserable but being miserable because you're bored I think yeah you can also say you're fed up with something meaning you can't take any more of it

yeah yeah it's linked to bored and via that sense of frustration and kind of in the moment of being fed up you're not yet taking action fed up means I've had my dinner and full and like there is that sort of like there's a boredom which is linked to sort of like

being sated in some way, being oversated, do you know what I mean? You're not having any urgent needs, do you know what I mean? That sort of thing I think that links to you. But it means also your capacity to take any more has been absorbed, has been used up. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

So just like your capacity to eat anymore is gone. Your capacity to tolerate any more of this thing, you know, fed up of has been exhausted. Yes, you may be feeling that now, dear listeners, but there's another hour and a half to go. Yeah, no, I'll still be the, you know,

boredom purist and you could be the boredom expansive voice here on this. I'm all right with that. We can have different perspectives on this. One of the other things we want to talk about is whether, is there a distinction being bored and being boring? Do you get boring people? Is that a really unfair thing to say? And in that I'm thinking of the Colin Robinson,

the energy vampire from what we do in the shadows, if you've ever watched that show. Have you seen that show, you two? No, I haven't. No, what happened? I know what of it. They're basically vampires who go around drinking blood, and they introduce Colin Robinson as an energy vampire who works in an office,

and he basically sucks everybody's energy by being incredibly, incredibly boring. Yeah, I think being boring or not boring is like charisma. I think it's entirely situational. Do you think so? Yeah, I think so. I don't think it's a personal quality that people have or don't have. I think it's an individualist. to think the people...

That's very reassuring after my falling in sleep audience last night. No, I think it's true. I think it's true. I think I'd go one further than that and say, you know, people... I wouldn't think it's fair to say

this is a boring person. I would say they are being boring, right? So it's a state that they are in and there will be some other state that I would like to think all human beings would have the ability to experience in their life where they are not bored or boring, right?

But again, like Jeremy said, I think it's situational. Some people might never have the opportunity to not be the most boring person on earth. Maybe they are to most people, but they have potential at the very least to not be boring, all human beings. Okay, let me draw it back a bit then. Instead of just categorizing some people as inherently essentially boring, what is it what we find boring in other people, when people are being boring? Because in that, it's sort of like I always think about people who are just talking about themselves and don't basically have an interesting you are in the world.

No, I mean, I buy that. If I think of situations where I've been bored talking to other people, like, it isn't about any particular thing or any particular topic, and it's not like someone going on about the thing they're really interested in. No, that's normally interesting, isn't it?

Yeah, it is. It is, yeah, no, it is the people who just talk about themselves, like they're in a job interview. And I'm thinking, I can think of at least one really famous academic, I still recall very strongly, being extremely bored by talking to them. So decades ago, because of exactly that, all they did was talk about themselves. And they sort of are notorious for that.

I'm not saying who it is by any mean. It's not anyone anyone's thinking of, either. We'll put the name as an acrostic in the show notes for you to work out here. No, I think there's something there. I think those are good suggestions. I also think there's something to do with self-awareness that's interesting. So I think if you are too hyper aware because of some level of insecurity, that can that kind of performing that kind of anxiety could be quite boring for the other person because it's quite taxing, which I would say is a cousin, but not the same as boring because when something is taxing, it's kind of weighing you down, I think in a slightly different way than it is boring. So that's one side of the spectrum being, you know, hyper aware and kind of what that performs.

But I think the other side is kind of a kind of posturing when the hot takes crew, you know, people who only speak in, you know, bites and phrases that have been in the news or, you know, like that week or whatever. It's just like really fucking boring. Like I don't buy any of it. God, I feel seen. Yeah, I'm just not interested. But then of course, I mean, you know, there's also the gendered lines as well. Like, I think a lot of women, I mean, I don't have obviously the lens of the male experience, but a lot of women have been in a situation where, you know, like a guy is trying to impress you. And I kind of feel a responsibility to like be kind, but it's meant I've had to put up with a lot of incredibly boring conversation because that person's not being real, right? They're not. they're not being genuine, they're trying to put on a performance because they're trying to impress you. I'm not saying this is conscious. It's often subconscious and it's kind of like, and I can see that straight away.

So it's, yeah, it's quite boring. Yeah, I mean, I think women probably experience it more. But, yeah, you also experience it as a man of the men trying to be. Being talked at, I think these are all different kinds of, like, being talked at different facets or like ways that it can show up, which is just kind of like it's not being present with the person opposite you. And there's no curiosity. There's no space for curiosity or interest or actual, you know, discourse between two people. I think you mentioned it earlier, Nadia, that like social isolation as well is one of the sort of symptoms of being bored.

And bored and come back in old age, basically, when, because in old age people can get lonely as well. and you get a lack of stimulation, a lack of variety in your life. And I suppose, you know, somebody just talking in a way which doesn't respect the rules of social intercourse is also quite, you can feel isolated when you're talking to somebody who's boring in that sort of matter. Right. As your residence 90s fan, I think we should play flagpole sitter by the American alt-rock band Harvey Danger featuring the amazing amazing.

lyric. If you're bored, then you're boring. Should we talk about some of the sort of like more philosophical approaches to boredom? It is a topic in philosophy. I mentioned this idea of existential boredom earlier. I think it is closer to depression, but like I think the two are linked in a way. Like this boredom of like you cannot find anything interesting. Do you know what I mean? You can't, you sort of like have this collapse of desire in some sort of way. But one of the most famous novels about this is like nausea by Sartre, which is a very interesting title, this idea of nausea.

There is some sort of link between boredom and disgust, I think. When I think of that, a friend of mine went to Nicaragua in the 80s and a sort of political solidarity thing. I ended up doing like literally boring work in the jungle, etc. But she always goes on about like, she basically got fed the same meal of like boiled beans every, really bland meal every day for like three months or something. And it got to the stage where, like, she was so bored of that food, it made her nausea, basically. It made her feel sick.

Do you know what I mean? She couldn't eat it. Whereas she quite enjoyed it the first time she ate it. And it was just that, that sort of repetition, that unchangingness can be linked to some sort of, to disgust or nausea or something like that. That's fed up. That speaks to the fed up very literally. You've had too much.

I've had enough of this. Yeah, yeah. You know? Yeah. In a literal sense, your body, it's like a visceral reaction. Your body is like, I can take no more. One phrase, important phrase, which we haven't mentioned, although we've alluded to this, is, you know, Marx and alienation.

And we've talked about, you know, repetitive tasks and stuff, but, you know, politicizing it around this concept of alienated labor, which is obviously central, you know, to the wider, socialist politics in the widest sense is also interesting to think about, to think about alienation as a process where somebody is made, in a way, made board in terms of like what they are, in terms of an actual action or craft that they are engaged in, as this very specific process and kind of obviously like all the sociopolitical effects of that. So it's also interesting to think about, well, if we would attribute that idea of alienation,

like what other forms could it take and how does it, again, interact with boredom in different ways, you kind of, in spaces outside Marxist theories. Well, I think alienation, in the way you're describing, you know, the product of the person's labour gets taken away from them and made into a separate thing that they have no real relationship to anymore. It's closely related to the idea of reification as well, the way in which the commodity or the social institution come to be seen as these things over which we don't have any control rather than being the lively product of social relationships.

It's an idea that gets taken up by Gogi Lukach, this is a Hungarian Marxist thinker in the early 20th century, and it's important in the situationist, actually, in Giede de Boer's Society of the Spectacle. And Tim Bews, a British academic based in America, as an old friend of mine wrote a book called Rayification, the anxiety of late capitalism, about 20 years ago. And you can say there is

all those things can be taken as a kind of diagnosis of how it is that the capitalist process of commodification tends to sort of make things boring as a tent to kind of structural tendency to remove the kind of affective charge

from things by by flattening everything out, by turning everything into a commodity meaning it has, you create, you end up having an identical relationship to, like a record, a movie, a T-shirt, a sandwich, whether you've made it or someone else has made it, they're all just these things.

I mean, reification means literally thingification, means turning everything into a thing, as opposed to a relationship, basically. Alienation is like also linked to, it's like a loss of control, but it's a loss of meanings. You're detached from, the object that you're creating in some sort of way.

And we can think about that lack of learning or lack of like, you know, engagement of the brain becomes, gets to its high point during the Fordist era. So one of the, one of the, like, innovations of Fordism or Taylorism, which is like the management theory that went along with it or the management practice that went along with it was that like in the pre-Fordist era, you know, the knowledge about the work process that would be held in the workers' heads and the whole project of Fordism or Taylorism is to like, is that the knowledge about the work process is moved into the manager's heads,

basically, and the workers are reduced to like an appendage of the machine, basically, and the work process is broken down into a simple, simplified tasks as possible. Move your arm in this way in order to do this, etc., etc. And so it's like a move from like more craft work to Fordist work or more boring Ford's work. But one of the things people talk about in terms of that is that that sort of work only needs your body and you can actually free your mind and use the techniques that people use

to use that sort of boredom or that empty brain time as a spark of creativity. I can't remember what poet it was now, worked on the assembly line up at Ford up in Detroit. Like I said, I used all that time to just like, you know, basically I used all that to sort of create poems, etc., all of that time, you know what I mean? And then contemporary work involves much more of your brain, basically.

You don't have that empty time, you know what I mean? You can't compose poetry. I'm not saying that every worker on the Ford is assembly line, use that time to dream up poetry, etc. But like contemporary work just demands much more of you, demands your brain power. Attention, not necessarily brain power, I would say, in the classic sense, you know, as in your intellectual power,

but your attention is needed, you know, in the way that we work in a contemporary sense, like you were saying. And I think that's an important distinction because I would keep, you know, the intellectual, the ideas part of my life. But there's parts of my work that are demanding and need my attention in a way that I don't have the space that I would like to just ponder and wonder and, you know, write the poetry or, you know, have ideas or connect things together. It's too fast moving. There's too much of it. I want more space. And that's very difficult in the modern working life to find. Yeah, I think that's all really useful. I mean, Gramsci, who coins the term forwardism, is writing in the context where there's a quite widespread social critique already emerging in the late 30s of assembly line work and what it's like to people. I mean, I'm sure I've talked about this on the show before, but the most obvious, popular. manifestation of that critique is the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times. And it's consistent with a lot of other critiques, both sort of conservative and liberal and

radical as well. And its critique is that assembly line work is incredibly boring. And this is mind-numbing to people, and that is bad. And it makes people unhappy, and nobody likes to do it. And Gramsci does have this different take. Like, Gramsci sort of thinks that more people are going to be like Nadia, basically. That more people who are working on the assembly lines, because they don't have to put their attention into it. They'll think about other stuff all day, and they'll think about revolution. And all the historical evidence is like all of those things were true. They're all true at the same time.

The Ford's subject is really bored at work and gets quite bored of the material culture because it's all based on mass production of huge numbers of identical objects. You can have any colour you like as long as it's black, says Henry Ford about the motor car. But at the same time, the structural conditions, including the relatively, liberation of their conscious mind from needing to be engaged in the work process, make the organisation of class struggle like really easy by historic standards. So they are able to win like massive gains like in the workplace and at the level of the state and the wider society.

And all those things are true at the same time. There seems to be a kind of deep connection between the kind of advance of those things over the course of the decades of the middle 20th century because we're kind of leaping ahead a bit in the notes now to the history of boredism, boredom, but Kieran, you, Kieran,

I like boardisms. Yeah, boredism, yeah, boredism, yeah, boredism, and post-bordism. You know,

it was a cliche of, of, like, comparative social commentary, like in the 70s and 80s, that these countries, that had established, like,

very, very successful, sort of, you know, forwardist industrial systems, and had high levels of social equality, also promoted this, you know, had this tendency to people to suffer

this sort of existential, angst. It was a cliche that Sweden supposedly had the highest suicide rate in the world. There was also a lot of worry about high suicide rates in Japan in the 70s, when their kind of industrial miracle had established itself. And Japan also famously has high, very relatively high levels of equality, very low levels of social inequality. And there was this sense that the sort of the conform, it was attributed partly to the kind of conformism of, of, those kind of societies, the people who felt that they were sort of outside a social norm in any way, found it very hard to tolerate. But it was also attributed by social psychologists. I mean,

some of whom were coming from really dodgy places to this idea that, well, people were just, people were bored, like people who just had this, there's not enough stuff to do. I mean, it's actually, it's a theme that's explored in an, Alistair Gray's novel, a history maker, which is this sort of comic science fiction novel, set in a post-scarcity few, future where basically they've this technology has been invented that is like the replicator in Star Trek it's like a perfect 3D printer it can just basically produce anything and so you're living in a completely post-scarcity society and he posits that in that society he sees it's kind of gendered and he says male boredom becomes a massive problem and so basically what happens the way they deal

with male boredom is men just like spend all their time doing these laps like a lot basically doing sort of like live action role plays. Like you pretend like you're in a war and stuff, even though no one actually gets killed. And that's how they deal with it. Sign me up. I know. Yeah.

I know. There is something to the sense that, you know, the inner world where people aren't facing sort of certain kinds of challenges and also don't have certain kinds of creative opportunities, then they can become very frustrated and very bored. And there's an argument that the whole, this is part of what drives the whole sort of shift to post-forwardism.

I mean, in the debates over what is actually the nature of the shift from forwardism to post-forwardism, like what drives it? Is it just driven by capitalist profit-seeking? Is it driven by technological change? Or is it driven by various social groups making demands that can't be met by Fordism? So one of the most influential texts is this book by the French sociologists, Luke Bolt, Tanski and I've given before, again, I'm sure I've probably mentioned before.

it's worth mention again that book is the new spirit of capitalism and incidentally it's a book that is sort of hated by certain strands of the Marxists left because they think it's arguing against any sort of a it's hated by strand of the Marxist and it's hated by strand of the sort of countercultural sort of anarcho left in France and I think they all sort of misread it but I'm not going to bother getting into the details there but one of their kind of approaches in that book is to say historically there's been two critiques of capitalism going back to the beginning of capitalism, going back to the end of the 18th century,

there's been what they call the social critique, which is basically the way I always summarise this for students, is capitalism is bad because it's unfair, it's unjust, produces all kinds of social injustices. And what they call the artistic critique, which they associate with the romantic movement, with artistic movement, with bohemians, with artists, and also with the counterculture in the 60s.

And the artistic critique, the way I always sum that up for students is, look, the problem with capitalism is it's boring. But that's why you should be against capitalism. And, I mean, I think Bolton's Kintibello's framework is useful. And I think they correctly point out that historically the most powerful movements against capitalism are those that bring those two together. And I think that's entirely the project. That's entirely the project of ACFM, actually. That's the weird left. I think the boring dystopia thing, which we'll get to is, like, it's interesting.

You know, like, it is interesting. I mean, I do accept that structurally capitalism is very dynamic and ever-changing, but it seems to be that somehow it's got us to kind of really sludgified, boring, repetitive, tedious reality, basically, in late neoliberalism. Boring Tisapia, which is one of Mark, you know, that was one of Mark Fisher's like catchphrases, and it's all caught on as a Twitter hashtag and stuff for a while, didn't it? Yeah, but we almost did a book. We started doing a book before, you know, he sadly passed away.

We were putting together the notes to me and him and a couple of other people in Plan C to make a book called Boring Dostopia. Well, I think you should talk about it. I think we, I mean, I don't. I feel like we should revisit it and do it anyway, you know, in whatever, in whatever. Because I think it was meant to be like, you know, a bit of a coffee table book with like pictures of all of these different things that are, that encapsulate, why capitalism is incredibly boring.

You know, all of like ATMs that don't work and shit. Well, yeah, well, it was, I mean, for me, boring, boring dystopia was a way of describing, for example, the way in which, like, large parts of London were being remodeled according to, you know, as these sort of corporate spaces, which are sort of semi-public, semi-privatized spaces, and the architectural style and all these parts of,

all these areas around Waterloo. Solace, soul. souless, soulless. To me, I always say it just looks like an airport. Everything now looks like an airport. No, but airports used to be better. Some airports used to be fun. Like airports weren't all identicate and shit.

The idea that capitalism is still producing the boring dystopia is slightly in tension with the idea that boredom actually belonged to the age of forwardism. Like post-forwardism already was partly based on, post-forwardism was capitalists saying, the youth in particular, all right, you're never going to be bored again. You want to not be bored? Here we go. How about short-term contracts for all work? How about just in time ordering? How about an endless proliferation of consumer culture? You're never going to be bored again? An answer to that, which goes back to like my initial distinction, which is I think that capitalism

can be boring, but it creates a material reality on the ground so that you are over-stimulated and never bored. But at the same time, time it produces different social realities or like different experiences rather that are incredibly boring you know like the ATMs that never work or like the you know how is your day and all of the shit like things that just make you want to like punch the wall well i was going to say the complete instrumentalization of the education system an education system which is all about standardized testing exams you know vacational metrics getting a job yeah in fact there's been a real project to make education boring again hasn't it?

as boring as possible, wrote learning, testing all the time, etc., etc. You're only allowed to do interesting subjects if you go to an elite university. Yeah, totally.

You can now basically, when the Wright describes a university subject as a Mickey Mouse degree, what they mean is it would be interesting to ordinary people. There is an interesting

tension there, isn't there, though? It's partly about, partly the project of post-Fordism and then platform capitalism under the aegis of the neoliberal program has been to make boring

the kind of public space and public institution that actually, like, Fordism was actually able to make interesting. This is like, I mean, Havillies point about the golden age of public modernism. That is like the era when actually like public architecture gets really interesting. So you're allowed to do interesting stuff at school and universities, etc. And then... And then the high point of participation in the production of culture as well. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Like politics isn't boring because it can actually...

deliver things. So loads of people are involved in it. And so, and you can see this as this sort of dialectic in a way. The like Fordism, you know, Fordism kind of offers people the security, and partly offers people the security. They've been struggling for since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. People have been desperately trying to make life more boring so that it isn't this like hideous, terrifying, you know, struggle just to stay alive. And you know, they want healthcare. They want it, they want a kind of education. They want pensions. They want stable jobs for life. You know, that's what they've been after since they were forced off the land, 200 years earlier. And so finally they get it, then, you know, that itself, that does

produce a whole set of other, you know, costs in a way, like for young people growing up in that context. And, you know, people feel bored. They feel frustrated. And they start pushing for things which, if they really got what they wanted, would take us even, they would undermine the power of capital even further. You know, they would push in the direction of some kind of democratic socialism. And so to prevent that, like post-Fordism comes along and it gives people this culture, it gives us this kind of saturated consumer culture where increasingly your kind of personal life is allowed to become really exciting. Like as a consumer, you're allowed to have a really fun life. You know, you can have sex with whoever you want. You can do drugs as long as you don't

do it too publicly. You can listen to 100 different kinds of music. But all this public stuff that Fordism kind of made potentially interesting starts to become. It starts to get broken up. It starts to become stuff that you're basically not allowed to have any relationship to other than the market relationship. And then to some extent, the shift of platform capitalism is partly driven by people looking for forms of connection and community online because they've been driven out of those public spaces.

It's partly is driven by like the multitude, as Hart and Negri call it, like moving online in a genuine search for connection and novelty and creativity and collective agency and now we're living through the period actually where that all that stuff capital is now has reacted against that by saying right you're here online we've got you now and we're going to and we're going to concentrate all that power going to concentrate control over all those platforms and networks in the hands of the half a dozen people in southern California and that's sort of where we are now I think and so it produces a really complicated distribution of kind of boredoms in some ways in anxieties and terrors in others.

Yeah, that's interesting, trying to think through, like, platform capitalism in relationship to an intervention into boredom or overstimulation or something like that. Platform capitalism is also based on that compulsion, that sort of like gamification of social interaction using the insights of the compulsive nature of gambling and these sorts of things, or that sort of stuff that we've talked about before. I just wanted to think a little bit more about that, though, is that, like, we might have moved from, we might have moved back towards people getting bored with social media. And part of that is this idea that Cory Doctro's got about the insuffication of the

internet in which the platforms have to be useful. They have to give us something that we want in order to get us on there. But once we're on there, they basically turn off that usability. Everything gets a bit more bullshit, basically. Because they're trying to, you know, the point of those platforms is to extract as much value as possible to the oligarchs who own them. And so, like, more and more social media becomes less and less usable. I almost think as though we might be moving out of the social media,

which functions as a public space or a replacement for public space. It's almost breaking down, I think, that role it used to have. Even like Twitter, which I cannot get off. With the Iran war going on now, it is almost useless. There's so much slop and propaganda and so much hidden on there that it's not playing the role it played in previous conflicts, where it would be something you could get immediate news. Now it's just impossible to...

You may as well watch BBC if one of work out what's going on. It is fucking useless and have no use at all, basically. It's incredibly difficult. And it seems to be that breakdown of a public space and people are retreating to sort of semi-private spaces, you know, so WhatsApp, lists, etc, these sorts of things. Discord. Yeah, these sorts of things, which are, yeah,

I really like that idea that, like, it was replacement for a public sphere, And I think we might be moving out of that because of dynamics internal to platform capitalism. I may or may not be wrong. The experience of being on Twitter these days is quite boring because it's just full of slop. Do you know what I mean? AI slop and this sort of stuff. I mean, that is consistent with the whole model of sort of capitalist history going about centuries

in which all these things are true. I know this is my most repeated slogan. Like all those things are true at the same time. It's true. You know, capitalism is this massive site of exploitation. which people, workers will try to resist. It's true that it also does produce fantastic innovations, but its capacity for innovation is also parasitic on innovations,

that it isn't really, capitalism as such isn't really the engine of, actually. It will create conditions to facilitate them because it needs them. But once it gets full control of them, it always has a way of sort of making them boring. And both that kind of desire to escape from the boredom that it creates, and the search for, you know, justice and peace and equality are kind of driving motors of radicalism, which are always contesting those capitalist forces.

Capitalism as dynamic and capitalism as inshittification process or an inshittifier, in a sense. Interesting when you think about it through the prism of boredom. Bourget abundance is an easier way to talk about inshittification. I can't remember who came out with that fantastic phrase. It's an amazing, amazing. I can't imagine who did come up with. We should play one of my favorite bands, Green Day's song Longview from the brilliant 1994 album

Dookie featuring the line, I'm so damn bored, I'm going blind and also the story of the last ever generation to sit around and watch their phone, but no one's calling. Last Generation Be able to say that. So that is Longview from Green Day's album, Dookie from 1994. Before we move on and start thinking about maybe some of the contemporary ways in which we experience boredom or, you know, over-stimulation or stuff like that, I think we need to go back to the 20th century to just mention, you know, well, a couple of really important theoretical positions on this. I mean, one is, of course, the feminist angle on boredom. You know, we've got writers like Betty Frieden and in the feminine mystique and in others, which are obviously talking. about domestic labor, right? And we couldn't, we couldn't do an episode on boredom without talking about that. And, you know, she's writing about, of course, this is in the West, you know, specifically in the US and Europe in the mid-20th century, we talked about Fordism and we talked about boredom in that sense, but she's obviously making the argument that many of us will have heard before, which is about

the structural condition of boredom, which is created by specific gender roles. And this idea that existed, you know, the discourse that women were encouraged to see domestic life and labor, all the cleaning, cooking, child care, et cetera, as fulfillment. But of course, the work, like, you know, the factory work, you know, mirroring the factory work was repetitive. But it was also isolated, right, because it's not happening in groups. It's not happening as a group of different women. It's happening as an individual woman in her own home, alone, usually during the day or with the children. And it's also on top of that not recognized as real labour. So that kind of so-called unspoken dissatisfaction is a form of boredom. And it becomes

politically significant, of course, because of when you start thinking about patriarchy and how patriarchy organizes time and work, whereas, you know, the men's work in the factories might have been repetitive and boring, but at least it's seen as productive and, I guess, socially meaningful in some way. Whereas women's labor at home, as we always say, the housework never ends. I mean, it never ends for us, and it definitely didn't end for those women, but it's also invisibleized, right? So the boredom then is seen in a slightly different way that we've been talking about, which is not so much about having nothing to do, I guess, but it's doing repetitive work that is undervalued or hidden. But importantly, and I think there's

three things that when you talk about here, there's a lack of autonomy and there's a lack of recognition, as I said, but there's also a lack of opportunity for like an intellectual life, of some sort. And I think that's really important. That's like the central thing that when we talk about the kind of boredom of domestic labour there. And it's really interesting actually that like what was the response to that? You know, when second way feminism came around, we've talked about this lots of times before, of course, but like, you know, the core organisational mechanism for that was a consciousness raising group precisely because it was like it was the way to overcome the isolation of the individualised

housewife and it was a way to engage in collective intellectual practice. Well, I mean, we're obviously very pro-consciousness raising group, but I also think that like that is the experience of being individualized, etc., being isolated in various different ways, and also being like separated from collective intellectual production. That is a pretty widespread condition now, do you know what I mean, which is why I do think that consciousness raising groups are, that sort of practice is something that we really do need to pick up. Do you know what I mean? It's something that, can be transported from the experience of the housewife and the way to get out of it to our own experiences of our own particular experiences of boredom.

Yeah, I really agree. What Nadi was saying is incredibly useful. I mean, the bored housewife, like that was the cliché. The bored housewife is a cliched phrase, and that was the thing which, as much as anything else, that's what women's liberation was a revolt against, that condition of boredom. And I think historically that's really important. I mean, we've already alluded to you on this episode quite a lot. a lot of these debates around what is driving historical transitions between, you know, Fordism

between the 30s and 70s and then post-Fordism between the 70s and 2000s into platform capitalism. And I think lots of people listening will know this, but lots of people will not benefit from having it spelled out. I mean, a big intellectual influence on all of us is the sort of, you know, the autonomous Marxist tradition from Italy. I would say it has quite a similar approach to some British Marxists like E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall. which really stresses the extent to which these big changes in the nature of capitalism, they don't just come about because capitalists decide to change things, or just because capitalists are competing with each other, tends to be this kind of orthodox American Marxist assertion,

that it's all just capitalists competing with each other that produce these changes. This perspective I'm talking about tends to say, no, a lot of the time capitalists are having to adapt their practices to the ways in which various social groups, especially workers, organize to defend their own interests, and make social demands, which capitalists find it very difficult, to meet. There's a kind of variation on that theory or kind of addition to it, which I've been really committed to. Like, I've given lectures to undergraduates about this, so on and off for years,

but I've never written anything about it. And I've never found anyone really write it down, which is to say, well, I think it's really, I think it is women's dissatisfaction with the four dissettlement in the 50s and 60s. It is a really key to driving that. Insofar as this Marxist tradition or neo-Marxist tradition, conceptualises it, it conceptualizes it in terms of workers, workers in the factories, finding ways to be disobedient, like demanding shorter hours, sciving off work, getting into the counterculture, calling wildcat strikes, demanding workers control and this sort of thing. And the argument is that is what drives capitalists eventually to develop all these technologies from container shipping to just in time ordering to global communications networks,

which makes them possible, basically makes it possible to shut down loads of factories in difficult places like Italy or Britain or parts of the state and kind of move manufacturing elsewhere and automate loads of it. And I think what's really understudied is the extent to which it's not just that. It's specifically the fact that women do not, especially after the experience of a degree of emancipation in the 20s, in the great period of modernism,

and after the experiences of wartime as well, they do not want, they will not tolerate this kind of restoration and this recreation of the role of the bored housewife. They're bored and they're frustrated. And to me, that's really manifest in some of the most interesting cultural production of the time. You know, Doris Lessing's novels, like the Golden Notebook, the greatest British film of all time, A Taste of Honey. You know, these are all kind of expressions of this frustration that women are experiencing at that time,

which I think ends up being a real driver of historic change. And it is as much as anything about boredom. It's about being forced into this condition of boredom. and wanting to escape from it. And that's not a non-materialist critique from that perspective, because from that perspective, that struggle for emancipation from boredom is exactly also a struggle for economic autonomy, a struggle for collective agency, all those things at the same time.

And so what was the sanctioned patriarchal solution for that in the United States in 1950s? Mother's little helper, give the lady some value. So that's really interesting. like how you take the condition of boredom and therefore the frustration and potential collectivity and emancipation and you just dull it, right? You give it a downer so that you make it more difficult for women to be able to organize and express their frustration. Yeah, but also a precursor of the more generalized condition of people self-medicate with all sorts of

things to another to cope with the sort of stresses of the fendry life. That's a really good point. The Valium prescribed housewife, like just anticipates the Prozac prescribed everybody, like in the 80s and 90s. Oh, he anti-drugs on this, but I can't remember. It's straight-edge, didn't you get the memo? Did you not get that memo? This is now a straight-edged podcast. Drugs are bad, okay.

Can I add a quote from Antonio Negri? In the 70s he says, the discovery, who was a big autonomous Marxist there is, the discovery that workers were smoking marijuana on the, and the assembly lines at Alfa Romeo was as important as discovering that workers struggle drives capitalist development. That was acid Negri, I think he went back on that. I think you've been smoking a bit himself.

We're talking about Housewives being prescribed Valium, the most fame. Valium being the brand name for De Azapam, when marketed by the pharmaceutical company Roach. Obviously the most famous song about that is the stoned mother's little helper. But the best song about that is, of course, from 1980, Manchester's greatest, the fall. This is the Roach Rumble.

Roche. There's one more perspective on board before we move on to the contemporary, or at least in contemporary Western world. And that's the perspective of Australian Lebanese anthropologist called Gassan Hage, who's actually from Ba'abda in Lebanon at the time of recording, is currently being bombed, or at least it was yesterday. So Gassan Hage has this kind of interesting theory. I mean, it would make sense to many of us, but I thought it's interesting how he encapsulates it, which is this idea. of boredom for, you know, migrants, refugees and the unemployed youth is not actually about not having something to do. It's what he calls stuckness, which is groups of people in society being forced to wait long periods, you know, not for the bus, etc., but for political and economic

systems, right? So what that looks like is things like waiting for a visa, waiting for a job, waiting for some kind of bureaucracy, it allowed their life to move forward. And it's kind of different. from a kind of middle-class experience, which he is saying is about comfort or too much free time, necessarily. I mean, we can debate that we have been. But he's saying, and this is the key thing here, which is interesting to come back to, you know, the housewives in the 1950s example,

is a lack of agency. So he's making a relatedness between boredom and a lack of agency because the time that you've got, that you're stuck in, is not your own, right? And so it's your idea of the future. and again, we might want to talk about the futures again here is kind of un-ta-paws because of institutions, because of borders and things like this. So he basically politicizes it and says, okay, it's about power structures and who gets to move life forward and who is forced to kind of

be stuck behind. And I thought that was an interesting piece of research to bring forward. I don't know like first-world problems this, but that sort of like bull-in-shittification of everything, you know, part of the thing of that is the introduction of like, you know, the contemporary forms with bureaucracy, basically, which are basically figured by the call centre, you know, that, like, being put on hold for, like, you know, however, so, so long, getting through to somebody, perhaps like these days at, like, you know, a machine, etc.

Like, where basically everything you said before is gone and disappeared, etc. You know what I mean? It's like it's almost Kafkaesque bureaucracy, but like Kafka-S in like, you know, that you experience on the phone, listening to Musak. I'm not comparing that to the sorts of conditions that stateless people have when they're waiting for their documents. It's Kafka plus Beckett, right? Because it's also absurd, right? It's both things at the same time. Because I think the difference

there in terms of like the old bureaucracy, I'm not saying old bureaucracy was perfect, guys. So I'm not that, I'm not that person. But at least, you know, the system, the intention behind the system was to kind of solve the problem, whereas the intention behind a lot of of the bureaucratic systems that exist that we all have to engage with today is to fob you off. Like, that is the point of why they exist, is to kind of stop you from being able to get any kind of answer or justice. So it's kind of double frustrating in a sense. So I would see that as more frustrating than boring, but yeah, I take your point. Contemporary bureaucracy tends to be more privatized. So it's a private company and, you know, it's linked to that bullshitization

thing because basically, you know, they're all monoton. or oligopolis. It's like, oh, yeah, you can either be on this platform or that platform, you know, like a streaming service, whatever. You know what? They're both a shit as there, so we don't give a fuck about your own experience of any of this sort of stuff. What choice have you got? That's the lack of agency thing that comes about. But I like that idea of, like, boredom through stuckness or waiting, etc. Because it also relates to, like, more simple forms of boredom, what you experience as a child, do you know what I mean, that thing of,

like, you're waiting for something to come along. And, like, it's a lack of agency to be able to create something, or sometimes it's a prompt to create something new. That's the route out of border, basically. Yeah, I think you're completely right. And I think what actually happens in the contemporary example is this idea of agency and how that agency is kind of displaced or materializes in a contemporary example. So you're standing at the bus stop, you are bored. What does everyone do these days? You take action. What does that action look like? You reach for your phone. So I think that's interesting how the scroll or the, you know, the engaging with digital media,

or the always the need for stimulation being like literally at your fingertips is kind of, it becomes a solution for the lack of agency. I think that's what happens in the 21st century or in the late 20th, I mean, where we are now, in fact, with the last 15 years with smartphones. So should we talk about, you know, how this relates to kind of anxiety and maybe some of the things that have been written about that? Well, let's just talk about this. We are all very anxious, this article by the Institute for Precarious Consciousness, actually a guy from Nottingham, which Plancy published, probably around like 2014. It's got its very interesting thesis and it relates to some of the stuff that Jen was saying earlier about Boltonski and Chappello's

their sort of critique. The argument is something like this, that every phase of capitalism, it has a sort of affect that goes along with it, a sort of dominant, passive affect, basically. And so the early capitalism, that the dominant affect is misery, basically, the misery of like living in the new towns, etc., etc. In order to fight against that, the workers' movement creates machines for fighting misery, basically, both by trying to directly sort of organise social life and sort of like almost directly organised social reproduction in the cities.

If you think about the sort of all-encompassing life of the sort of socialist movement, particularly in Germany with the SBA Day before the First World War, but in Britain as well, you know what I mean? Organised workers, cycling clubs, etc., these sorts of things, get yourself out of the misery of the cities, etc, etc. And then the sort of like the affect, the dominant affect in the sort of for this period is this affect of boredom, which we've talked about.

What tends to happen in the post-war period around the counterculture, etc. Is this we create machines for fighting boredom, basically, right, which is these sort of counterculture machines, these sorts of things. And then he says, you know, what's the dominant effect that goes along with contemporary capital, is anxiety, basically. Anxiety that, you know, we don't have their power to influence our lives, et cetera, et cetera. You know, that we're isolated individuals who haven't to face the world, and it's huge, huge problems as individuals or perhaps as families, etc.

This increasing precarization of work, the precarity of work, precarious nature of like renting, etc. All of this stuff just builds up these sort of anxiety disorders or low-level anxiety. And the argument that was put forward in this article was that the left is still too focused on fighting, you know, post-war, 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s conception of boredom, right? You know what I mean? And this is sort of like a critique, perhaps, of things such as reclaim the streets and these sorts of things, you know, this sort of creative protest or that sort of stuff. The answer actually that the Institute for precarious consciousness comes up with which he says, look, you know, we need to, he does make this argument, he says that we need consciousness raising group. We need to learn from the second-way feminist movement of how to get out of isolation, etc.

You know, the consciousness raising group should be focused on our shared condition of anxiety and precariousness. And that's the precondition for any other sort of action. I think we've like problematized that a little bit on this show by thinking that like boredom is not gone. In fact, you know, boredom has changed sort of shape in many ways. A lot of the countercultural practices that developed in the, you know, in response to this, even stuff like punk, etc., where shock was used as a way of, you know,

like escaping from the boredom and the sort of like conformity of the classic sort of four-disc, post-war sort of period. A lot of that repertoire, I think, is defunct. Like that whole provocation and shock and all that sort of stuff. If anything, it's been captured by the rights. So I do think he's right in that sort of way. But I think there is a different form of boredom, which I think that boredom is much more, that idea of like, like literally everything is boring, you know, when you get out into the public sphere, etc. Like, social media is fucking boring. Do you know what I mean? Nature isn't boring. Nature isn't boring. This conversation is not boring.

Well, that's not for us. The real world. It's not boring for us. That's just the mediated world. It's bullshit. It's a mediated world, but it's also like boring dystopia that we were talking about earlier. You know what I mean? They're like built environment, the environments, the architecture in which we're supposed to wander around and all this sort of stuff is boring. It's the same. There's no variation. There's no creativity in that. Do you know what me? But we don't experience it as like empty boredom. It's not the boredom of like the 19, my 1970s and 80s youth in which like TV stopped at like whatever it was, half past 11 or something like

that. You know, nothing was like literally nothing was open on a Sunday. Do you know what I mean? That sort of like empty boredom, which was a stirred to creativity. Instead, we have boredom, we have a boredom of like being distracted all the time. Our attention is constantly distracted, so it's not empty. It's filled, but it's like filled by this sort of like meaningless distraction, which can feel like a form of boredom, if you ask me. And Mark Fisher had this article. I think it was called like, everything is boring, but no one's bored because we're not allowed to be bored, because our attention is constantly distracted and yet where is the interest, where is the creativity,

where is our ability to influence the world? I think everything you're saying is right. I think with an article like that Institute for Precarious Conscious Conscious One, you know, it's always going to be possible to unpick it. I mean, the idea there's like one dominant affect per phase is always going to be easy to problematize. I still think there's something very insightful about it. I think it was really helpful in kind of illuminating the sense of what is different indeed

from the shift from Fordism and the way it produces boredom and post-forwardism in the way it produced anxiety. Although, of course, you've got to say, that wasn't a new observation. I mean, people like Richard Senet in his book, The Corrosion of Character, had been talking about how post-wardism was making everybody anxious. I mean, people have been talking about that since the 80s. But the contrast with boredom being the main focus of critique and resistance was really useful. Partly what's going on is like the question is well what's the site of boredom?

Because the book is under Fordism, it's work primarily. Work becomes really boring. It becomes routinized, come to bureaucratized, comes as institutionalised. Of course that's partly because people have wanted it to become more boring because before that it was terrifying. So work, the site work becomes boring and youth really, you know, there's very specific historical conditions which would mean that youth are bored because youth are either going out to work very young or if they're not going out to work a lot of the time like when they're not in school or in college so it isn't that much of them to do.

They've been protect, actually what's happened as young people have been protected from work. They're not having to go out to work as young as they did in the past. But there isn't really anything else for them to do a lot of the time now. So they're wandering the streets or going to youth clubs with very low resources and this sort of thing. So, and obviously no one's really going to say, like, boredom's gone. Obviously, once you start digging into it,

you're talking about modulations of boredom and modulations of anxiety, and modulations of other things. But I do think there is a sort of truth in it. There's a recognisable truth. But I also think ultimately, that was that essay was writing about post-forwardism. It was years ago now.

That was about post-fawoodism. It wasn't about platform capitalism. I mean, maybe hyper-anxiety is still with the affect to platform capitalism. But I also have a sense that, in a sense, the notion of anxiety seems almost kind of banal compared to the levels of paranoia and also, and sort of, fear.

the people are now experiencing that is now normal. I think anxiety was the condition of post-faudism and the post-faudist labour market. It was a labour market in which everyone was insecure and jobs, individual jobs were insecure,

but actual rates of unemployment were pretty low. So you could never really feel comfortable that you were settled into a job for a long time, but you probably were going to get another one, like when you inevitably lost this one. but that is not where things are now, especially for young people. Now we're in a situation where things are much more

challenging. Like if anything, things are returning to some amplified version of like 19th century capitalism, where maybe it's banal to look for like, as I've already suggested it would be, to look for like one afet that names it all, but this sense that

you know, the shift from post-wood into platform capitalism I mean, certainly according to my model, you know, I'm one of the big advocates for that as an analytical model, it's not that everything changes is that some things get really amplified, some things change, some things get reversed.

You know, the outcomes are kind of uneven. So clearly loads of people still experience loads of anxiety, but it's almost, like I say, it seems like that's almost a banal term for what people are having to endure in terms of fear for the future. And, but it's still a useful,

it's still a useful model, and it's still the case that, yeah, boredism, boredism. But boredom is sort of part of it. don't know if it is actually. I don't know. Because we're coming now full serve with what we talked about at the top of the show. And I think especially if we're talking about young people,

however expansive we want the term to be and however much we want to modulate it, I don't think boredom can be useful as a term for naming what they're experiencing. And I think there is this sense that in fact, it's never, as I said earlier, it's never having the experience of anything

you could really recognize as boredom, partly because anxiety has been ramped up to levels where you can't even feel bored. Like, bored just can't be the term, but the level of frustration that you're experiencing now. That I think is a problem, because I do think historically,

that experience of boredom, it was part of an affective regime, as I would put it, a kind of set of interlocking and overlapping structures of feeling, you might put it. Also, that produced, like, huge, stimulated and produced huge amounts of creativity. I mean, that creativity was also dependent on the material circumstances.

But, you know, it was that experience of being really bored as a teenager that pushed loads of people, you know, into the art schools. And the art schools were getting loads of funding from the state. And you could just go and, like, spend five years, like, fucking around, figuring out something to do and get a band out of it or get a film out of it or something like that. It produced that produced extraordinary sort of creativity. And I do think that experience of bored and was, really necessary. I mean,

we've talked about this before. I mean, for me, there's no question. I don't, if I'd have been able to just play computer games with my mates on a platform, I don't know what would have happened to me. Like, my, like, everything, everything about who I'm, everything that everyone likes about me publicly. And I'm not saying, I know lots of people hate me, lots of people indifferent, but there are plenty of people listening to this show.

There are things I do that they like. And everything I do that people like out there, is totally dependent upon me having this experience for about 10 years of my life when I was really bored and basically the only thing to do half the time is go down the library and find a book to look at

so it's like nothing else to do and if I'd been able to play like roadblocks with my mates I would have done and I wouldn't have done any of that and I don't know where I'd been in it and I think to me that is sort of a terrifying thought I want to just emphasise on that as well it's like particularly when I was growing up

like the object of life like was to be an individual interesting person. It's like so important to me that you would be like interested in things. Do you know what I mean? And I have hub obsessions and these sorts of things and like, you know, be interested in the world and all of that sort of stuff. Which was a reaction to this fear of boredom, I think, or the experience of boredom. I never, I never, I never thought about any of those things. But you're younger than us, aren't you? That's the... No, I don't think it's just that. I think it's... I just think it's the kind of person I am, and I think it's how I grew up in the environment. I don't think it's anything to do with age. I also think it's slightly to do with gender.

It's never, ever something that I've worried about, about being too boring for people. It's not a fear of being boring, or a fear of being bored, I think. But like a sort of valorisation of, like, being an interesting person. Okay, yeah, we seem to have ended up choosing a lot of guitar. car rock of various kinds for this episode. So let's hear a bit of classic British Electro Pop from 1991, the Pet Shop Boys, a classic elegy to the idea of boredom-free adolescents being boring.

I mean, this leads us to a question here of like, should we be demanding the right to boredom? Should we be demanding empty time, basically? you can see things which are sort of like people almost gesturing towards that, like the need for a right to boredom. People talk about like raw dogging, raw dogging bus journeys or raw dogging flights or whatever.

It's this idea that like, you know, you live in this hyper-stimulated world where your attention is constantly being grabbed by algorithms, you're not in control of, etc. The key there is that it's the norm, the key with the argument is that the assumption is that the norm is you have a, no control over your attention. So it is a challenge to be able to control, which is the interesting

bit, right? Yeah, totally. And it's also that thing of, well, we come back to where we started, don't we, basically. You need to sort of learn how to, like, you know, read books these days. You know what I mean? And be able to, like, you know, basically go through things which aren't immediately giving you stimulation, do you know what I mean? And that includes, like, long, boring French films and these sorts of things. I think there is some sort of yearning towards having that empty space to some degree. Empty time as well. Empty time I meant to say, really.

Yeah, I don't think we'd disagree with this, would we? We'd have to say, I mean, any element of a contemporary socialist project is partly wanting to restore some things that have been taken away. And maybe that would be, I mean, ideally what we want, this is the politics of the dialectic in a way. We want to construct a situation in which young people in particular, at least they are free from the kind of they're free from the forms of anxiety and worse than anxiety that are inflicted by spending all their time on capitalist own platforms and living in a high

competitive competitive education system and a high competitive and very insecure labor market so that they do feel once again like we did when we were younger like they are free to experience some empty time but at the same time like i don't want them to have to be subject to the kind of boredom that I was. I want them still to be able to listen to all the music in the world, like at the touch of a bar. And I want them to be able to, you know, get every book in the world on their phone. I just want them to be able to have the attention to bound to sit in and read it instead of flicking onto Instagram every two seconds. So, and all of those things, like are achievable, I think. But they were, they are only achievable by virtue of some very

concerted, like political struggle to take control of all those technologies and to democratize them and and make them useful. Loud dear listener, we're going to reveal what our strategy has been all along. The reason we've been doing two and a half hour podcasts is that we are training you for a world in which there is a right to be bored. This is a...