"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." (Dorothy Parker)

The Romans called it Taedium vitae, "the tedium of life." Nietzsche described it as "that disagreeable, windless calm of the soul." If you want to be eloquently European, one might use the French "ennui." By whatever name it’s known, in modern society boredom has reached epidemic proportions. The pervasive sense of tedium and emptiness remains one of the unsolved and potentially lethal epidemics of modern life.

As you digest that sentence, let me assure it is worded correctly. I did suggest that boredom might be lethal - to individuals, societies, cultures and, perhaps, Western Civilization, itself. At this point, you are probably ready join the majority of readers who consider me thoroughly unbalanced. But, allow me to justify the weightiness of my assertion. No less authority than the late director of the Harvard College Observatory, astrophysicist Harlow Shapley, who was once asked to list the 5 most probable ways the world would come to an end. Shapley listed the obvious: nuclear war, radical climate change, a plague. But, dear doubting reader, what malady/catastrophe do you think was #3 on Dr. Shapley’s famous list? Boredom.

[As an interesting - if completely irrelevant - aside, Dr. Shapely also once calculated that every breath you take has millions of argon atoms that were once in the bodies of Joan of Arc and Jesus Christ; that every breath you take has millions of argon atoms that were in the bodies of dinosaurs 65 million years ago; that every breath you take will suffuse the bodies of all terrestrial life-forms as far as we can see into the future. Interesting man, Dr. Shapley. He, obviously, didn’t experience boredom in his life.]

Boredom effects, to some degree or other, I suspect all God’s creatures. Dogs who are bored become self-destructive and cats "experience" boredom. Boredom can even be exhibited human newborns. A study was done with a group of pregnant women who were asked to read aloud Dr. Seuss to their babies in the last trimester of their gestation. They were instructed to read the same story aloud 10-12 times per day. The same story every time. The first day or so after the babies were delivered, their pulse and respiratory rates were measured to get a baseline. Then a recording of the mother’s voice reading the same story they had heard daily in utero was played and the neonates vital signs were compared to baseline. Researchers found little change when the newborns heard the same story in the same voice that they had heard in the womb. However, the mother’s voice reading a completely new children’s book caused significant changes in the infants heart and respiratory rate. Conclusion: Even in fetal development, humans can become bored with the same sounds and speech patterns of a repetitive story but will respond with increased physiological markers when presented with a novel experience, i.e. a new story.

So, if we can get bored before we are even born, what does that say about our chances of avoiding boredom in adulthood? Clearly, we cannot. We have all experienced it during our lives: the monotone sermon, the unengaged lecturer, a 2 hour wait in the doctor’s office, interminable traffic snarls - life’s little pauses. Obviously, occasional feelings of tedium are inescapable and, fortunately, for most, transient. But what of the more insidious type of boredom: chronic boredom?

That it exists is not in question. That chronic or, even a slightly less noxious form, recurrent boredom can cause psychological distress and aberrant behavior also does not seem to be debatable. Those prone to chronic boredom seem to fit a definite personality type. Introverts are less likely to be affected by boredom than extroverts and, as one can usually assume, those who study the problem have devised a Boredom Proneness Scale.

So what, you might be asking? Haven’t we always been, as thinking and exploring animals, easily bored? Hasn’t boredom (or tedium or ennui) been the ultimate stimulus for the advancement of science and technology? The answer, clearly, is yes. But it is also clear that there has been a significant rise in the incidence and negative consequences of ennui over the past half-century. As we have moved from a culture dictated by scarcity/productivity to one characterized by abundance/consumption, we have had a exponential rise in the feeling and psychopathology of boredom in our society.

A century ago we worked 70 hour weeks and lived to be 40 years old. Today, we work 40 hours weeks and live to be 70 years old. We have had a seismic rise in "leisure" activity. That we have more leisure time can certainly not be lamented and no one would suggest we go back to 70 hour work weeks. The pertinent question is simply this: With what have we filled our leisure time with? Answer: We have filled it with tripe and folderol (I have long waited for the chance to use the latter word in a column). Television, movies, YouTube.com and TMZ.com, and the like now fill our minds with increasingly decadent and degrading glimpses of human foibles and weaknesses. We have become the Roman mob at a virtual coliseum filled with distractions and hedonism. And, gentle reader, this has had consequences.

We, as a society, have a growing and worsening addiction to "entertainment" (and I use that term in its broadest and loosest sense). Thus, dazed with tedium and convinced by the broadcast media that our lives are boring, empty and meaningless, we constantly crave titillation: something strange, something poignant, something absurd, something tragic. Something, no matter how remote to our personal lives, that will make us feel - to overcome what Robert Lifron termed "psychic numbing." And the bar for achieving satisfaction in this unending quest has been raised to dizzying and often nauseating heights. No longer satisfied by boxing matches, we watch human cockfights in the form of "ultimate fighting." Bored of drama and science fiction we watch reality television which, season after season, drags the depiction of the human being down to the level of little more than animals. We ignore - are bored by - the honorable, noble, heroic and the respectable and glorify the sensational, the macabre and the freakish.

And these symptoms of pathological boredom spill over into our personal lives. Thrill-seeking activities are on the rise as we not only attempt to bring excitement to our lives but to emulate what we interpret to be "real" lives as portrayed in the media. Base-jumping (parachuting not from airplanes but from high terrain), snow-boarding, street racing, hang gliding, ice and rock climbing and the like have replaced safer and more reasonable sporting activities all, apparently, in the search for the "adrenaline rush" that allays (at least temporarily) the agony of tedium. Even the visual splendor of the Grand Canyon is no longer sufficient to stimulate the imagination of visitors and a "skywalk" has been added to artificially squeeze some excitement out of visitors.

More tragically, since everyone we view in the artificial lives of TV and the movies are promiscuous, murderous, sadistic and/or perverted, we feel the pull to join them in the decline of civility. After all, the celebrities never seem to be bored! When we perceive our lives as somehow inadequate - easy enough to do when we are constantly bombarded with images of the dangerous and "exciting" lives of other people - we appear to seek out possibly self-destructive pursuits in order to provide what we sense is lacking in our own lives. Drug use and sexual promiscuity are obvious choices spurred on by a gnawing sense of futility in our lives. Fixation and preoccupation with aberrant lifestyles (see O.J. Simpson, Paris Hilton, the late Anna Nicole Smith, Britney Spears, etc) is the great American pastime. When we compare our lives with the artificial glitter and seductively-dangerous psychopathology that is celebrated in the media, it is little wonder that we perceive our own lives as dull, lifeless and listless.

We also seek out fulfillment in the fleeting and temporary "fixes" provided by materialism. Billions are spent annually in lotteries and gambling in the furtive hope that we will strike it rich as if instant wealth will cure our underdeveloped and undirected psyches. We have swallowed - hook, line and sinker - the advertiser’s bill of goods that we are just one purchase away from happiness. If we can only buy the right face cream, car, computer, flat-screen high definition TV, or miracle sexual enhancement, our lives will have all that which is lacking. If we can only find our "perfect match" on eHarmony.com or Match,com, we will live the life of Cinderella or Prince Charming. "If only" - crafted as a cultural watchword by the advertising industry - is the flypaper that snares countless lives every day.

As described by the psychiatrist Victor Frankl in "Man’s Search For Meaning:"

"Unfortunately, too many Americans have swallowed a bill of goods which states that happiness can be achieved 24 hours a day and will be found in success, fame, possessions, and marrying or having a relationship with the right person."

As I see it, the problem with the reliance of the external to achieve any form of lasting happiness is two-fold:

1. Life is a constantly changing smorgasbord of emotions ranging from joy to sadness, laughter and tears, pain and growth. A constant state of happiness is unrealistic and a ethereal wish; and

2. Happiness and self-realization is not to be found in any external possession.

It is perhaps the second principle that leads to the greatest conflict. With the progressive erosion of our concern for our spiritual welfare - or, if you wish to remain secular, simply call it a sense of "inner peace" - we no longer look to or (God Forbid!) within ourselves. We have adopted the mantra of the advertising industry that self-esteem is based on the latest gadget or the latest fashion. The knowledge of the latest installments of the current "hot" television series or the current Hollywood starlet to make the news are more interesting to co-workers and "friends" than what your thoughts might be on the beauty you appreciated in a sunset you saw over the weekend or a lonely but perfect violet you saw growing in a rare patch of earth on your walk to work. This is the time in which we live.

According to Rollo May, boredom is "the loss of the capacity to wonder, to appreciate the sense of mystery and awe in life." This is partly due to the advancement of scientific information and the insidious loss of the mythology of our lives and our institutions. When the creation of a new life is reduced to "sperm finds egg, DNA undergoes mitosis, and cell proliferation yields fetus," it is understandable that human creation has become devoid of its astounding wonderment. Science, despite all it advancements of the human condition, has stripped away all the veiled fantasies and mythic awe that life and nature has intrigued mankind for millennia. Our eyes, now diverted from the world around us, have no where to cast their gaze except to the unreal phosphorus images emanating from our "boob tubes."

And here we sit. With huge credit burdens wasted on things we don’t need and filling our closets and our homes, useless remnants of faded hope, we remain palpably vacuous and empty shells. Perhaps the next commercial will have the answer to our prayers which go up to cathedrals on 5^th Avenue and Hollywood not to churches, synagogues or mosques. We pray for deliverance from our tedious lives and a barren world when they are, in fact, already filled with beauty and wonder if only we would stop long enough to contemplate what we are capable of achieving and the glories of nature that envelope us.

But before we stop to do that, let’s see who Oprah has on her show today.