Suffering from Endless Boredom? Meet Søren Kiekegaard and Ennui
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Time to read 11 min
Questions Answered in This Blog Post
What is ennui and how is it different from boredom?
Why did poet Charles Baudelaire call ennui the "greatest evil"?
What can Kierkegaard teach us about the problem of ennui and finding meaning?
The meme to start with:
Boredom. If you listen to Green Day’s discography prior to American Idiot, the majority of the band’s songs revolve around the idea of being bored in some kind of way. “When I Come Around” has a speaker who partakes of drugs as a way to pass the time in a life that reeks of futility as much as weed. “Longview” details the average day of a teenager in the 1990s, finding somel relief from the boredom in self-pleasure. “Redundant” relies extensively on a repetition that is exhausting.
“Where is my motivation?” Billie Joe of Green Day wonders in “Longview.” Perhaps many of us can relate.
And while this was definitely a vibe that children of the 1990s can relate to, desperation and despair in boredom frequent those of us who rely on our smartphones to entertain us, who watch 30 second (or less) videos the way people used to nervously eat popcorn when watching a horror movie, and those of us who stick to stringent schedules, not even waiting for the next thing.
The world is faster than it’s ever been, or at least gives us that illusion. Reliant so very much on the technologies we create, we find that we have more and more free time to ourselves, or perhaps face the horrendous prospect of having free time to ourselves. The postmodern hypercapitalistic condition?
Perhaps.
But it’s a problem that has visited our ancestors since at least the 19th century. It is a problem philosophy and poetry address extensively during this time. It is something that is best defined through the term ennui.
Ennui: An Annoying Concept
When we think of boredom, of not being entertained, of being restless with nothing to do, most of us consider this to be a temporary state. It’s annoying enough when you are snowed in and can’t get out, so you have to resort to Netflix and video games. Or if the power’s out, maybe you dust off a boardgame.
But what if boredom is not really a feeling that comes and goes? What if it is more of a state of being, in the way depression or anxiety are a state of being, not quickly leaving once the sad or scary event is over? What if boredom becomes a pathology?
Enter ennui. Taken from the French word of the same name, Merriam-Webster defines ennui as “a feeling of weariness and dissatisfaction,” going on to note that the word is indicative of the kind of boredom that comes with living a life of “too much ease.” The bourgeois life, perhaps, of a son who has too much money and time on his hands.
The word, as Etymology Online remarks, has no exact pairing in English and, while it has been taken into the language as it is, its pronunciation has not changed from the French, to sound more English. It is a word that is more a cumulative state than a feeling. It is also the word from which the words “annoy,” “annoying,” etc. stem. The stem word does not evoke “annoying,” though someone who is visited by ennui could be easily annoyed.
Ennui is like boredom, but it is a boredom and an emptiness, a sluggish tiredness that goes beyond, “Man, I wish I had something to do. Bleh.” It persists beyond the three hours that we sometimes have on a Saturday, without any external stimulation or desire to stimulate our own minds.
Poet Baudelaire says Ennui Is the Worst!
While ennui seems to be experienced by those who have more time to themselves, often as a result of having more leisure and money, it was exemplified best by the Victorians of the 19th century. One such Victorian, French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), described this term best in his book, Les fleurs du mal, or The Flowers of Evil.
To begin the series of poems, Baudelaire, a decadent poet of the mid-century, speaks of the nature of evil in “To the Reader,” in which he describes the worst evil of all as a “delicate monster” who “smokes his hookah.” The greatest evil, among all that exist, in their way, among us, is ennui. It is mean and ugly.
To Baudelaire, the son of a bourgeoise family who was known for spending far beyond his means, the restlessness and emptiness that comes from ennui, from having all of life’s pleasures at your feet yet nothing terribly interesting before you, is the worst evil of all, the worst feeling or state one could inhabit. And he lived this as a starving artist with a penchant for the finer things in life.
What do you do when you have everything before you? When you are beyond the struggle of feeding yourself, the struggle of getting a roof over your head or having Maslow’s first tier of needs met? Do things become less interesting, less stimulating?
Baudelaire writes through a laudanum-infused haze about hate, sex, violence, and distorted romantic love. (If you haven’t checked him out, I can assure you that you won’t be disappointed.) And through all of this, through the spleen and the ideal, the question presents itself: What is the purpose? In immersing yourself in life’s pleasures, you have to continually fill the tub with hotter and hotter water, lest you grow cold.
Charles Baudelaire died in 1867, passing prematurely from the complications after a stroke, another tragic (or the tragic) cursed poet. He spent his life in financial distress, partaking of fine art, fine dining, and women in turn on a nonexistent income. He fixated on the sumptuous, tactile sensations to, arguably, keep his mind off the meaningless of it all.
Enter Søren Kierkegaard
A contemporary of Baudelaire’s, Søren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855), a Christian apologist from Denmark, is considered the father of existentialism. His body of work consists of many different viewpoints authored by the same writer, but often given under pseudonyms to help sort them out. Even if you’ve never heard of Kierkegaard, you’ve definitely heard some of his pithy quotations, such as the phrase, “leap of faith.”
Kierkegaard, who passed away at 41 years of age, wrote with Christian apologetics in mind, using philosophy to help explain and argue for his theology. In writing with pseudonyms for different viewpoints, he is able to indicate when he is playing Devil’s advocate and when he is making his greater philosophical point. While Kierkegaard’s output was substantial, two of his best known works are Fear and Trembling and Either/Or. Let’s talk about Either/Or.
An imposing work on the nature of ethics and agency, Either/Or involves three main speakers: the “editor,” who writes in the preface that he just happened to find some papers in an old desk at a thrift store; an unnamed person who pens a bunch of hardcore stuff on the aesthetic life (we call him “A”); and a dude going by Vilhelm (we call him “B” to keep it together), who writes on ethical matters in organized letters to A. The editor, given the name Victor Eremita, for his pseudonym, frames the often confusing exchange between A and B.
It is in the unnamed A that we find similarities with Baudelaire and our own anxious malaise. A writes in a witty manner, like Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), about aesthetics, such as music, poetry, and the finer things in life. None of these really seem to offer him any interest other than being fodder for clever commentary.
A is for Aesthete: The Malaise of Living
Like Baudelaire, A suffers keenly from dissatisfaction and boredom, as indicated by his writing. The lack of satisfaction in his life leads him to do such things as pen an entire treatise on the philosophy of kissing (spoiler: it’s not that deep), and write many disjointed aphorisms on everything from poetry to having children. However, while A whiles away the time with writing pithy observations, the thrust of his discontent comes in his chapter on the nature of “either/or.”
I really can’t do this any better than Kierkegaard himself does, so let’s hear it from the source:
"If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. . ." -- Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Trans. Alastair Hannay
For A, as for many of us who suffer from ennui, the point seems to be pointless. If you are going to be discontented either way, then why would you act at all? In framing action and agency with regret, A argues, in his annoyingly playful way, that there is no ethical merit in one action over the other. If you’re gonna be screwed either way, why not choose the slightly more fun way?
A becomes a sort of stand-in for the Aestheticism movement that gained prominence in the 19th century, full of decadent poets, painters and playwrights, the movement argued for “art for art’s sake,” and that there needn’t be any moral to any story. Art does not need to be functional to be worth something. It only needs to be pretty, or so ugly that it becomes pretty.
The movement, which valued aesthetic over use value, rendered many things pleasantly meaningless. A work of art, for instance, does not need to have a value outside of it. A painting can be glorious and ornate and serve no other purpose than the fact that it is pretty. A novel can tell a story without having to be didactic, or preachy. In fact, a cool novel is just going to be beautifully written, and should try not to give anyone any ideas of morality.
This movement makes more sense when you look at people like Oscar Wilde, who just do art because art is pretty, and defy you to get something out of it more than aesthetic. In so doing, the aesthetes, the decadents, etc. end up rejecting, to a great extent, ethics and meaning. You could call many such artists amoral, given their firm rejection of contemporary moral codes.
But if you reject everything, what do you have left? If you reject meaning, can you have meaning for yourself? And to what do you, like A, resort to in the wake of a meaningless life. The answer returns to where we started: ennui.
The Oscar Wilde Sculpture in Dublin, Ireland. Courtesy of Wiki Commons.
Ennui: The Cost of Our Convenience
Just like the existentialists he would influence in the 20th century, when he gets translated beyond his original Danish, Kierkegaard struggled with what to do when you come to terms with a world that feels meaningless, with a world that feels pointless, when whatever choice you make seems to be one you will regret, either way. For later existentialists, while there is pain in this knowledge, they (like Sartre and Camus) embrace the absurdity of it all, and create their own meaning when things are meaningless by default.
Writing from 19th century Denmark, Kierkegaard often seems convinced that meaning resides in the spiritual, and that author B, who refutes and rejects A in organized essays, rules the day when it comes to a fuller life, and being right. In the spiritual life, according to Kierkegaard, we can find the meaning that is often obscured by the living of a sensual life.
It seems an easy answer, right? Just find God and you’ve got it. But even those of us with religious leanings often struggle with finding meaning or purpose. As we’ve indicated in a Memesletter of the past, the practice of philosophy often requires leisure for it to be a professional endeavor. And of course, people with more financial means have a tendency to have more leisure.
In the current world, most of us have more leisure on our hands, even if we are working in service or working class jobs. We can thank the imposition of labor laws for this, in part, as well as the joys of more sophisticated technology. We do not have to boil water to wash our laundry, for instance.
The 21st century mind has more opportunities to wander than it ever has. As such, discontent and depression (as well as its delightful cousin, anxiety) can often rule the day. And the concept of ennui still remains relevant. The world in which we live is a post-truth, post-care world, in many respects. And when things get to where we question the point of doing anything, it can be difficult to know when or why to act.
Instead of remaining in that anxious frozen state, it’s important to realize that while ennui is a state more than a feeling, like a feeling, it can pass too. The dryness that comes upon us all at some time can be, perhaps, a field to water for a later, better harvest.
Whether we receive meaning through a religious practice or through the fact that we are able to get out of bed every day, it’s essential to find it. To remain in a state of ennui is to experience the world without being an active participant. The passivity of ennui, while not the worst evil out there, makes the state a dreadful one to endure. But the end of ennui is action, even if the action feels meaningless at first.
Find your meaning.
Summary:
Ennui is a state of being that resembles boredom but is more persistent and painful.
Ennui often stems from living in luxury and leisure.
Poet Charles Baudelaire writes of the painfulness of ennui as a chief evil in Les fleurs du mal.
Søren Kierkegaard discusses the meaningless that can stem from persistent ennui in Either/Or, concluding that we receive meaning through the spiritual life.
Ennui visits many of us, but it is important to nonetheless imbue our lives with meaning, in our own way.
C. M. Black
C. M. Black holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Wesleyan College and an M.A. in Technical and Professional Writing from Middle Georgia State University. A lifelong goth, she resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where she works as a professional writer. You can view more of her work on Substack, or follow her on Bluesky and Facebook.
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