Boredom

Boredom is defined as Emotional reaction toward an experience that doesn’t match our definition of fun, interesting, or useful.  Since it is an emotion, it may be an accurate reaction to an objective reality.  We may be experiencing an even that does not meet our needs or desires to be intellectually stimulated and/or physically entertained.  However, as with all emotions, boredom may also have a subjective cause.  One such cause is a lack of mental flexibility.  Mental flexibility is the ability to see larger meaning of an experience.  Without mental flexibility we may miss out on the good that an experience has to offer us because we too narrowly define the experience.  For example, people with greater mental flexibility have greater senses of humor, mainly because they just catch more of the life around them and understand it more, so they catch more of the humor.

In our faith lives, if we lack mental flexibility we may define our faith by needing to go to Church, needing to go to Catholic school or catechism classes, needing to follow the rules, and needing to meet the demands for time and money.  If we narrowly define faith in this way, we will be bored with it. However, in this case our emotion is misleading us.  Faith is really a relationship with God, who created us, saved us, loves us, and desires us to live His life.  Faith could never fail to meet our needs and desires.  If we find faith boring, the problem is in us, not in faith.  This is one example of how boredom, and other emotions, can deceive us.

To be fully human, we need to think about all of our emotions and to decide how accurately they are pointing to authentic goods and evils.  If we are bored, we need to first determine if we are bored because the experience is objectively boring or because of some deficiency in our participation in the experience.   If the experience really is lacking, then we can choose to do something about it.  If we are lacking, then we should choose to change.  That is what it means to respond to boredom in a fully human way.

In our faith lives, remember – holiness is the antidote to boredom!