Every summer, as newsrooms empty and beaches fill up, one topic resurfaces in the news: boredom. This feeling would be, according to most of the articles dealing with this theme, in the process of “disappearing” in developed countries. In July 2024 alone, half a dozen editorial offices, including TF1, The HuffPostor even The life have thus echoed this supposed “rarefaction”.
Caught up in the frenzy of our modern lifestyle, the younger generations have been “deprived” of this sensation. Back at the top of the book sales charts with his latest novel, entitled Jacaranda, The author Gaël Faye is one of the most ardent defenders of this idea: there are few interviews in which the author does not talk about the “robbery” that screens, social networks and the current “technological arsenal” have allegedly carried out on our lives, taking away our ability to feel this sense of emptiness.
Has boredom disappeared? Contrary to popular belief, the abundance of contemporary distractions has never actually got the better of it. In fact, it would be quite the opposite, according to epidemiological studies on the subject: even though the use of social networks or screens has become massively widespread, the feeling of boredom has increased in many countries in recent years. A joint development that has scientists wondering: what if our new passions, instead of entertaining us, have reinforced our weariness?
In the United States, the cradle of these new technologies, a study published in 2020 in the scientific journal Journal of Adolescent Health shows that the feeling of boredom has increased by 1.7% per year since 2008 among high school students – 100,000 of them were monitored for the occasion. In France, the most recent surveys on the issue also support this trend. The same observation in China: a meta-analysis published in 2023 in the journal of psychology Personality and Individual Differences and covering around sixty studies shows a strengthening of this feeling among Chinese students.
Boredom is not dead
Before social media, television and radio were also accused of having “killed” boredom. Proof that the issue is not new, the father of analytical philosophy Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was already worried about its disappearance: “We feel boredom less, but we are more afraid of it,” he warned in Boredom and Excitement. The Conquest of Happinesshis standard work on the subject, published in 1930.
Statistical studies on the subject remind us that boredom is not measured by the number of hours spent doing nothing. This feeling actually depends on different factors, such as the nature of the task performed, its redundancy, its difficulty, the meaning found in it, but also, and more generally, the mental state of people, their health or their socio-economic conditions.
Thus, being busy, for example by looking at screens, does not provide any immunity against idleness, real or perceived: everything depends on the use that is made of the activity in question. A series of experiments conducted in Canada illustrates this mechanism. It recently showed that switching from video to video, zapping, speeding up, the primary mode of consumption of Instagram, Facebook or TikTok, was in itself more likely to reinforce boredom than uninterrupted viewing, as offered by YouTube or Netflix. And this, whether the content is judged to be interesting or not.
Inactivity or boredom?
While social networks have become the first response to boredom, they could actually accelerate the spread of this feeling, according to the researchers, whose work was published in early August in Journal of Experimental Psychology, the journal of the American Psychological Association. A hypothesis shared by more and more scientists, who nevertheless point out that there are much more important causes for the spread of the feeling of boredom, in particular the increase in cases of depression, characterized in particular by a pathological loss of interest.
Previous research had already shown that greater social media use was linked to higher levels of boredom, but the underlying mechanisms were not well understood until now. To explore them, the researchers had the idea of asking a few hundred students to watch different content, for a few dollars, and observing them.
At times, the volunteers were able to zap as much as they wanted. At other times, the software prevented them from doing so. Before and after the viewings, the volunteers answered a series of questions about how bored they were, but also how satisfied they were. In total, seven experiments were conducted, each with slightly different configurations.
Zapping against boredom, a counterproductive passion
These results should of course be taken with a grain of salt: they were obtained under experimental conditions and on very small samples, of the order of a few hundred participants each time. What a few student volunteers do does not always predict the variety of reactions of the entire population. But these experiments have the merit of shedding light on our behaviors with regard to these forms of entertainment. “Social networks appear to be the most accessible escape. Except that, by moving from one content to another, users do not engage enough, which prevents them from finding as much meaning as in a longer video,” summarizes Katy Tam, lead author of the study and researcher at the University of Toronto (Canada), to L’Express.
From this paradoxical behavior, which springs from the natural urgency to want to get rid of boredom, can thus be born what Katy Tam calls “feedback loops”. “People can be in pursuit of an elusive desire, for example wanting to watch something ever more stimulating, and thus ‘scroll’ indefinitely, which risks reinforcing the previous boredom”, continues the specialist. Who has never had the feeling of leaving social networks more frustrated and tired than before?
The trap of social networks
According to Katy Tam, this loop can also be reinforced by a kind of “fear of missing out” (also known as Fomo), the fear of missing out associated with high digital consumption. At the end of the experiment, volunteers were asked the following question: “Did you feel like you didn’t watch enough videos?” Most of the people who were able to zap answered yes. The opposite happened for those who watched a video in its entirety.
This is the paradox of social networks: we often stay there for want of anything better, waiting for some enjoyable content to arrive. Sometimes without taking pleasure, trusting the selection concocted for us by the algorithms, because one day we found stimulating videos there. A bit like those who, at the casino, tirelessly pull the lever of the slot machines, in the hope of making up for their losses.
The comparison between the scrolling and gambling is attractive. Both work on the same basis, they cause pleasure in a “random” way. This is a strong stimulation for the brain: many studies have shown, for example, in mice that dopamine release is higher when they do not expect to find food than when they do.
Digital casinos?
For some experts, including American addiction specialist Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, Both activities would even have the same addictive power. A theory that is also very popular in the media. But, to date, only gambling is considered addictive by scientific consensus. Social networks are certainly the subject of compulsive behavior, but do not seem able to generate an addiction in the medical sense of the term.
These controversies are bigger than they seem. Because, for one, zapping on social networks is a massive phenomenon. On average, according to the studies cited by the Toronto researchers, students open their social networks every six minutes, and check their smartphone 35 times a day. Knowing that the practice can be counterproductive is therefore important, especially if you suffer from boredom.
On the other hand, the subject is too often considered light, even ridiculed. It is, in reality, not insignificant. “The chronic experience of boredom is associated with various mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, stress, apathy, anhedonia [NDLR : la perte de la capacité à ressentir des émotions positives]or to somatization”, recalls the study of Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Boredom is constantly confused with idleness. Hence the fact that it is often erected as a bulwark against capitalism and its pace, as the philosopher Mazarine Pingeot did last July in The Conversation. Hence the fact that the subject is mainly the subject of discussion in summer, a period conducive to slow times and to stopping. However, it would be better to praise slowness and nonchalance, rather than boredom.
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