Depressed or bored? How COVID-boredom intensifies the fear of missing out

 "Depressed or bored? How COVID-boredom intensifies the fear of missing out," in The Conversation, 7 February 2021

As the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions and quarantines continues into their second year, more people are experiencing an acute form of COVID-boredom.

Boredom Studies Reader

Boredom Studies Reader: Frameworks and Perspectives (Routledge, 2016)
Edited by Michael E. Gardiner and J. J. Haladyn
Boredom Studies is an increasingly rich and vital area of contemporary research that examines the experience of boredom as an important – even quintessential – condition of modern life. This anthology of newly commissioned essays focuses on the historical and theoretical potential of this modern condition, connecting boredom studies with parallel discourses such as affect theory and highlighting possible avenues of future research. Spanning sociology, history, art, philosophy and cultural studies, the book considers boredom as a mass response to the atrophy of experience characteristic of a highly mechanised and urbanised social life.

Boredom and Art - An Interview with Julian Jason Haladyn

Boredom and Art - An Interview with Julian Jason Haladyn

In this interview with Julian Jason Haladyn, we discuss his recent book "Boredom and Art - Passions of the Will to Boredom", in the process covering a range of issues, from how boredom emerges as distinctive to the modern and post-modern experience, and how inhabiting the space of boredom can represent an act of powerful subversion (with a tip of hat to Walter Benjamin). Also, we look at how the art of such as Edouard Manet, Marcel Duchamp, On Kawara, and Chantal Akerman draw us to engagement in that subversion.

Boredom and Art

Boredom and Art (Zero Books 2015) 
This book examines the use of boredom as a strategy in modern and contemporary art to resist or frustrate the effects of consumerism and capitalism. This book traces the emergence of what Haladyn terms the will to boredom in which artists, writers and philosophers actively attempt to use the lack of interest inherent in the state of being 'bored' to challenge people. Instead of accepting the prescribed meanings of life given to us by consumer or mass culture, boredom represents the possibility of creating meaning: ‘a threshold of great deeds’ in Walter Benjamin’s memorable wording. It is this conception of boredom as a positive experience of modern subjectivity that is the main critical position of Haladyn's study, in which he proposes that boredom is used by artists as a form of aesthetic resistance that, at its most positive, is the will to boredom.