On being bored and being boring

In 1993 the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips published his breakthrough book of essays: On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored. The essays introduced us to a new way of thinking about psychoanalytic writing: smart, literary, free of all the familiar traditional jargon. At the time Phillips was Principal Child Psychotherapist in the Department of Child and Family Psychiatry at Charing Cross Hospital in London and had recently published a book on DW Winnicott in the superb Fontana Modern Masters series.

One of the most fascinating of Phillips’ essays was called, “On Being Bored”. “Every adult remembers, among many other things,” he writes in the opening paragraph, “the great ennui of childhood, and every child’s life is punctuated by spells of boredom…” Psychoanalysis, he goes on, “has rarely found a place in theory, for all the less vehement, vaguer often subtle feelings and moods that much of our lives consist of,” such as “the child’s ordinary experience of being bored.” Could it be, he asks, that boredom is not “an incapacity” but “an opportunity”?

Re-reading this essay thirty years on, I found it both original and wrong. I remember often feeling bored as a child and hating those times. I much preferred being busy playing, drawing and reading. But there were times when I couldn’t find the mental energy to do any of these things and felt, quite simply, “bored”. Looking back, I realise that being bored was a phrase I used for what I later thought of as being depressed. Interestingly, in his essay Phillips doesn’t use the words depression or depressed. He is keen to find a positive (and original) take on being bored. That’s not how I remember times of boredom as a child. I wasn’t familiar with the term depression but the word “bored” seemed a good way to describe feelings of being unhappy and not being stimulated.

I was reminded of Phillips’s essay when I recently saw Martin McDonagh’s acclaimed film, The Banshees of Inisherin (2022). It is a film about the strange break-up of a friendship between two Irishmen living in a small village on a remote island off the Irish coast. Pádraic (Colin Farrell) is baffled and deeply hurt when his friend Colm (Brendan Gleason), a passionate musician and composer, tells him he doesn’t want to spend time with him any more. Why not? Because he’s “boring”.

As the film unwinds, it becomes clear that Pádraic is not the only boring person in this small community. Indeed, apart from his much smarter sister and Colm the rest of the island seem a classic study in what Marx famously called “the idiocy of rural life”. Real life, Big History, goes on elsewhere, across the water, where the Irish Civil War is being fought (the film is set in 1923) and Pádraic’s sister eventually leaves the island in search of this more interesting life. The question that is never answered is: why has Colm buried himself in this dull place, why can’t he get up and go in search of kindred spirits?

There are plenty of boring characters in cinema, but it’s hard to think of an interesting, sometimes funny, often deeply moving, film which places boredom and being boring at centre-stage. Cinema, like psychoanalytic theory, it seems, has little place for thinking about being bored or being boring.

Instead of asking Phillips’s question, Why are some children bored, let’s ask a different question, Why are some people boring? No one wants to be thought of as boring. It’s one of the cruellest, most unkind things you can say about someone, as Pádraic realises. (Part of Colm’s self-absorption in the film is to do with his extraordinary indifference to the effect of these words, of his cruelty, on his one time friend.)

Sometimes it’s because someone is not very intelligent, they have not read enough, thought enough about the films or plays they have seen or the TV programmes they have watched, or they have been deprived of stimulation by parents. How many times have we seen small children on a bus with a parent or carer who ignores them completely and focuses all their energy on their phone? They don’t talk or sing to the child or engage with the child in any way. The long-term results of this for the child cannot be good. Perhaps this neglect will lead to a life of being bored or even being boring.

But we have also all known very successful and intelligent people who are boring. How can this be? They have interesting jobs, interesting husbands or wives, they read books, go to interesting places. And yet they are dull.

I remember in the 6th Form, at university and at graduate school, and then in my working life being amazed how interesting the people around me were. Conversations flowed, there were passionate arguments about politics, culture, ideas. People could talk for hours. I once stayed up all night in my first term at university discussing Saul Bellow with someone who became a lifelong friend. We both loved Bellow’s writing, then and now, nearly fifty years on, and we were so excited to find someone else who shared that same passion.

What, then, would you call someone who didn’t share any of your passions or interests and apparently had none of their own? I don’t mean different interests, I mean no interests at all, or, if they have interests, they can’t speak interestingly about them.

That’s why we all know that to call someone boring is so hurtful, much worse than disagreeing with them. It’s not at all the same as calling someone depressed. Some of the most interesting people I have ever known battle with depression because when they are not depressed they are full of life. Being boring, by contrast, is a life sentence. You’re not boring one minute and lively and funny the next.

That’s why people were so intrigued when the then editor of Newsnight, Ian Katz, called the Labour politician Rachel Reeves “boring snoring”. Of course, she is boring. No political journalists said Katz was wrong. But it created a stir because it broke one of the laws of political journalism. Call a politician unreliable, deceitful, wrong-headed, but never call them boring. Already there is a debate growing about how boring Sir Keir Starmer is and whether it could even lose him the next election.

It’s not a matter just of individuals. The Banshees of Inisherin tells us something few films want to admit: there are whole communities that are boring and that’s why people with any get-up-and-go just leave for the mainland, which in the film is a kind of code for a place where people are interesting. How interesting are the people in The Vicar of Dibley or in Happy Valley? Of course, Geraldine Granger (played by Dawn French) and Tommy Lee Royce (played by James Norton) spiced things up a bit, but would you really want to live in Dibley or the Calder Valley? I can’t wait for Adam Phillips to write a whole book about being boring. Or perhaps it’s a job for Ian Katz?

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