The Ordinary Silence We Call Boredom
The room sits. The chair sits. The table sits. The air does nothing. A window does less. The wall repeats itself, white, white, white. My hands rest, not moving, not meaning. Time does not pass, or if it does, it passes by limping. Nothing changes. A breath goes in, comes out, goes in, comes out. Another. Another. Another. The rhythm dull as chalk. I count. I forget. I count again. Numbers are useless, but they insist. Outside, the street holds itself like a photograph. Cars not moving, or maybe moving but in the same shape, so it makes no difference. The sound of a distant engine, then silence, then the silence again, then silence. A bird flickers once and then vanishes. The sky holds still, heavy with no message.
The page does not want to be written. The words refuse to arrive. The ones that do arrive are grey. They lie down flat. They do not sing, they do not argue. They just sit. The sentence ends. Another begins. The same. The same. The same. This is boredom. Not dramatic, not sharp. It does not wound. It smothers. It folds itself over you like damp cloth. It holds your breath but does not choke you. You can keep living inside it forever. That’s the danger. That’s the horror. And then the question sneaks in: do I ever even get bored anymore? With all the shows, the games, the glowing screen that replaces sky, have I ever truly sat in the dull weight of nothing? Or is what I call boredom now something else entirely the buzzing of too much, flattened into sameness? A thousand choices until choice itself is exhausted. Netflix becomes wallpaper. The phone becomes a metronome. The feed scrolls forever but never moves. Boredom debates itself inside me. One voice says it is gone, extinct, hunted to death by dopamine. Another voice says it has only changed costume. It hides in repetition. It lives in the loop. It is the hum behind the scroll, the ache beneath the noise.
And then history whispers. Boredom has never been innocent. It has built empires and burned them down. Soldiers waiting too long between battles found themselves gambling, drinking, killing each other in camp. A generation in Weimar Germany, restless in the dull grey air, made frenzy look like salvation and marched themselves into catastrophe. Dictators have learned to weaponise boredom: curfews, queues, waiting rooms, endless forms not just to waste time, but to remind people that their time is not their own. Oppression wears boredom as armour. Revolution borrows it as fuel. Boredom sits in the middle, not caring which way we fall. It can create music, novels, uprisings. It can create addiction, violence, collapse. It does not push toward good or bad. It only pushes. I write this sentence. Then another. Then another. The page fills, the room sits, the silence breathes. I say I am bored. And in that saying, I see that boredom itself is never boring. It is the quietest of weapons. It is the spark and the suffocation both.
Boredom, for me, doesn’t feel like a blank. It feels like a room stuffed too full. The kettle hisses for the exact same number of minutes every morning, but when I stand and watch, those minutes swell. An email sits stubbornly at ninety-nine percent, as if the last pixel is shy. A tram bell rings, but no tram arrives, and strangers lean their necks toward the tracks with the same hopeful choreography. These are not gaps in the day, but small pieces of furniture time sneaks into the room when I’m not looking. Culture dresses this feeling differently depending on where you stand. In the West, boredom often feels like guilt. Proof you’re lazy, not squeezing the juice out of life. In Accra, it wears another face. The late trotro becomes a circle of oranges, dust, and jokes that know they’re being retold. The waiting becomes an event, not a hole. Repetition is what holds people in place long enough for laughter to braid. Meanwhile, in the immigration hall, boredom is thick on purpose. Plastic chairs, a flickering screen, numbers that rise but don’t move you. This boredom is manufactured time folded into nothing, a reminder that your hours don’t belong to you. In monasteries they gave boredom a name: acedia, the noon demon. When the sun wouldn’t budge from the sky, monks felt the drag of time trying to pull their minds apart. Today we meet the same demon through glowing rectangles that never stop moving. It isn’t silence that gnaws, but endless motion. The feeling is the same: too much time pressing against the ribs, no shape to hold it. Psychology would call boredom a misfiring of attention. Not nothing happening too many small things happening without order. The fridge hum, the blinking cursor, the neighbour’s cough, the text bubble that teases and disappears. All competing to be crowned, none deserving the throne. Consciousness loses its conductor and the orchestra keeps playing, out of sync, too loud. Maybe boredom is what it feels like when we discover that the world is unscored, and we are waiting for music that isn’t coming.
Whole addictions have sprouted in the soil of boredom: substances, screens, the endless scroll, each promising to cover that raw, restless hum. Think of a teenager lying on their bed, phone tipped above their face. They aren’t looking for anything in particular just flicking upward, thumb to screen, thumb to screen. A thirty-second video. Then another. Then another. Hours blur. The room darkens, unnoticed. Their body is still but their nerves are sprinting, caught in a loop. They aren’t entertained. They aren’t even interested. But the boredom is padded now, numbed by movement without meaning. It’s not so different from the factory worker in the 19th century sneaking sips of gin between shifts to carve the monotony into pieces. Or the soldier in a muddy trench, hours between battles dragging like stones, rolling dice over and over until gambling becomes the only pulse in the day. Boredom, left unchecked, mutates into its own hunger. It doesn’t ask for joy; it asks for cover.
And here’s the unsettling part: boredom can quietly reshape a life, not in one dramatic moment, but in accumulation. The endless scroll becomes the default way to pass minutes until minutes become years. The drink to kill an evening becomes the drink needed to face a morning. The harmless bet becomes a rhythm too hard to break. What starts as padding something to soften the hum becomes the hum itself. That’s the double edge of boredom. For some it births ideas, books, revolutions. For others, it opens a slow door into habits that tighten into cages. The same restless pause that gave us Newton’s gravity can just as easily give us another lost night, another empty morning. Boredom doesn’t care which way we walk it just pushes. Philosophy has circled boredom as though it were a keyhole. Heidegger described the deep version where the world itself becomes smooth, edges blurred, every object tasting the same. Sartre’s nausea brushed it too: a door handle suddenly stripped of meaning, revealed as cold loop of metal, too raw to touch. Perhaps boredom is the mind brushing against the fact that life has no built-in form, we invent the forms, and sometimes they slip. What if boredom isn’t the absence of meaning, but meaning stretched so thin it becomes see-through? Like tracing paper over a drawing: the outlines are still there, but faint, whispering in a pitch too low to hear.
Sometimes I think boredom isn’t about novelty at all. It’s about risk. The barcode that refuses to scan, the crossing button that never answers, the meeting that begins with “circling back” these are repetitions without danger, without consequence. Our bodies evolved to brace against risk. Without it, the energy has nowhere to go. It sits inside us like water in a blocked pipe, heavy, insistent. But boredom is also political material. In welfare queues, detention centres, waiting rooms it is not neutral. It is engineered. A tool of soft control, reminding you that your time is expendable. Contrast that with the jacaranda outside my window. Every spring it throws purple confetti with no occasion to mark. The pavement becomes grammar for no reader. One kind of boredom shrinks the person inside it. The other expands. Both are boredom, but they tell different truths.
There’s another angle I can’t shake boredom as camouflage. Grief that’s tired of crying disguises itself as a long sigh. Desire that hasn’t found its object yet slumps in a chair and calls itself boredom. Maybe we misdiagnose half of our feelings this way emotions still searching for a name, wearing boredom until they can introduce themselves. What fascinates me most is boredom’s warping of time. A minute under its spell isn’t sixty seconds it’s a stretched skin you can press a finger into and leave a dent. Sometimes I think boredom is time’s real face, and the clock its disguise. Clock time is smooth, linear. Boredom’s time is elastic, uneven, unruly. It circles back on itself, collapses, balloons. In those distorted minutes the truth leaks out: time isn’t a line we walk but a tide we drown in and surface from.
At night, when the fridge hums, the apartment has a baseline. You only hear it when it stops, and when it does the silence feels like a theatre just before the play begins. Not empty. Charged. Pipes twitch. A neighbour sneezes. A bird speaks a language too fast for me. Boredom lies across the ceiling like a shallow pool. I breathe slowly in its water. It is heavy. It is also strange. Art often tries boredom on, just to see what happens. A camera stares at a building for eight hours until the bricks grow biographies. A painter repeats a line until the line itself becomes weather. A canvas with nothing but a date somehow becomes a whole room full of that day. These works don’t try to relieve the feeling. They open a door, then step aside, leaving you to notice the seams of time for yourself.
So, I return to the everyday: the kettle that insists, the tram that hesitates, the supermarket where limes are weighed like they need passports, the laundry drum that keeps showing me the same sock until it feels like a character in a story. The sock comes around again in the laundry drum. I’ve seen it seventeen times now. Instead of a character in a story, it’s become punctuation. A period that keeps insisting the sentence isn’t over.
Maybe that’s all boredom is: life’s punctuation. The pause where meaning could go but doesn’t. The space where power shows its hand. The moment when time admits it was never linear, never fair, never ours.
The email finally loads. It’s an advertisement for discount mattresses. Twenty percent off. The subject line says, “Don’t miss out!” but the sale ends in fourteen days. I delete it. Refresh. No new emails.
Eight minutes on the display. Always lies. Will be eleven.
The older man three chairs down coughs. Every forty seconds. She knows. She’s timed it. He washes seven white shirts weekly. His wife died. Now he washes her ghost.
Her husband texts: “almost done?” She doesn’t answer. He knows how long laundry takes.
The fluorescent light flickers. Steady, steady, flicker-flicker, steady. Been doing this for months. No one will fix it.
She thinks about leaving. Just walking out. But then what. The laundry would sit. He’d text “???” The thought dies.
Six minutes.
They had sex Sunday. Or Saturday. Same position. Same duration. Twelve minutes. After, they watched half a show. One fell asleep. This is marriage now.
Her phone: 71% battery. Draining without use. Everything drains without use.
The older man shifts. Knee pain probably. Everyone over sixty has knee pain. He’ll dry his shirts for exactly forty-five minutes. She knows. Been watching him for months. They’ve never spoken.
Four minutes.
A mother enters. Two kids. Sticky hands touching everything. Everyone pretends not to see. Everyone was once the mother. Once the child. Once the witness.
Her husband thinks about the woman at work who laughs. Really laughs. His wife does courtesy laughs now. Courtesy everything.
Three minutes.
The sock passes. Blue toe. Or grey in this light. Everything’s grey in this light.
She and her husband will have the dinner conversation. What do you want. I don’t know what you want. Not pasta we had pasta. Then you pick. Round and round. Already exhausting.
Two minutes.
The older man coughs. Wetter this time. She almost asks if he’s okay. Doesn’t. That would break the rules.
Her husband turns off the engine. Too wasteful. Immediately cold. Turns it back on. This is his whole life. Decisions immediately reversed.
One minute. But really four.
The machine stops.
She doesn’t move.
The sock waits. Twisted with everything else. Damp. Thursday.
Her husband honks. Once. Light. But still.
The fluorescent flickers: steady, steady, flicker-flicker, steady.
She stands. Opens the door. The sock. Blue toe, white heel. Definitely blue. Or grey. Or nothing.
Outside, 4:23. They’ll hit traffic. She knows. She’s letting them.
This is boredom: not empty time but time aware of itself. Conscious of its own passing. Second by second. Regulated dying.
Everyone here understands. The older man folding ghost shirts. Her husband idling in parking lots. The broken change machine that gave up trying.
She pulls out the sock. Still damp. Needs another cycle. Always needs another cycle.
Puts it back.
Adds quarters.
The machine starts again.
Eight minutes on the display. Will be eleven.
Her husband texts: “??????”
Six question marks now.
She sits back down. Three chairs from the older man. Proper distance. Not too close. Not too far.
The sock begins rotating. First pass. Second pass. Third pass.
She counts because counting is something.
The fluorescent flickers.
Thursday continues.