The Whole of Boredom


Book Description

Alistair Morgan is a hard man. Teenage thug, soldier and nightclub bouncer, he did too much, too young, most of it bad. It haunts his sleep. But now he’s gone and got himself an education. Re-invented himself as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language. It’s 1992 in Saudi Arabia. The money’s good but the place can send you off your head. To make matters worse, he’s ended up working with a bunch of oldsters who don’t seem to need much help in going off theirs. Somebody has to keep the wheels on the bus, but why does it always have to be Ali Morgan? And then, there are these women who keep falling in love with him, who he can’t love back? It’s enough to make a poor boy cry. Except he’s never cried in his life. Maybe that’s the problem? Perhaps if he could soften up a bit, learn how to love, the nightmares might go away?




The Comfort Crisis


Book Description

“If you’ve been looking for something different to level up your health, fitness, and personal growth, this is it.”—Melissa Urban, Whole30 CEO and New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Boundaries “Michael Easter’s genius is that he puts data around the edges of what we intuitively believe. His work has inspired many to change their lives for the better.”—Dr. Peter Attia, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Outlive Discover the evolutionary mind and body benefits of living at the edges of your comfort zone and reconnecting with the wild—from the author of Scarcity Brain, coming in September! In many ways, we’re more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues? In this gripping investigation, award-winning journalist Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort. Easter’s journey to understand our evolutionary need to be challenged takes him to meet the NBA’s top exercise scientist, who uses an ancient Japanese practice to build championship athletes; to the mystical country of Bhutan, where an Oxford economist and Buddhist leader are showing the world what death can teach us about happiness; to the outdoor lab of a young neuroscientist who’s found that nature tests our physical and mental endurance in ways that expand creativity while taming burnout and anxiety; to the remote Alaskan backcountry on a demanding thirty-three-day hunting expedition to experience the rewilding secrets of one of the last rugged places on Earth; and more. Along the way, Easter uncovers a blueprint for leveraging the power of discomfort that will dramatically improve our health and happiness, and perhaps even help us understand what it means to be human. The Comfort Crisis is a bold call to break out of your comfort zone and explore the wild within yourself.




Boredom


Book Description

This Element challenges prevailing views of boredom as a modern phenomenon and as an experience occurring inside our minds. It discusses the changing perspectives on boredom within psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis on both sides of the Atlantic in the last 100 years. It also analyzes visual and textual material from France, Germany, Britain, Argentina and Spain, which illustrates the kinds of social situations, people and interactions that have been considered tedious or boring in the past five centuries. Examining the multidirectional ways in which words like ennuyeux, 'tedious', langweilig, aburrido and 'boring' have been transferred between different cultural contexts (to denote a range of interrelated feelings that include displeasure, unease and annoyance), it demonstrates how the terms, concepts and categories through which individuals have experienced their states of mind are not simply culture-bound. They have also travelled across geographical and linguistic barriers, through translation, imitation and adaptation. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.




The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics


Book Description

This book, the text of Martin Heidegger's lecture course of 1929/30, is crucial for an understanding of Heidegger's transition from the major work of his early years, Being and Time, to his later preoccupations with language, truth, and history. First published in German in 1983 as volume 29/30 of Heidegger's collected works, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics presents an extended treatment of the history of metaphysics and an elaboration of a philosophy of life and nature. Heidegger's concepts of organism, animal behavior, and environment are uniquely developed and defined with intensity. Of major interest is Heidegger's brilliant phenomenological description of the mood of boredome, which he describes as a "fundamental attunement" of modern times.




The Routledge International Handbook of Boredom


Book Description

This comprehensive text is a unique handbook dedicated to research on boredom. The book brings together leading contributors from across three continents and numerous fields to provide an interdisciplinary exploration of boredom, its theoretical underpinnings, its experiential properties, and the applied contexts in which it occurs. Boredom is often viewed as a mental state with little utility, though recent research suggests that it can be a powerful motivator of human behavior that shapes our actions in many ways. The book examines boredom from a range of perspectives and is comprised of three parts. Part I delves into the theoretical approaches to boredom, presenting methods for its measurement, explaining when and why boredom occurs, and scrutinizing the impact it has on our behavior. Part II focuses on the psychological and neural properties of boredom and its associations with a multitude of mental and interpersonal processes, such as self-control, mind-wandering, flow, and aggression. Part III presents boredom in practical contexts like school and work, and sheds light on its role for health-related behaviors, psychosocial well-being, and aesthetic experiences. The book concludes by summarizing the state of boredom research, identifying promising areas for future research, and providing directions for how research on boredom can be advanced. As the authoritative book on boredom, this handbook is an essential resource for students and researchers of psychology, sociology, education, sport science, and computer science.




A Philosophy of Boredom


Book Description

It has been described as a "tame longing without any particular object" by Schopenhauer, "a bestial and indefinable affliction" by Dostoevsky, and "time's invasion of your world system" by Joseph Brodsky, but still very few of us today can explain precisely what boredom is. A Philosophy of Boredom investigates one of the central preoccupations of our age as it probes the nature of boredom, how it originated, how and why it afflicts us, and why we cannot seem to overcome it by any act of will. Lars Svendsen brings together observations from philosophy, literature, psychology, theology, and popular culture, examining boredom's pre-Romantic manifestations in medieval torpor, philosophical musings on boredom from Pascal to Nietzsche, and modern explorations into alienation and transgression by twentieth-century artists from Beckett to Warhol. A witty and entertaining account of our dullest moments and most maddening days, A Philosophy of Boredom will appeal to anyone curious to know what lies beneath the overwhelming inertia of inactivity.




On Boredom


Book Description

What do we mean when we say that we are bored? Or when we find a subject boring? Contributors to On Boredom: Essays in art and writing, which include artists, art historians, psychoanalysts and a novelist, examine boredom in its manifold and uncertain reality. Each part of the book takes up a crucial moment in the history of boredom and presents it in a new light, taking the reader from the trials of the consulting room to the experience of hysteria in the nineteenth century. The book pays particular attention to boredom’s relationship with the sudden and rapid advances in technology that have occurred in recent decades, specifically technologies of communication, surveillance and automation. On Boredom is idiosyncratic for its combination of image and text, and the artworks included in its pages – by Mathew Hale, Martin Creed and Susan Morris – help turn this volume into a material expression of boredom itself. With other contributions from Josh Cohen, Briony Fer, Anouchka Grose, Rye Dag Holmboe, Margaret Iversen, Tom McCarthy and Michael Newman, the book will appeal to readers in the fields of art history, literature, cultural studies and visual culture, from undergraduate students to professional artists working in new media.




The Culture of Boredom


Book Description

The Culture of Boredom is a collection of essays by well-known specialists reflecting from philosophical, literary, and artistic perspectives, in which the reader will learn how different disciplines can throw light on such an appealing, challenging, yet still not fully understood, phenomenon. The goal is to clarify the background of boredom, and to explore its representation through forgotten cross-cutting narratives beyond the typical approaches, i.e. those of psychology or psychiatry. For the first time this experienced group of scholars gathers to promote a cross-border dialogue from a multidisciplinary perspective.




Towards a General Theory of Boredom


Book Description

Through comparative historical research, this book offers a novel theory explaining the emergence of boredom in modernity. Presenting a Durkheimian topology of cross-cultural boredom, it grounds the sociological cause of boredom in anomie and the perception of time, compares its development through case studies in Anglo and Russian society, and explains its minimal presence outside of the West. By way of illustrative examples, it includes archetypes of boredom in literature, art, film, and music, with a focus on the death of traditional art, and boredom in politics, including strategies enacted by Queer intellectuals. The author argues that boredom often results from the absence of a strong commitment to engaging with society, and extends Durkheim’s theory of suicide to boredom in order to consider whether an imbalance between social regulation and integration results in boredom. The first book to scientifically explain the historical emergence and epidemic of boredom while engaging with cutting edge political debates, Towards a General Theory of Boredom will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in social theory, social psychology, and sociology.




Melville and the Theme of Boredom


Book Description

Boredom is a prevalent theme in Herman Melville's works. Rather than a passing fancy or a device for drawing attention to the action that also permeates his work, boredom is central to the writings, the author argues. He contends that in Melville's mature work, especially Moby Dick, boredom presents itself as an insidious presence in the lives of Melville's characters, until it matures from being a mere killer of time into a killer of souls.