Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life by Kevin Hood Gary, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022

Kevin Gary’s important and insightful book challenges readers to consider the moral and practical dimensions of boredom so that we might educate for lives of meaning. He gathers a range of sources from across time, traditions, and disciplines, and he puts these in conversation with our everyday experiences of boredom in the modern world, while also exploring ways that boredom has been written about and experienced in the past. It is an excellent book, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. At the heart of Gary’s thinking on boredom is the counterintuitive suggestion that boredom can be an educator, as opposed to something to be avoided at all costs: If your students are bored, give them something interesting to do. If you are bored, it just means you haven’t figured out how to live your best life. Technological and self-help fixes for boredom proliferate. While it is easy to mock the ways we try to outrun boredom, Gary sagely advises us to consider whether being bored may be written into the human condition. And if boredom is part of our condition, maybe it isn’t a problem to fix, but rather something to which we must develop a disciplined and humble response. And here Gary offers leisure as a practice, a way of learning how to live wisely with boredom, instead of acting as if boredom is something we can engineer a solution to or run away from. Gary, importantly, distinguishes between two types of boredom: situational and existential. Situational boredom has many forms, but an exemplary form of situational boredom is waiting in line. We are bored because we are waiting for something to happen. But once we arrive at the front of the line and reach our goal, this type of situational boredom disappears. Teachers should be mindful of the roles that situational boredom plays in the classroom, but this situational boredom is not Gary’s main concern. Rather, Gary sets out to address more profound experiences of boredom, the type of boredom that may occur, for example, when even our most cherished accomplishments leave us feeling empty and bereft of meaning. I have heard from several colleagues that the experience of getting tenure was a relief but also a moment that left them asking: is that all there is? Someone gets the promotion they longed for, or the house in the desirable neighbourhood they have always wanted to live in, or the consumer good they thought would make them happy. Instead of feeling fulfilment or joy, it only leaves more boredom. Unlike situational boredom, this existential boredom can strike us to the core and is less easily resolved. There is another important distinction to be made between clinical depression and boredom in the sense Gary is interested in. As Gary notes (p. 34), even someone who would not qualify as clinically depressed can nonetheless feel existential despair when they contemplate the ways that we humans find ourselves bored and unfulfilled, maybe especially in the face of the very things we thought would bring our lives meaning. Given the increasing concerns about mental health in schools and society, it may be worth more fully disentangling depression from the type of existential boredom that Gary addresses in this book. That said, I think there is important truth to the assertion that getting the things we think we want can still leave us feeling terribly empty without necessarily being symptomatic of clinical depression. Such feelings of emptiness can suggest the need for something different than treatment for depression. And this something different, Gary suggests, might be found in the practice of leisure. …