A Brief History of Boredom

Part I: 30,000 BC - 700 AD

Note: The word "boredom" itself only appears in English around the 1850s. Before that, people used "ennui" (French) or "tedium" (Latin).

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

— Blaise Pascal
Pensées (1670)

For twenty or thirty millennia, humans passed their time with finger-doodling on stone walls, and some of it was magnificent. The walls of Chauvet Cave in France (30,000 BC) feature lions and mammoths depicted with a dedication to craft that makes post-modern artists of the last century seem like epileptics, who only painted mid-fit. Before the modernist commitment to abstraction and ugliness, there was a concerted desire to communicate with future generations by freezing moments in time with natural images.

Rock art in Sulawesi, Indonesia (51,000 BC!!), includes depictions of pigs and human-animal hybrids, a nod to future Alex Jones’ rants about DARPA government experiments. Spain’s El Castillo (39,000 BCE) has red disks and stenciled hands. The caves at Lascaux, France (17,000 BC) are littered with tiny hands, buffalo, and horses.

Altamira (36,000 BC), and hundreds more display remnants of voices from a distant epoch, their handprints reaching through cave walls to the future to communicate with us: “We were here, and we touched these walls so that you wouldn’t have to waste your time with such frivolous activities and would be free to consume five times the daily calories as us, while learning the ukulele, dancing for TikTok, and taking romantic walks on the beach with strangers met on Tinder before acquiring gonorrhea from them.”

Archaeologists call these ancient works of art sacred expressions of early consciousness and anthropological time capsules. They’re also what a man does when he doesn’t have Angry Birds, Candy Crush, sportsball, GrubHub, or a wife reared on psychology and feminism who knows the instant solution to all of their problems: “We need a vacation to Santorini or couples therapy, James. Pick one.”

A torch, a hand, charcoal bits from a fire, a smear of ochre, with nothing better to do until the next big hunt. How boring? They made bone flutes, bored holes into femurs, and sat by the fire for hours, staring at it like it held the clues to a better existence, which, in a way, it did. Fire was the first show worth watching, long before Wokeflix productions featuring disabled black English kings, and televised debates between blackmailed paedophiles about who was better suited to keep stealing from the enthralled, enslaved viewers, all smug in their certainty that this time, with this candidate, everything will be different.

They passed the time by stacking rocks—to speak with the Gods, or mark a territory, perhaps because it felt good to make one object balance on another larger natural object, in a world where the vastness of everything and seeming randomness of existence clashed with their struggle for survival which exhausted the majority of their time.

They threaded shells, shaved bark, and traced finger lines through the soot on the ceiling of caves. Sometimes they carved mammoth ivory into little objects, made stone tools, and draped themselves in animal hides.

Everything, including the probability of survival, was shaped by their hands and improved by cooperation. Some hands may have shaped nothing and cooperated with nobody, being averse to manual labor. One of them probably noticed these first schemers rubbing their hands together in the shadows, whispering schitzo phrases like, “God promised us these caves 3,000 years ago.” The schemers began charging interest for spears and bows and arrows, and seized the ivory and women of any noticers before clubbing them to death for speaking out about their parasitic predispositions.

The average lifespan for late Paleolithic men hovered around 34 years, whether they died by club or bad teeth. If women survived childbirth and charmed the right husky mammoth-killer, they might make it as long as age 37. We are told to believe the Paleolithic period lasted from over 3 million years ago until 10,000 BC. We are not told that the latter date is roughly when a great cataclysmic cooling event called the Younger Dryas occurred, ending with a great flood that probably wiped out entire advanced civilizations.

For 2.998 million years nothing happens other than the evolution of homo sapiens from apes, but the apes stay around also (cough cough) and everything is just the “Paleolithic” period? Does anyone else get bored of hearing this shit passed off as official history?

Perhaps historians and paleoanthropologists got bored with searching for truth, or what they found was a Giant (11 feet tall) inconvenience to their masters’ official narratives, and their grants depended on them not getting bored with accepting money to subvert it instead.

Lifespan was still short for the late Paleolithic biped, no matter whose version of history is embraced. Memories were even shorter without a printing press or iCalendar notifications.

Yet somehow, in those short decades, when most lives were snuffed out at birth or in childhood, they made time for art.

No rollerblading.

No wine tasting.

No fidget spinners.

No assless chap shaking pride parades.

No rug pulling shit coins.

No card nights at Frank’s man cave.

No Super Bowls or hot dog eating contests.

No overlords to tax them or send their children to die in wars for “bankers.”

They created something permanent and remarkable that has lasted THREE THOUSAND SEVEN-HUNDRED AND TEN generations.

What have we created that will lAst fIve generations without first wiping us from this planet or this simulation?

Lascaux: 1,710 generations ago.

Seneca observed in his seminal work On The Shortness of Life, “…life is long if you know how to use it." The real tragedy, he warned, is not the brevity of life but those who never take care to avoid squandering it. It was easy for him to write, as he died at the ripe old age of 68, one of the Roman Empire’s richest men.

Legacy is what humans plan to leave behind for future generations to marvel at and remember them by. For the average homo sapien it often begins with securing a non-triple-boosted mate and creating offspring. Boredom, humanity's oldest companion, is what passes the time in between plotting other moves to secure that legacy.

It rolled in long before there was a word to describe what it was. Like Plato’s shadows flickering on cave walls, it's always been there, an unacknowledged force shaping idle hands while enhancing brain cells through much-needed meditative respite for millennia.

We've been enthralled by the dancing shadows as long as we needed our perceptions managed, and while we like to think of our species as enlightened and magnificent, having evolved or been adjusted by our simulation or spiritual creators beyond the reach of great men like Plato or Seneca, the truth is that, metaphorically, we have never bored of keeping ourselves chained inside those caves to marvel at those shadows.

Across millennia, the concept of boredom provides as much insight into the psyche of people and their civilizational struggles as any transformative invention or map-altering voyage for conquest or gold.

One essential question that arose in my boredom thinking about boredom is how do we distinguish tedium or boredom in ancient civilizations from cultural customs and daily rituals?

My conclusion? We can’t.

The average classical ethnographer, scribe, philosopher, or historian wasn’t going to bore readers with tales of tedious acts that bored the hell out of his fellow tribe or citizens.

So, I’ve taken some liberties to find them myself in the ways they may have managed boredom, if not endured it.