At our last faculty meeting we expelled three boys for being outside the dorms without permission after check-in. According to the procedure, we hear an explanation of the incident by the student before the faculty votes. In each of the narratives we heard, one common theme exposed itself: boredom. Each of them left the dorm because he was bored. And from the sound of their pleas to be allowed to stay at the Academy, they believed boredom a good enough excuse to break rules they knew should not be broken, and certainly a good enough excuse for absolution.
My students talk often about being bored, about "having nothing to do." And by "do" they mean the usual entertainments of our culture: cinemas with ten screens, rock concerts, dances, parties, cruising in automobiles. From their complaints and the testimonials of the three ex-Exonians, boredom appears to be a major epidemic infecting the imagination, atrophying curiosity and inventiveness, enervating motivation and resourcefulness. Is it true?
My first tendency is to chide them, remind them of what Helen MacInness once said: "Nothing is interesting if you're not interested." But I realize that that is not the case at all. True, some of the fault for their malaise lay with themselves, with the deficiencies of their own spirit. But this is blaming the victim. Much more of the fault for their boredom comes from the thin oxygen of our society. Everything they do, everything most people do, is, in fact, done for them. They may go to a movie for something to do, but in reality they go to have something done to them. That's what they pay their entrance fee for: to be laved with effects, to be mildly lifted and painlessly edified. Creative energy is spent in finding things to do, not generating things to satisfy the fullness or desperation of the spirit.
What my students are saying is symptomatic of modern man's greatest burden: living with the comfort he has technologically created for himself. Anyone who has worked on an operating farm knows that there is very little time -- or need -- to question if what one is doing fits what one wants to do, whether means and ends coincide. The Sisyphean rock of "chores" is the ubiquitous answer. The daily armistice farmworkers must make with reality anneals mind and body so that body and mind are not out of joint.
But when the bulk of society's work is service-oriented, that is, geared toward everyone taking in everyone else's laundry, then very little substance is produced, "substance" being something palpable that can be used as a measure of progress or accumulation. When the day's work is erased by the five o'clock Monday-through-Friday Daytona 500, when a person looking down at his or her desk sees merely yesterday's landscape slightly rearranged, then it is difficult to feel that one's efforts has any worth or durability. To earn money in this fashion is, in a sense, to earn hemlock, with the ironic twist that the more money one earns, the slower the death.
Thus the boredom that my students speak about is real and corrosive. It describes both the sparseness of their own imaginations and the paradoxically rich emptiness of the culture that enfolds them. It is not a failure of character. They are reacting in the only way they know how to the world in which they live. When that world does not offer enough clinquant goodies for their delectation, they understandably feel adrift because the only tactics they have learned, like the adults they emulate so well, is to consume. Or, rather, to be consumed by the things they consume, to be nothing more than the evanescent entertainments that amuse and stimulate them. And when the lights go out and the music stops, so do they, in a manner of speaking. For those three boys to act as if boredom were a self-evident defense is perfectly logical, no matter how intellectually distasteful it may feel to the jury.
But there is nothing inevitable about any of this. Life is best lived as a balancing act, in a constant flux that does not reach extremity (or reach it too often). The only way to achieve this is to make sure that our immensely talented imaginations get exercised. Our hands need something to mold; our eyes require geometry; our hearts need to sense triumph; our brains demand malleable conundrums. The more society fragments -- the more different people do different things for different people at different times -- the less chance one has to ride herd on those forces that can directly affect one's happiness and mental health. There comes a time when one has to stop being part of the cattle and become a drover instead.
My students, as adolescents, have little enough chance to ride herd on anything. Yet they hold on to the faith that as they become adults, gain their driver's licenses and the right to drink legally, they will somehow find a fulfillment they do not now possess. But they will only find more of the same ennui they experience now; they haven't learned the habit of happiness. We would do well to heed what Bertrand Russell once said, that "boredom is a vital problem for the moralist since half the sins of mankind are caused by fear of it." That fear is also tinged with self-loathing and the various lesser cousins of self-loathing: laziness, passivity, apathy, willed ignorance. This is the legacy our adolescents, as well as ourselves, are inheriting. The three boys asked to be excused because of boredom. There should be no excuse for it at all.