Boredom

A nation where half the workforce says they are bored19 with their jobs20 (69 percent if measured by “feeling engaged”21), close to 40 percent22of all of us claim to be bored with our social lives, and two thirds23 of millennials report being plainly “bored with life.” According to research, young Americans today are more “boredom-prone”24 than at any time in history—so much so that Gen Z has been crowned the “the bored generation.”25 And for many, the feeling is a strange kind of exhaustion where more than half our day is spent sitting,26and yet we feel tired—tired of work, tired of leisure, tired of a culture so fried with cynicism and unseriousness and pointlessness. In 1933, the novelist James Norman Hall wrote a letter to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.27Defining boredom as “being bored; ennui,” Hall explained that, “To define [boredom] merely as “being bored,” appallingly true though this may be, is only to aggravate the misery of the sufferer who, as a last desperate resource, has gone to the dictionary for enlightenment as to the nature of his complaint.” Outside of the arts, entrepreneurship rates98 (as measured by the percentage of Americans who own part of a private company) have cratered—down by 50 percent across the board and down close to 70 percent for the college-educated class; culminating in last year’s first ever Forbes 30 Under 30 list devoid of a single self-made billionaire.99 Young Americans are also, according to data, less curious, less willing to disagree, and less likely to take risks.100, 101 One survey in particular, found that over a fifth102 of Americans can’t remember a single time they were curious about anything.

Author: Skeptic

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