How Did Ancient People Deal With Boredom?
By: Historical Insights
Tags: Self Improvement, Boredom, History, Society, Coronavirus

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

People around the world have been subjected to a number of changes in their lives over the last few months.

If we’re lucky, we’re still healthy and employed. But that doesn’t make it easy — we’re stuck apart from our friends, subject to new anxieties about our health and our economic futures, waiting for faraway officials to tell us when and how we will be able to resume our “normal” lives.

Perhaps the most common feeling for many of us right now is boredom. It’s why people are engaging in increasingly elaborate internet video challenges or baking complex breads. Frankly, it’s part of why I’m writing this right now.

But we’re facing this time of boredom with more resources than anybody has before us — we have the ability to browse the internet, watch or listen to pretty much anything ever made, and order most goods over Amazon. In short, during the most boring month of our lives we still have more ways to entertain ourselves than some of the most privileged people centuries ago.

Though the English word “boredom” did not come into use until Charles Dickens used it in Bleak House in 1852, boredom has been a well known phenomenon for most of human history. Indeed, imagining the tedium and repetition involved in pretty much any way of making a living in ancient or medieval times would be enough to terrify most of us in the overstimulated modern world.

Imagine spending every day churning butter, or tending a field of crops, or weaving fabric — all by hand. Few people moved beyond their immediate surroundings; one historian estimates that 80% of medieval Europeans, for example, never traveled more than 20 miles from their homes.

Most people in the past did the same (often physically grueling) tasks day after day in the company of the same small group of people. Their options for entertainment were slim — most people likely could not read in these societies, and the same myths and stories were repeated over and over. So how did they experience boredom, how did they cope, and what can we learn from them about our predicament?

Despite that fact that, from our vantage point, boredom must have been endemic in the pre-modern world, the concept shows up unevenly in records from ancient societies. The ancient Greeks rarely referred to boredom, and didn’t really have a word that maps onto our concept of boredom.

The words that they used to describe states like boredom also meant things like “distraction” or “disgust” or “irritation.” Aristophanes describes one character’s boredom at having to wait for the Athenian Assembly to begin through action rather than description — he says, “I groan, I yawn, I stretch, I fart, I don’t know what to do.” You may have been in this situation recently — unable to precisely name your mental state but restless nonetheless.

A Roman bust of Aristotle (public domain)

Perhaps boredom was such a ubiquitous part of ancient Greek life that it wasn’t necessary to name it precisely. In the same way that we don’t think about the fact that we are breathing all the time, maybe ancient Greeks didn’t identify their constant boredom, just its symptoms.

There may have been cultural attitudes involved, as well. Some of Athens’ most prominent philosophers praised their fellow citizens’ ability to enjoy their leisure. Aristotle, for example, saw leisure as absolutely crucial for creating a learned and politically engaged populace.

In his Politics, he wrote, “we should be able, not only to work well, but to use leisure well; for, as I must repeat once again, the first principle of all action is leisure.” Though it’s unclear how widespread these attitudes were, perhaps Greek cultural ideas about the beneficial effects of leisure made them more comfortable with the conditions that could lead to boredom.

Romans, a culture that valued hard work and discipline perhaps more than the Greeks, discussed boredom more frequently, and in ways that map onto our modern experience. Seneca, the Stoic philosopher and playwright who lived between 4 BCE and 65 CE, describes the mix of restlessness and inertia that many of us feel these days:

Thence comes that feeling which makes men loathe their own leisure and complain that they themselves have nothing to be busy with. For their unhappy sloth fosters envy, and, because they could not succeed themselves, they wish every one else to be ruined; then from this aversion to the progress of others and despair of their own their mind becomes incensed against Fortune, and complains of the times, and retreats into corners and broods over its trouble until it becomes weary and sick of itself. For it is the nature of the human mind to be active and prone to movement.

Seneca emphasizes the ways in which boredom (he used the word taedium) can curdle into more harmful emotions like bitterness and anger if it’s not dealt with properly. Seneca’s remedy for boredom is pretty simple: he says that we need to find something to do. if we have nothing to do around the house, he encourages his readers to engage in public affairs. So Seneca would advocate what a lot of us are already doing — baking bread, repainting the bedroom, and perhaps gearing up to get involved in the upcoming election.

“Months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror” became a common description of warfare during the First World War. Rome was known for its military exploits more than pretty much anything else. Its massive armies spent long periods of time away from home, and many soldiers found themselves with long periods of time during which there was nothing to do.

Ennius, a Roman playwright, has a soldier character say, “When there is a lazy beginning the mind doesn’t know what it wants… The mind wanders indecisively; we only live sort of a life.” Perhaps this half-living seems very familiar to you right now; boredom can often make the days seem endless and pointless.

Plutarch, a Greek historian writing during the Roman period, warns of the problematic effects of boredom on soldiers’ morale. He wrote about Eumenes, a general whose troops were trapped in a siege. Eumenes prescribed his men exercise — he had them walk around a large house over and over again, speeding up with each lap.

One of the desert fathers, early monks who battled the sin of boredom (public domain)

During the early Christian era, boredom came to seem worse than just an condition of life — it could be a sin.

The monastic life, like many religious vocations, was deliberately constructed to include long, low-stimulation periods of silence and contemplation. They, like us, had their freedom and social interaction severely limited; this deprivation was supposed to allow them to focus on getting closer to spiritual truths. So where was the line between virtuous simplicity and boredom?

Early medieval monks spoke of the vice of acedia, a Greek word originally meaning “indifference” or “lack of care.” Evagrius, an early desert monk, spoke of acedia as the “demon of noontide” that would come to ruin monks’ moral and spiritual commitment. Acedia was labeled one of the deadly sins (the eighth; it was later folded in with sloth). Evagrius’ disciple John Cassian described a monk suffering from acedia this way:

He looks about anxiously this way and that, and sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness.

It’s this lack of focus that made boredom dangerous for monks. Becoming unmoored in the long, hot hours of the middle of the day made them vulnerable to temptation. Perhaps they would wonder why they had chosen the religious life at all; perhaps they would just lose focus on the spiritual life they were supposed to be living.

Life in boredom can seem purposeless, as I’m sure you know. So how should we fight acedia? Some monastic rules prescribed communal reprimand — one’s fellow monks should scold those falling victim to boredom and help them to focus on spiritual contemplation.

So you’re bored — I am too! So were most people throughout history! But there are some time-tested solutions. Ancient authors had a number of remedies for the boredom that they faced. Some encouraged bored people to lean into it — to enjoy the leisure they had.

Others encouraged the bored to get busy, finding a project or taking up exercise. Others said to lean on their community, allowing those around them to jolt them out of their stupor. Whatever you choose, take refuge in the fact that your boredom is alleviated by modern technology and — most importantly — temporary.