In the video you are about to endure, I describe and differentiate between three types of boredom.
But how can you tell them apart?
Here is a quick key to success.
Saturation boredom, bad faith boredom, and motivational boredom.
How to tell them apart.
Saturation boredom leads to anhedonia, an incapacity to enjoy anything, to find pleasure in anything. Withdrawal and avoidance.
Bad faith boredom leads to aggression and recklessness, narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors.
Motivational boredom leads to action, leads to exploration, leads to the pursuit of gratification in a good sense, leads to authenticity, leads to the elimination of external influences on you, leads to a direct contact with your essence and being, leads to a meaningful life.
So motivational boredom is very good for you.
We confuse the three types of boredom and consequently we give the wrong advice and we make the wrong choices.
Watch this video and you will never make this mistake again.
If you have never experienced boredom, I have a cure for that.
Actually, I have 1,563 cures. The videos on my channel. Just watch them, and you will have had the epiphany of being bored.
Boredom is defined by the American Psychological Association as a state of weariness or ennui resulting from a lack of engagement with stimuli in the environment. It is generally considered to be one of the least desirable conditions of daily life, and is often identified by individuals as a cause of feeling depressed. It can be seen as the opposite of interest and surprise. The adjective is bored.
There's only one problem with that.
Boredom is not a single affect. It is not monolithic. It is an assemblage of a series of psychological processes and dynamics, including, above all, transformations of aggression.
And today we are going to discuss three types of boredom. Two of them, highly negative. And the third one actually, very positive.
And on this positive note, my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm currently a professor of clinical psychology and a professor of business management. Yes, psychology and business always go together in SIAPS and a former visiting professor of psychology.
Let's start with the first and most common and most familiar type of boredom known as saturation boredom.
Saturation? Because when you are bombarded with messages, with stimuli, with cues, with information, with entertainment, when you are bombarded with human interactions as well, you tend to become desensitized.
In other words, you develop tolerance. You need more of the same in order to become reactive.
It's very akin to drug addiction.
When you start to consume a drug, you need very small quantities to experience the full gamut of side effects and benefits or adverse outcomes.
Gradually, you become used to the drug, you become habituated, you develop tolerance, you become desensitized and you need increasing quantities in order to have the same experience.
Boredom is a signal, a signal of increasing tolerance.
You can watch a good movie and you would be excited and you would be surprised and you would be thrilled and you would be on the edge of your seat, toes curled and all other things.
But then if you watch a second movie and a third movie and a fourth movie in rapid succession, by the fifth movie, if you are very, very persevering, by the fifth movie, you are likely to be bored, regardless of the content of the movie.
So boredom in this case is the outcome of saturation.
We react with boredom to a message, to a signal, to content, to information, to stimuli or to cues which are repetitive in nature and indistinguishable from each other, more or less.
Saturation boredom leads to a phenomenon known as anhedonia.
Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure, regardless of the activity involved.
People with Anhedonia simply can't experience pleasure. Never mind what you offer them. Never mind the circumstances. Never mind the environment. Never mind the stimuli. Never mind who is around themand what they are doing, they're listless. They're wary. They're slow. They're yawning. They're sleepy. They're lethargic. they definitely are incapable of pleasure.
Saturation boredom is intimately linked with anhedonia, and anhedonia results in avoidance and withdrawal. These are known as constriction behaviors. Avoiding the world, withdrawing from reality, from the environment, from other people, this constricts your life, narrows it, makes it more limited.
Saturation boredom, therefore, leads to life constriction.
Another name for saturation boredom is ennui. Ennui is a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction, arising from a lack of occupation or excitement.
Okay, these are the families of effects associated with overload of information, over sensitization, over exposure, anything that is over.
Now, the second type of boredom I call the bad faith boredom.
Bad faith is a phrase used by Jean-Paul Sartre to describe a situation where we are not loyal to who we are. We betray ourselves. We act in ways which are alien to us, foreign to us, and consequently we become estranged from ourselves.
We may do this because we are goal-oriented, or because we want to survive, or because we are manipulating someone, or because we know no better, or because we have been conditioned and socialized to behave in a bad faith manner.
Bad faith is the gap between the authentic self and the imitated, emulated, fake self. It's not the false self, don't make a mistake here, the false self is something completely different. False self is a compensatory defensive construct.
The bad faith self, the self which is inauthentic, not you, has to do with betrayal, has to do with denying who you are, repressing who you are, has to do with being ashamed of who you are, has to do with self-negation.
And so in a way the bad faith self is a self-defeating, self-destructive strategy and it is closely identified with a concept in psychoanalysis known as the ego ideal.
Bad faith creates boredom. When you are not yourself, when you deny who you are, when you ignore your core identity, when you suppress and repress everything that would make you happy or excited or aroused or interested, when you do all this, obviously you end up being bored with your own existence.
Bad faith boredom leads to pathological or dysfunctional behaviors, such as recklessness and aggression.
Actually, it's easy to prove that bad faith boredom is a form of self-directed aggression, and therefore it is a close kin, a close family member of depression. Both depression and bad faith boredom are forms of self-directed aggression.
Now, bad faith boredom is very common in narcissism and psychopathy, although for different reasons.
The narcissist endures bouts of boredom because he does not exist. There's nobody there. It's an emptiness, a void, a black hole, an absence, masquerading as a presence.
And because there's nobody there, of course, there's no interest in oneself, in life, and in others. There's inability to perceive other people as separate, as external, as real.
And so it's a very boring world where everything is an inanimate object or an internal object. These are the two choices. Nothing is happening on the outside in pathological narcissism.
And it's a world that is frozen, black and white, drawn in rough contours, not real, a little like cardboard cutout. And this is a very boring environment.
Narcissists are bored, consequently, because their world is impoverished. It's not rich, not rich in details, not rich in dynamics, and not rich with the presence of other people.
Psychopaths on the other hand are also bored all the time. But they are bored all the time because they are focused on goals, not on themselves, but on goals.
The goals could be power or sex or money or access or contacts or fame and celebrity but it's always something else not the psychopath.
We say in psychology that the psychopath externalizes aggression, but in a way the psychopath externalizes himself as well.
And consequently, the psychopath is so laser focused on a single goal that he misses the rest of the world.
He is unable to perceive, to process, to react to, to enjoy, to experience anything, anyone around him because he is so focused on obtaining results.
He is so focused on making money, or becoming powerful, or becoming famous that he goes through life, abjuring, abdicating and neglecting to notice the beauty and richness of existence.
So if the psychopath is a father, he is likely to miss the best years of his children because he's busy making money or becoming a famous politician.
That's an example.
So this is a bad faith boredom, boredom that emanates from the fact that you're not yourself, that you reject who you are, that you deny and bury your true core identity, and by betraying yourself this way, you render the world a very boring place indeed.
So these two forms of bored, these two variants of boredom, the saturation boredom and bad faith boredom are dysfunctional. They are disorderly. They're bad for you. To borrow from physics, they are entropic.
But there is one kind of boredom which is actually very good for you. And it is what I call motivational boredom.
Other types of boredom, like saturation boredom and bad faith boredom, are usually signs that you are not challenging yourself enough, that you are not being yourself, that you have no long-term vision and plan because you don't exist in your own eyes, that you're insecure, you don't trust in your own eyes that you're insecure you don't trust yourself to be able to accomplish your goals or on the other end of the spectrum that you're so focused on your goals that you forget who you are you forget that you are you forget everyone around you you ignore the entire world.
In all these cases, of course, it's impossible. Impossible to experience interest, excitement, curiosity, thrill. Impossible.
Because you are dead inside.
OK, but motivational boredom is very different.
Motivational boredom is actually at the core of authentic life. It is a direct contact with nothingness as a form of being, as a form of self-awareness.
Nothingness is not worthlessness. Don't confuse the two.
Nothingness is the ability to say, I don't care about anything. I don't care about people's expectations. I don't care about norms and demands. I don't care. I care about one thing only. Me, my being, my essence, my identity, being faithful to myself, not betraying myself.
So this is nothingness.
And motivational boredom is the focus of authentic life, a life that is dedicated to authenticity, a life where you pursue an ever closer union with who you are.
Why would this be boring? It would be boring because this kind of pursuit is devoid of action and we have learned, especially in modern society, to associate inaction with boredom. When we are not active, we are bored.
Now this is a new phenomenon, by the way.
Up until the 18th century or the 19th century, people could spend hours, days, doing nothing, doing nothing, smelling the flowers, gazing at the sky, talking to each other idly, accomplishing nothing, and they were not bored. Boredom is a new concept, associated with consumption, associated with action, associating with ostentatious displays, associated with grandiosity and narcissism, in short.
So modern people, modern day people in postmodern society, when they pursue authenticity and the nothingness at the core of authenticity, good faith instead of bad faith, I am myself and nothing else. That's the core of nothingness.
When they pursue this, when this becomes their philosophy, their ideology, their new religion, they automatically become bored.
Because they have learned and they have been conditioned to become bored when they are not active, when they don't conform to societal expectations and mores, norms and demands, when they're not seen by other people, when they're not noticed, when they're not respected, when, in short, modern people, people in modern society, derive their internal regulation from the outside.
They're all externally regulated. They don't regulate themselves from the outside, they're all externally regulated. They don't regulate themselves from the inside, but they regulate everything from the outside.
Their sense of self-worth, self-esteem, self-confidence, self-image, self-perception, knowledge, everything comes from the outside. Nothing comes from the inside.
And of course, this is very boring. This is very boring if you don't have an inner life. If you are dependent on the outside, for everything small and big, you are bound to be bored.
And people compensate for this boredom in modern societies by becoming overactive.
Activity masks the boredom. It does not eliminate it. It's not a cure for boredom. It's a distraction.
Motivational boredom, it's a distraction.
Motivational boredom, on the other hand, is the kind of boredom that motivates you to seek yourself, to become more of who you are, to become a better version of yourself, to explore your inner world.
So this could be done in a variety of ways.
If you study, that's one way of self-exploration and self-discovery. If you build something, if you have a hobby, if you raise your kids, anything you do that complies and reflects your inner being, that is the kind of thing that's going to reduce motivational boredom.
Motivational boredom motivates you
The problem of Western civilization is that there is an intolerance of boredom.
You remember the definition of the American Psychological Association that this is a very unpleasant state to be avoided.
Why? Why would boredom be avoided?
Boredom is a major engine of thinking, of contemplation, of wisdom.
When I'm bored, I have the best ideas. I have the best ideas because I'm not goal-oriented. I'm not focused on anything or anyone. I'm just there.
And in Western civilization we have been taught to reject boredom, to not tolerate it. It's a form of death. Boredom is equated with death. To be bored is to be dead alive and we reject nothingness of course.
Over stimulation, the direct exposure to life leads to desensitization and ultimately to boredom via attunement as I mentioned.
Motivational boredom, however, restores meaning, restores meaning to life, converts life from bad faith to good faith, from inauthentic to authentic, from disingenuous to genuine, from fake to real, from counterfactual to factual, from false to truthful.
Motivational boredom is the kind of boredom that motivates you to act, and that's why it's called motivational, but not to act on the world or even in the world but to act on yourself and in yourself.
So motivational boredom creates conscious and unconscious motivations.
And of course, some of the solutions when we explore ourselves, when we discover ourselves, some of the solutions are bound to be fantastic.
Fantasy is a tool that is used by motivational boredom for self-exploration.
But fantasy never becomes a defense or a pathology when the boredom is motivational.
In saturation boredom and in bad faith boredom, one of the dysfunctional, malignant solutions is fantasy.
Narcissists live in fantasy. Psychopaths have the equivalent of fantasies, goal orientation.
So, fantasy, in the first two types of boredom, which are bad kinds of boredom, fantasy becomes malignant.
In motivational boredom, fantasy is nothing but a tool, a tool of mastery over one's self, a kind of action.
So the fantasy is action oriented. One fantasizes about becoming, it's not a rejection of reality, it's an embrace of reality.
The narcissist fantasy is about not becoming, about being someone else. The narcissist fantasy says, I don't want to be me, I don't like me, I reject me, I want to be God, I want to be superior, I want to be powerful.
So the psychopathic narcissistic fantasies are a rejection of oneself and consequently a rejection of life.
In motivational boredom, the fantasy leads to an embrace of oneself, end of life.
So there's a mastery here. It's not diversion, it's not entertainment, or it's not only entertainment.
But it is a path. It is a journey which ultimately leads to the coalescence between who you are and the world you inhabit.
The world then becomes you and you become the world.
And this unitary oceanic feeling was described in numerous religions in psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud and so on and so forth.
Now we confuse all these. We confuse all these responses to motivational boredom and we say that they must be connected to meaning. If they are not connected to meaning, then they are by definition, meaning less.
But this is true only if the meaning comes from inside.
All these activities that I mentioned, fantasy, mastery, action, even diversion.
If they're linked to an authentic internal core, then of course, they're meaningful. They're imbued with meaning. They're organizing principle they are also hermeneutic exegetic principles in other words they help us to make better sense of the world so they're meaningful but if all these things action mastery and so on, are oriented outside, externally, to the world, they lead to infinite regression nesting.
If the meaning in your life is dictated by other people and their meaning is dictated by other people, then it's an infinite regression. Ad infinitum.
If you rely on other people to regulate your sense of identity, your sense of self-esteem, self-confident, self-worth, self-image, self-perception, if everything about you comes from the outside from other people, and their regulation comes from other people, and the regulation of these other people comes from other people, there's no end to this. There's no end to this, and when there's no end, there's no meaning.
This is why religion is so powerful, because in religion there is an end. There's an end to the questions. There's an end to the quest. This end is known as God.
Similarly, you don't have to be religious. But when you seek meaning, when you try to animate your life, recreate your internal space, regain your core identity, become authentic, one with yourself, you need an end.
Your questions, your query, your path, your journey of self-discovery and self-exploration, it must have a destination. It must have an endpoint, because if it doesn't you never get anywhere.
And when you are dependent on other people, when you are dependent on the world, when you derive your internal universe from external facets of reality such as money or power, or possessions or fame, then there's no end to this.
Because you rely on other people and they rely on other people and they rely on other people and there's no end to this. There's simply no end to this.
And when there's no end, there's no meaning.
When our defenses fail, we are bored, but this boredom is healthy. It's motivational bored, because it generates action. It generates fantasy, which is a healing fantasy, a reimagining, a re-visualization of whom we are.
And left untouched and inert, it brings enlightenment. We should seek motivational boredom. We should aspire to it.
And all the great religious figures realized this, and all the great philosophers knew it.
That's why all the prophets and all the philosophers advise us to stay put, to not act, to be quiet, to focus inwards, to meditate, because they want to induce in us a state of motivational boredom.
Philosophers and sages of ages past, they knew that the only way to find meaning and purpose in life, the only way to gain direction, and above all, the only way to make peace with who we are and to become one with our own identity, the only way is to make us bored, to force us to become bored by encouraging us to avoid the world, to avoid reality, to avoid stimuli, to avoid cues, to avoid information.
This would drive us to a state of nirvana.
What is nirvana after all?
It's when you are one with yourself. There's no daylight between who you truly are and who you think you are.
When this occurs, you're at such total peace that you are capable of anything.
And this potential eliminates the motivational bottom and renders the world an infinitely rich offering at your beck-and-call and service.