25 August 2026
The Egg of Experience
What happens, in August, when nothing happens: the philosophers, the experiments, a doubt
There are subjects that culture treats with systematic embarrassment, as though attending to them were already a small lapse of taste. Boredom is one of them. We speak of it readily in order to deplore it, rarely in order to interrogate it, almost never in order to defend it. And yet every August millions of people organise themselves, pay, travel, book weeks in advance a stretch of time which — once the two or three attractions foreseen by the itinerary have been subtracted — is structurally empty, and are then surprised, or alarmed, when that emptiness makes itself felt. The question worth asking is not whether boredom on holiday is pleasant: obviously it is not, hardly ever, at the moment one is undergoing it. The question is whether it is salutary. And in order to answer seriously a question that sounds almost frivolous, it is best to treat it as one would treat a serious problem: going back to the sources, verifying every assertion, and resisting the temptation to simplify what the philosophers complicated for good reasons.
A methodological suspicion, before we begin. Boredom today enjoys a conspicuous rehabilitation in the media: articles, podcasts, columns extolling its neuroscientific benefits while always citing the same two or three studies, bounced from site to site without anyone ever having gone back to the original. The pages that follow attempt the reverse operation: to take seriously both the philosophical tradition that has thought boredom as a category of existence and the experimental literature that over the past fifteen years has tried to measure it. The result is not what one would expect. The two traditions do not contradict one another; and, more interestingly, neither do they confirm one another in the comfortable manner in which received opinion maintains that they do.
It is best to interrogate words before ideas — a habit lexicographers share with theologians, and one that is of use here at once. Noia descends, through the mediation of Provençal enoja, from the Late Latin inodiare, the outcome of the expression in odio habere: to hold in hatred. This is not a decorative etymology. The reference works agree in noting that the root points to an intense negative feeling, a hostility towards one's surroundings, and not to the mild unpleasantness to which contemporary usage has reduced the term. Whoever is bored, according to the memory buried in the word, is not simply deprived of stimuli: he is in a state of latent aversion towards what surrounds him, adjacent — if one follows the thread all the way down — to hatred. The lexicon, in short, already knew what the moralists would discover later, namely that in boredom there is a withheld anger.
The Italian vacanza likewise preserves a memory that is awkward for anyone who lives the holiday as an accumulation of experiences. Attested from the fourteenth century, it comes from vacante, the present participle of vacare, which in Latin means to be empty, free, unoccupied — the same family as vacuo. Holiday time is, semantically, emptied time: not filled with activities alternative to working ones, but empty by definition. And there is a second meaning, recorded by the dictionaries and almost always overlooked: vacare also governs the preposition a, and then it means to devote oneself to something, to attend to a chosen occupation. The two senses do not contradict each other, they explain each other. One can devote oneself to something only if one has first been emptied of something else. It is the same logic the Romans fixed in the pair otium and negotium, where the second term is built by negation of the first: business is what remains once leisure has been taken away, and not the other way round. The contemporary holiday, dense with bookings and transfers, is for the most part negotium disguised as otium: an occupation that has changed address, not nature.
With these two clues in hand — the hatred hidden in boredom, the emptiness hidden in the holiday — one can return to the philosophers with a better-trained ear. And the most solid point of departure, for someone writing in Italian, is not a foreign one.
Between 12 and 23 July 1820, on pages 165-183 of the Zibaldone, Giacomo Leopardi sets down what he himself calls the "theory of pleasure": some twenty leaves of compact argumentative prose, anomalous within the fragmentary economy of the work, almost a small treatise set into a diary of thoughts. The thesis is well known; it is worth restating it exactly, because school memory tends to flatten it into a slogan. The human soul, Leopardi writes, always desires and aims solely "at pleasure, that is to say, at happiness"; but that desire has no limits either of duration or of extension, whereas every real pleasure is by nature circumscribed. Between infinite desire and finite object there opens a gap that no possession fills. The way Leopardi opens the argument also deserves attention: he attributes that sense of insufficiency to a cause which is, he says, very simple and more material than spiritual. Anyone who imagines him as the singer of a vaporous, romantic sickness of the soul would do well to reread that line: it is a declaration of naturalistic method, and the rest of the path follows from it.
From here comes the step decisive for our theme. Even when the desired object remains stably in our possession — Leopardi gives the example of the man who has desired wealth and has obtained it for good — it ceases to produce pleasure, because everything wears out, impressions fade, and habituation, just as it removes pain, so extinguishes pleasure. There follows a conclusion that still strikes one today for its coldness: pleasure is always a most vain thing, whereas pain and boredom — Leopardi names them together, in that order — do not have this quality. They do not evaporate. Pleasure is the guest who never really arrives; boredom is the one who never leaves. In the Leopardian economy boredom is not a defect of experience: it is the part of experience that resists wear, and it is therefore, paradoxically, the most real.
There is, however, in those same pages a less frequented passage, and one that for our argument is worth more than all the rest. Leopardi asks how nature has remedied the impossibility of supplying us with infinite pleasures, and answers that it has made up for it in two ways: with illusions, and with the immense variety of things. Variety serves, he explains, so that a man wearied or disenchanted with one pleasure may have recourse to another; so that he may not have time to dwell on any one of them and let it wear out; and so that — this is the line that counts — he may not have too much scope to reflect on the incapacity of all pleasures to satisfy him. Variety, that is, is not an aesthetic gift: it is a device of distraction, and its precise function is to prevent us from thinking about our own condition. Anyone who knows the history of French philosophy will recognise the structure. Leopardi, in July 1820, in a notebook at Recanati, is describing divertissement.
Divertissement, of course, has a father, and he is Blaise Pascal. In the fragments of the Pensées that the Lafuma numbering gathers under numbers 136-139, Pascal observes that no human condition, however favourable, withstands the trial of absolute repose: with commitments, distractions and occupations removed, even a king would have to consider what he is, and would necessarily fall into the sight of what threatens him — possible revolts, illnesses, death. Without divertissement, a king is more wretched than the humblest of his subjects, provided the latter plays and amuses himself. Hence the obstinate search for occupations: gaming, hunting, war, high office. And here Pascal makes the move that renders him irreplaceable: he notes that it is not the stake that interests us. We would not want the money won at play if it were offered to us without the play; we do not want the hare, we want the hunt. The man who this morning was shattered by a bereavement, or tormented by a lawsuit, thinks of it no longer, because he is wholly taken up with working out which way the boar will break that his hounds have been pursuing for six hours. Nothing more is needed, Pascal observes. Nothing more is needed.
In the same fragment Pascal adds that, even were one to believe oneself sheltered on every side, boredom would not fail to come forth, on its own private authority, from the depths of the heart, where it has natural roots, and to fill the mind with its venom. In a different fragment, which in the same numbering bears the number 622 and which the seventeenth-century copyists entitled simply Ennui, the formulation is drier still: nothing is so unbearable to man as to be in complete repose, without passions, without business, without diversion, without application; for then he feels his own nothingness, his own abandonment, his own insufficiency, his own dependence, his own powerlessness, his own emptiness. They are two distinct fragments and must be kept distinct: the temptation to fuse them into a single, more effective quotation is strong, and it is the first step towards the apocryphal.
Applied to the summer holiday, the Pascalian argument suggests an unpleasant reading: the organised holiday — the dense itinerary, the daily excursion, the schedule saturated with things to see — is not the opposite of the work one is fleeing, it is its continuation by other means. It is divertissement squared: one flees from business by taking refuge in a more agreeable busyness, identical in function, whose function is to keep us far from ourselves. The boredom that supervenes when that schedule jams — an afternoon with no programme, a rainy day, an hour's wait at an airport — is not an accident of the system. It is the system ceasing for a moment to work, and returning us precisely to what it was meant to protect us from.
The following century does not abandon this line: it radicalises it, promoting boredom from a passing mood to a philosophical category in its own right. In the first part of Enten-Eller, published in 1843, Søren Kierkegaard's pseudonymous aesthete devotes to the theme an essay with an agricultural title, The Rotation of Crops, and states in it the principle everyone quotes: boredom is the root of all evil. There follows a nonchalant and magnificent genealogy. The gods were bored, and therefore created human beings; Adam was bored because he was alone, and Eve was created; from that moment boredom entered the world and grew in exact proportion to the growth of the population, until the nations, bored en masse, hit upon the idea of building a tower high enough to touch the sky. And then — here Kierkegaard slips in a line worth the whole essay — they were dispersed throughout the world, just as people now travel abroad, and went on being bored.
It is worth pausing on that sentence, because in 1843 it already contains the diagnosis that concerns us: geographical dispersal as a failed remedy. And it is here that almost everyone, including the present writer at first, misunderstands the "rotation". It is taken for granted that it consists in continually varying stimuli, multiplying places and experiences — that it is, in short, the philosophical theory of tourism. It is the exact opposite. Kierkegaard distinguishes two forms of rotation and rejects one of them. The vulgar form, which he calls extensive, is that of the man who believes boredom depends on the constancy of his surroundings and therefore spends his life changing the scenery: an illusion, he says, because it mistakes the regularity of the landscape for the cause of the evil. The method he proposes does not consist in changing the soil but — as in real crop rotation — in changing the manner of cultivation and the kinds of crops. And the principle that governs it is the principle of limitation: the more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes. The example he chooses is memorable and disagreeable: a prisoner condemned for life is extraordinarily resourceful, and a spider can suffice him as a source of amusement; he observes every slightest sound, every slightest movement.
There is then a distinction that the Latin proverb about idleness as the devil's pillow has helped to obscure, and which Kierkegaard sets back on its feet with clarity: idleness is not at all the root of evil. Idleness, he writes, is on the contrary a divine life, provided one is not bored; the evil is boredom, and idleness is the true good. It is exactly the distinction Latin entrusted to the pair otium and negotium, and which the contemporary holiday has mislaid by confusing emptiness with its pathology. Reversed in this way, the thesis is no longer a justification of travel: it is its refutation. The tourist who accumulates destinations is applying the method Kierkegaard judges ineffective; the man sitting still in a bare room, who notices the spider, is applying the right one. We shall return to this prisoner: a hundred and seventy years later, in an English laboratory, they will give him a telephone directory and two polystyrene cups, and discover that he was right.
Martin Heidegger performs the most radical operation of all. In the course given at Freiburg in the winter semester of 1929-30 — four hours a week, and published only in 1983, seven years after his death, as volume 29/30 of the complete edition — profound boredom, tiefe Langeweile, becomes the fundamental attunement from which it is possible to awaken the metaphysical questions themselves: what is world, what is finitude, what is individuation. It is an ambition disproportionate to its object, and that is precisely what makes it interesting: rarely has an emotion held to be minor received an analytical apparatus of that magnitude.
Heidegger distinguishes three forms of boredom, of increasing depth. The first is being bored by something definite, and the example he chooses is of an almost embarrassing concreteness: the nondescript station of a branch line, where four hours remain until the next train. Note that there is no delay, no failure of service to be laid at anyone's door: the timetable is what it is, and it has been accepted. One reads the timetable boards; one studies the table of distances to places one cares nothing about; one looks at one's watch and discovers that a quarter of an hour has passed; one draws circles in the sand, counts the trees along the avenue, walks up and down in front of the station. These are what Heidegger calls the pastimes, and anyone who today has a telephone in his pocket will recognise the gesture without need of translation. Two structural features sustain the analysis: being left empty and being held in limbo.
The second form is more insidious, and for our theme it is the decisive one. It is no longer a matter of being bored by something, but of being bored in the presence of something: the example is an evening invitation, freely accepted, which went exactly as it ought to have gone. The company was agreeable, the food good, the conversation too. Nothing to be laid at anyone's door. And yet, back home, one realises that one has been bored. Here there is no external culprit to identify, and boredom — precisely because it lacks an object — is deeper than the preceding kind. Anyone who has spent an irreproachable holiday and returned from it with an inexplicable melancholy knows what is being spoken of: it is not the holiday that has failed, it is the very structure of experience showing itself. The third form, which Heidegger renders with an impersonal formula — it is boring, full stop, without one's being able to say for whom or on account of what —, has neither object nor occasion any longer: it is a condition of Dasein. And at that point common sense is overturned. It is not the world that is boring on certain occasions; it is we who are, structurally, exposed to boredom. The holiday, by withdrawing the occupations that normally cover over this exposure, merely makes it harder to ignore.
Up to this point the philosophical tradition converges on a single point: boredom reveals something true about the human condition, and no quantity of divertissement cancels it — at most it postpones it. Contemporary experimental psychology now enters the scene. And it is here that the story becomes far more instructive than it is usually told to be, provided one follows it to the end.
In July 2014 Science published a study destined to become one of the most cited — and worst cited — in the popular psychology of the past decade. Timothy Wilson and colleagues, between the University of Virginia and Harvard, conducted eleven experiments in which participants remained alone in a bare room, without books or telephones, for a period of between six and fifteen minutes, with the sole task of thinking. In the tenth experiment they were offered the possibility of administering to themselves a mild electric shock by pressing a button. The datum that travelled round the world concerns that button: among the participants who had previously declared that they would pay in order not to receive the shock again, sixty-seven per cent of the men and twenty-five per cent of the women pressed it at least once. The conclusion popularised by hundreds of newspapers was immediate and apparently definitive: the human mind cannot bear itself, and prefers physical pain to its own company.
In December of the same year, in Frontiers in Psychology, four scholars — Kieran Fox, Evan Thompson, Jessica Andrews-Hanna and Kalina Christoff, between British Columbia and Colorado — published a commentary re-examining not new data but exactly the same data, made public by the original authors. And a different picture emerges. Across the one hundred and ninety participants of the first seven experiments, the mean score for enjoyment of "just thinking" was 5.21 on a nine-point scale, that is, just above the midpoint; that for entertainment 4.24, just below it; that for boredom 4.60, again at the centre. It should be said, in fairness, that the aggregate value presented by Wilson, a composite of the three, was 4.94: the difference between the two readings does not lie in the numbers, it lies in what one takes to be remarkable in a number that hovers about the centre of the scale.
On the button, however, the objection of Fox and colleagues is sharper, and it concerns a fact that popularisation simply omitted. Among the forty-two participants in question, fifty-seven per cent never administered any shock at all, and only seventeen per cent took more than two in the whole session. Eighteen people pressed the button at least once: a minority. And when asked, in an open question, why they had done so, fourteen of those eighteen answered by indicating some form of curiosity about the nature of the shock or its effects; only four mentioned boredom. The celebrated experiment, in short, may have measured less the unbearableness of thought than the curiosity of someone who finds a button within reach and fifteen minutes to fill.
Anyone stopping here would have an excellent anecdote in hand — science believing it had buried the philosophers and being refuted by its own data — and would be wrong, because the affair has a third movement. On the same day, in the same journal, Wilson and his colleagues replied. The reply is entitled, elegantly, Would you fund this movie?, and proposes a thought experiment. Imagine you are an investor from whom a director is asking money for a feature film; prudently, you show the fifteen-minute trailer to test groups. You discover that, on average, they judge it far less enjoyable than ordinary activities such as listening to music or browsing the web; that between a third and a half of the viewers disobey the instructions and start doing something else; and that the majority of the men, and a quarter of the women, choose to take an electric shock rather than go on watching it. Would you fund the film? The authors add a detail that is the most honest thing in the whole exchange: they had set out from the same hypothesis as their critics, namely that thinking would be enjoyable. It was the data that proved them wrong, and they find themselves in the odd position of having to explain why both the others' interpretation and their own initial hypothesis were mistaken.
The controversy, years later, is not resolved, and it is not resolved for a reason that bears directly on our subject. One side looks at the absolute value and reads in it a tolerable experience; the other looks at the comparison and at the behaviour — less agreeable than browsing the web, and in any case interrupted by those who were able to interrupt it — and reads in it a refusal. Both are right, which means that those contested scores say exactly what they appear to say: boredom inhabits the centre of the scale. It is not torment, it is not delight, it is not even indifference. It is that grey and quality-less zone in which one does not wish to remain and out of which, nevertheless, one does not come destroyed. Had the philosophers we have traversed been able to witness the dispute, they might have observed that it is the dispute itself, and not its outcome, that proves them right: four centuries earlier, boredom had already been defined as that which has no qualities of its own and precisely for that reason will not let itself be forgotten.
One datum remains, in that archive, which neither side used and which leaps to the eye of an August reader. Participants were also asked to describe, in their own words, what they had thought about during those fifteen minutes. They did not think about death, or about emptiness, or about their own insufficiency. They organised parties for the weekend, remembered sunlit beaches, looked forward to the imminent summer holidays: of the eighteen who had pressed the button, twelve reported explicitly pleasant thoughts, five neutral thoughts, and none negative ones. And the measure that reached the highest value in the entire research — higher than enjoyment, than entertainment, than boredom, than difficulty in concentrating — was that of mind-wandering: 6.94 out of nine. Put in an empty room with nothing to do, human beings go on holiday by themselves.
If wandering is what happens when nothing happens, it remains to be seen whether it produces anything. Here the most solid research bears the signature of Sandi Mann, of the University of Central Lancashire, who on 9 January 2013 presented at the annual conference of the Division of Occupational Psychology of the British Psychological Society, at Chester, and published the following year in Creativity Research Journal together with her co-author Rebekah Cadman, two experiments of an almost provocative simplicity.
In the first, forty people spend fifteen minutes copying numbers out of a telephone directory — the most deliberately boring task one can conceive — before being invited to list all the possible uses of a pair of polystyrene cups, a classic test of divergent thinking. They prove more creative than a control group of another forty people, admitted to the cups without passing through the directory. In the second experiment the stakes are raised: thirty people copy the numbers as before, while another thirty merely read them, an even more passive activity, which leaves the mind more room to wander. It is this last group that proves the most creative of all; the control group, once again, the least. It is not therefore boredom as such that generates invention: it is passive boredom, the kind that does not occupy the hands. Writing, by occupying, reduces the space for wandering and with it the benefit.
Mann's hypothesis is that boredom, when it is not immediately filled by an external stimulus, forces the mind to seek its satisfaction elsewhere, and that this elsewhere is inner wandering. Cognitive neuroscience supplies her with support: as early as January 2007, in Science, Malia Mason and colleagues had shown, combining thought sampling with neuroimaging, that mind-wandering is accompanied by the activity of a network of cortical regions active when the brain is "at rest" — what is called the default network — and that individual propensity to wander correlates with the activity of that network. On this too, for the sake of precision, it must be said that the journal hosted in that same year a critical commentary, which objected that it is hard to distinguish stimulus-independent thought from simple watchfulness. The field is less settled than it is made out to be; but the convergence between the experimental datum and Mann's hypothesis holds.
And what holds above all is the convergence with Kierkegaard's prisoner. What Mann and Cadman measure in their laboratories is, translated into nineteenth-century terms, the principle of limitation: one becomes resourceful not when stimuli are multiplied but when they are subtracted. The telephone directory is the prisoner's spider. And the difference between the two groups of the second experiment — those who go on writing and those who only read — is the difference between the one who keeps busy and the one who has surrendered to doing nothing; the reward goes to the second. It is perhaps no accident that the four neuroscientists of the 2014 commentary close their intervention by paraphrasing Pascal: the wandering mind too, they write, has its reasons, of which science still knows very little.
There is one image, among all those met along this path, that holds them together better than any synthesis. It is Walter Benjamin's, and it is found in The Storyteller, the essay on the work of Nikolai Leskov that appeared in 1936 in the journal Orient und Occident and is devoted to the crisis of the art of storytelling; Italian readers know it through Renato Solmi's version collected in Angelus Novus, published by Einaudi in 1962. Benjamin observes that a story imprints itself on the memory of the listener only in depth, and that this process of assimilation requires a state of relaxation that grows rarer and rarer. If sleep is the high point of bodily relaxation, boredom is the high point of mental relaxation. And it is at this point that he writes the sentence everyone quotes and few can place: boredom is "the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience". He adds that the rustling in the leaves is enough to drive it away, and that its nests — the activities intimately bound up with boredom — are already extinct in the cities and are decaying in the countryside as well.
He was writing with the rhythm of the rotary presses and the hum of the first radios in mind. He could not foresee that ninety years later the bird would be driven away by a vibration in the pocket every ninety seconds; but the image holds, and it contains the most precise answer to the question from which we set out. Boredom on holiday is not salutary in itself, any more than any ingredient extracted from a recipe and considered on its own is. What is salutary is the condition that boredom, if left intact, makes possible: an empty stretch of time in which something — a thought, an association, a memory we did not know we had — can brood until it hatches. To fill every August afternoon with an activity, however agreeable, following the same logic that fills the working days, means never letting the egg hatch. It is no accident that the best ideas rarely arrive during the organised excursion, and often in the empty hour of early afternoon in which, for lack of alternatives, one has surrendered to doing nothing.
There is therefore no need to seek boredom as one seeks a remedy at the chemist's, nor to fear it as an illness to be warded off with ever denser itineraries. What is needed, if anything, is to recognise when the rustling in the leaves — the notification, the planned activity, the rush to occupy every available hour — is driving away something that had only just begun to brood. For the rest, as both a French mathematician who withdrew to Port-Royal, and who held that all human unhappiness sprang from our incapacity to remain seated in a room, and a young man from Recanati who at twenty-two had already understood why the variety of the world was given to us as a gift, well knew, the question is not new. It has merely become, in August, harder to evade.
Gabriele Vitella