I was recently thinking about boredom in adolescence, a phase where a Goldilocks scenario seems the norm: there’s either too much boredom that teens complain about, or not enough boredom, prompting adults to become concerned.
What exactly is boredom? Defining it can be surprisingly challenging. The Cambridge Dictionary links it to being ‘unhappy and uninterested’, synonyms being dreariness, weariness or ennui. Merriem Webster likens it to restlessness and a lack of interest.
Adolescent boredom is common yet misunderstood. Decades ago, psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described the ‘adolescent doldrums’. In a letter written in 1964, he referred to this experience as similar to a ship that can’t move forward for a while because the wind has temporarily slowed. The ship comes to a standstill, waiting for the wind to pick up, giving it momentum to move forward again. He says:
‘[this is] the temporary state of affairs to which there is no solution until something happens. In the case of the adolescent, something happening means puberty and maturation’.
What we perceive in adolescence as boredom or lack of motivation may be just a period of waiting for something to emerge, most of the unknown activity happening beneath the surface, readying the teenager for forward progress again.
In early adolescence, when puberty hits, boredom increases. Childhood interests lose their lustre, and adult responsibilities and interests have not yet gathered momentum. Carl Pickhardt puts it like this: “Having cut himself adrift from childhood, he feels at loose ends – no longer a child but not yet the person who comes next”. At this point, what parents see is their teenager, once engaged in various hobbies and activities, now becoming directionless, adrift, unmotivated. There is ambivalence in the adolescent’s experience: they ‘love having nothing to do, but they hate having nothing to do. They don’t necessarily like being told what to do, but they don’t like not knowing what to do either’.
In this state of limbo, they stand still, waiting, not sure how to proceed, with parents feeling unsure how to support them too. It’s difficult to know the difference between the normal, developmentally expected ‘doldrums’ and those times when parents need to take note.
Some claim that excessive boredom can lead to mental health or academic problems, and researching ‘boredom in adolescence’ online leads to an overwhelming (quite boring!) amount of information out there dictating ‘what needs to happen’. There are articles mapping out ‘national trends in boredom’ or outlining adolescents’ boredom ‘trajectories. Yet the concern about too much boredom goes hand in hand with a concern about adolescents sustaining even tiny amounts of boredom, leading boredom to be equivalent to a phobic state.
Adam Phillips talks about the empty space of boredom being a developmental achievement, vital for a full life. In his essay ‘On being bored’, he says:
Every adult remembers, among many other things, the great ennui of childhood, and every child’s life is punctuated by spells of boredom: that state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire.
I stay with the last phrase: the wish for a desire. Too much boredom is as problematic as not enough boredom, and both states can block the way to desire and purpose. But here we are again quantifying things, when nothing quite fits. It reminds me of that old song by Jefferson Airplane:
‘One pill makes you larger,
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all’
Like with the song, no amount of boredom in adolescence feels right, no amount of activity or inactivity is the right amount. Most of us can remember how that feels. Teenagers respond to this in between state in their own way: they daydream, withdraw, tune out; or they sink into computer games or social media (a typical escape nowadays). Sometimes they go in the opposite direction and turn to risk taking. All of this can be pathologised, with plenty of studies if we want to look for them. For example, there are studies showing that adolescents turn to risky things because of boredom – again, an experience of nothing being ‘just right’.
Ours is a culture of lists, solutions and categorisation, but in the face of boredom and listlessness the usual response is bewilderment. We don’t quite know how to respond. I found it interesting that doing research on boredom made me feel bored, not being sure what I was looking for. This reminds me of the ceaseless scrolling and switching of our time, with its endlessness, an obvious ‘too muchness’ there which also feels boring. The too full space of memes and social media posts is equivalent to the too empty space of no satisfying activity. Underlying this, we are waiting for something that doesn’t arrive. Adam Phillips says:
Experiencing a frustrating pause in his usually mobile attention and absorption, the bored child quickly becomes preoccupied by his lack of preoccupation. Not exactly waiting for someone else, he is, as it were, waiting for himself.
We can speculate about how our frenetic online existence, especially for young people, interrupts the normal developmental achievement of boredom and its connection to creativity. Is being overfull and overstimulated the same as boredom? It’s hard to say. What I know is that we treat boredom as something to overcome, a problem to solve. We either want to fill up the space (with activity) or empty it out (by becoming really worried and over-controlling about the too muchness of adolescents’ interests): “we treat boredom like we treat childishness itself — as something to be overcome and grown out of, rather than simply as a different mode of being, an essential one at that.”
In our response to adolescent boredom – are they too bored? Or not bored enough? – we can’t help but notice the normativity that creeps in, and the hidden judgments. I’ll finish with a quote by Adam Phillips that means a lot to me. It refers to our impatience in the face of the waiting, listless adolescent. We can wish for growth and development, while also allowing time to pass and for the wind to change. Phillips says:
“How often, in fact, the child’s boredom is met by that most perplexing form of disapproval, the adult’s wish to distract him — as though the adults have decided that the child’s life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly interesting. It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather than take time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the process of taking one’s time”.