But Is It Boring?

Andrew Stojkovich reviews Andreas Elpidorou’s “The Anatomy of Boredom.”

By Andrew StojkovichJuly 1, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

EVERY TIME I’ve told someone that I’ve been reading Andreas Elpidorou’s new book The Anatomy of Boredom, I’ve been asked the same question: “Is it boring?” Ostensibly, it’s the cheap, snarky question, like asking if The Second Sex is about getting past first base or if Plato ever gets around to apologizing. This simplistic style of questions makes one’s eyes roll. Because, despite Anatomy’s philosophical depth, its analytical rigor, and its tradition-breaking claims, the most salient question is, of course, its title. And yet, there’s something to it.

At a basic level, “Is it boring?” can be rephrased as “Is the book worth your (or my) time?” To any prospective reader, this question is vital. At a less basic level, “Is it boring?” is tethered to nuanced value judgments about art, society, culture, and even morality. As Elpidorou himself writes: “[T]he ascription of boredom can undermine the legitimacy of particular situations, objectives, or concerns by relegating them to the realm of the mundane or uninteresting. Boredom’s power to […] render its object (or target) meaningless is crucial.” Boredom’s complex ties with meaning—semantic, existential, social—are pressing and made clear through the seemingly “unserious” question: “Is it boring?”

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Elpidorou’s book on boredom is something of an overview of boredom, detailing the notion’s philosophical history; its ubiquity in art and literature and culture; its psycho-, neuro-, and physiological underpinnings; its social contours and existential import. There’s even a chapter on animal boredom. Anatomy is a thorough examination of boredom’s protean character. But at its core, the book is an attempt to define the term.

Synonyms for the phenomenon abound. Acedia, taedium vitae, the noonday demon, sloth, melancholy, ennui, tristitia, Langeweile, noia, fastidium, existential malaise, drudgery, weariness, fatigue, being “sick of it” or “over it.” Up through the present day, much of the philosophy of boredom has focused on developing broad typologies for the different words and concepts and experiences that vaguely resemble boredom. For instance, Martin Heidegger divides boredom into bored by/bored with/profound boredom, Lars Svendsen divides the concept into situative boredom/sloth/existential boredom, and Gustave Flaubert goes with ennui commun/modern boredom. The list goes on.

If a contemporary thinker is to discuss boredom, it’s of vital importance to detail its fragmented history and ask whether these divisions—of synonymy, of hyponymy and hypernymy, and of total differentiation—are valid and useful, as Elpidorou makes clear:

[I]f boredom isn’t one—that is, if there isn’t just one type of boredom—then different researchers might be speaking of the same boredom only in name. And the results, claims, or theories of one study (including this one) might thus not be relevant to the results, claims, or theories of another. For that reason, the question, “Is boredom a unitary phenomenon or not?” is one of utmost importance and in need of an answer.

The question of whether boredom is singular or manifold is, I believe, Elpidorou’s most important because in answering it, he doesn’t take on every proffered theory of boredom, poking holes in some and agreeing with others. That would be a quixotic task, boundless in its scope. Rather—and rather brilliantly—Elpidorou tackles the meta-ontology of boredom: Is it viable to create a framework around what boredom is? Moreover, is it viable to even ask if boredom is anything, in the first place?

Boredom has traditionally been understood by its constitutive ontologies, or what it’s made of (i.e., its psychological character, its biological markers, the phenomenal experience). By thinking about boredom in this way, thinkers have named boredom an emotion, an affective state, a state of mind, and the ever-vague “feeling.” But Elpidorou suspects boredom is not something we can cut so cleanly.

Consider two scenarios that Elpidorou offers. Imagine sitting in a tedious work meeting, one that just won’t end. Now imagine a more generalized boredom, one where everything is boring—the job, the house, the family, the friends, everything. While there are some obvious similarities and differences between these experiences, to even begin to tackle all the social, historical, phenomenological, cultural, and linguistic forces at play in them would, again, be quixotic. The nuances between experiences are too infinite to address and amend. And if we’ve splintered into constitutive typologies, drawing hard lines between these experiences often triggers philosophical sinkholes. To name only a few: Is the former example of boredom contingent on the latter, or vice versa? Are these boredoms dependent on cultural backgrounds and historical narratives, or are they purely physiological phenomena? If dependent on modern social phenomena, is boredom a relatively new phenomenon?

Elpidorou seeks to break readers free of boredom’s pedantic-semantic cycle. For one thing, philosophy’s quibbling parties all seem to have some valid points about the nature and character of boredom. For another, divvying up boredom seems to break our intuitive understanding of the experience. Because even if we agree that there are differences in these experiences, there seems to be a through line that ensures the signifier “boredom” makes sense. So, what is a philosopher to do? Elpidorou suggests we see boredom less as a what and more as a how.

Consider corkscrews. There are countless different objects that can uncork a bottle. And despite their differences—perhaps one corkscrew has a wooden handle while another is electric—they’re still corkscrews. As Elpidorou states, “Accepting that a corkscrew is a functional entity—that is, an entity that ought to be defined in terms of its function—allows us to find unity (in this case, functional unity) within diversity.”

Boredom, for Elpidorou, is just like the corkscrew: its thingness is derived from its function. So when he defines boredom as “the painful realization of the lack of optimal cognitive engagement” and “a powerful mechanism for regulating cognition and behavior,” the thingness of the mechanism he’s referring to doesn’t much matter. What matters is that the function itself is an aversive one, marked by unsatisfactory cognitive engagement, and so perhaps spurs some boredom-balancing reaction. In understanding boredom in this way, Elpidorou sets himself apart from his philosophical forebears. It’s not that he rejects them; rather, he finds a way to both break from tradition and mend its furcated history, a seemingly impossible task, yet one he does deftly.

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Historically, boredom has been viewed as a bourgeois problem of too much idle time. Today, podcasters and pop psychologists describe it as the key to brilliance, creativity, and success. For Elpidorou, the mainstream discourse surrounding boredom trivializes an unsparing and often devastating experience. Citing a wide body of empirical research and literature, he does well to highlight the brutal reality of boredom:

A chronic inability to maintain satisfactory levels of cognitive engagement […] has been shown to lead to negative health outcomes, maladaptive behaviors such as increased alcohol or drug use, lapses in attention during the performance of everyday tasks, increases in risk-taking activities, and even a willingness to engage in novelty-seeking (and sometimes harmful) behaviors.

While boredom can have some positive effects, the reality of boredom is often much bleaker, especially for people from economically disadvantaged groups.

Anatomy’s later chapters include a smart and detailed analysis about how boredom is exacerbated by “social membership (class, race, gender, physical ability, sexual orientation, etc.) and historical and political standing,” though his philosophical model focuses on how boredom disproportionately affects people of lower socioeconomic status. For those without means, boredom has a ravenous phenomenological character: decreased attention, loss of meaning, deepened feelings of constraint. And without access to healthy means of satisfactory cognitive engagement, dangerous behavior seems likely. For the disenfranchised, boredom can break the spirit.

Anatomy, again, reorients our understanding of boredom, but at the social level. This secondary subversion can happen only because Elpidorou begins Anatomy by putting boredom in its functional place, allowing his philosophy to attend to boredom’s differences from a generative and productive foundation. In so doing, Elpidorou not only opens the door to a vital intersectional discourse about boredom’s existential import but also goes on to show how boredom’s systemic nature demands attention and care from entire communities. Boredom becomes something to be taken seriously not merely by academics or psychologists but by everyone.

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But really: Is it boring? Let’s use Elpidorou’s definition, then, that boredom is “the painful realization that one is not cognitively engaged with one’s environment in a desired manner.” We can’t just say “yes” or “no” to Anatomy being boring. We first have to break down the constitutive and functional variables at play. If Anatomy is boring, it could be for any number of cognitive reasons—because one does not derive cognitive engagement from philosophy, from specialized prose, from nonfiction, or from books in general. Further, to say whether Anatomy is boring is also to understand the context within which it is being read. Are you reading it to learn? For fun? For a class? Before bed? At a sporting event surrounded by thousands of throat-throttling roars? Context matters, and it affects satisfactory cognitive engagement.

And while I can’t answer these questions for the reader, I can certainly answer the question for myself: I found the prose smart, sometimes prosaic, but necessary in its plainspeaking. I also found its argument acerbic, tight, and incisive. The fact that Elpidorou touches on so many aspects of the experience—its ontology, biological import, social context, and more—in just over 260 pages of main text is remarkable. More than that, his philosophy is accessible. Anatomy has the one quality I value highly, and it’s a quality I’ve found only in top-notch philosophy: the writing is simple enough that the reading doesn’t hurt, yet the claims are complex enough that the reader feels intelligent. Anatomy guides you through heavy forest but holds your hand to journey’s end.