Give me death or give me boredom?

Immortality is desired by many, figuratively and literally. Shakespeare's sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"), ends with the grandiose claim that the poem's existence will give everlasting life to its subject: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."2 More recently, the medical profession has given serious thought to treating death as an illness to be cured. But this desire to indefinitely prolong life ignores a serious problem that would become evident upon success — boredom! 

I am not the first to consider this problem. Bernard Williams's "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality" is perhaps the most famous treatise on the eventuality of tedium in an everlasting life.3 Williams's piece is titled after Karel Capek's play, The Makropulos Affair, in which the life of Elina Makropulos (EM) has been prolonged by an elixir obtained from her physician father. Having lived for 342 years as a woman in her mid-forties, EM decides enough is enough. She stops taking the elixir, opting for death, because immortality has become so tedious. 

The inevitability of a boring life, enabled through immortality, rests on the notion that the individual living remains consistent in character, goals, and desires, and that therefore all things strived for by that specific individual will be achieved at some point bringing on oppressive boredom. If, on the other hand, one could over time change one's character and desire distinct things, Williams argues, we would cease to be a coherent individual, essentially living a sequence of separate lives. 

Williams suggests that for everlasting life to avoid boredom we would need to conceive of something that could be unendingly absorbing. He doesn't give concrete examples perhaps because the concept is impossible to conceive. Here, opportunity costs become important. Humans balance the need to exploit known resources with the need to explore the world for potentially better things — that is, everything we do comes with a cost of not doing something else. Even something that seems absorbing and deeply pleasurable — sex, let's say — comes packaged with an opportunity cost that will eventually push us to alternate activities. 

I'm not intending in this essay to deconstruct, support or challenge Williams's case — just to use it as a launching point to showcase the challenges of choice and agency in an immortal life (or an afterlife). Nevertheless, there is one pillar of Williams's case that is relevant for my argument: that an immortal life will force us to choose some activity as being more valued than another, and with all kinds of time, such choices become meaningless. Perhaps this claim disappears if we assume that novelty could conceivably arise in an immortal life.4 Imagine that you choose to master all musical instruments in your immortal life. Once done, boredom might loom large, until you accept the possibility that a new, previously unknown instrument might be formed. Boredom solved. But this ignores the challenge of choice. If my goal is to master all musical instruments, I still need to do so one at a time. Which one do I start with and why that one? I could apply an arbitrary rule (proceed alphabetically), but this would seem to me to be a good way to highlight the absurdity of the whole enterprise. And once mastered, at any given moment in my immortal life I would still need to ask myself, "Which one would I like to play now?" The question is meaningless given unlimited time. It is in the finitude of a mortal life that I give value to one instrument (activity) over another. 

Martin Hägglund makes a similar claim in his recent book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom:

If we could not take ourselves to be bored by anything or bored with our own activities, we would never have a reason to try to transform how we conduct our lives... By the same token, we could never be committed to doing anything, since nothing that we do would make a difference for us."5

The claim Hägglund makes is related to my assertion of our need to choose, but is slightly different. For Hägglund, it is not that an everlasting life would necessarily lead to boredom, but that without the possibility of boredom we would struggle to assign value to things and guide our lives accordingly. Without boredom we would not be pushed to seek value and meaning and we would fail to commit to anything. 

Another challenge to Williams comes from Andreas Elpidorou, who suggests that Williams fails to articulate a coherent notion of boredom. For Elpidorou, Williams ignores the fact that in-the-moment feelings of boredom are fleeting signals that ultimately indicate we have desires. When bored we realize that we're failing to engage with the world in meaningful, purposeful ways and in that realization is the reality that we want to be engaged. With such a desire how can we be bored?6 Or more precisely, how can we be indefinitely bored? I resonate with this argument but think that it fails to address one of the outcomes of boredom: the pressure to choose. At any given moment we must choose specific things to engage with. So, while in-the-moment feelings of boredom reveal to us the fact that we have a desire to engage with the world, they do little to resolve that desire. In psychological literature, those who experience boredom frequently and intensely are said to be high in boredom-proneness. But more than just frequency and intensity of feelings of boredom, it is the sense that everything lacks meaning that pervades the experience of the highly boredom-prone.7 I am arguing that immortality might cast a blanket of sameness across all possible activities, dooming us all to boredom proneness. 

This quandary arises for a being governed by drives. While many drives are key to survival — thirst, hunger, reproduction — others may serve more general needs for cognitive engagement, curiosity, pleasure, and agency.8 It is that last drive — the need for agency — that is intimately entwined with boredom. Boredom explicitly signals that we are not engaged with the world around us and it is felt as discomforting — restlessness and agitation the most common bedfellows of the experience.9 Ultimately, that uncomfortable sense of disengagement highlights to us that we are not being effective agents, we are failing to engage with the world in purposeful, meaningful ways. You might argue that with all kinds of time we could become more agentic (or reach some ultimate level of agency). But the desire to be agentic is in turn inextricably linked to our other drives — primarily to seek pleasure or engagement. And in seeking things that are pleasurable, meaningful, and satisfying to us in some way, we attach temporal deadlines. 

In fact, this may all come back to time. With limited time we ought to cherish what opportunities we do have.10 But with limited time comes the pressure to choose, and to do that we must assign value to the different things we do. I might collect stamps. You might race go-karts competitively. I might enjoy sailing. You might be a cross-country runner. None of these things is inherently more valuable than another but by our own assignment of that value.11 The contents of our own happiness (like the contents of our boredom) are irrelevant. It is that we chose these things, that they represent goals that sprung from within us — goals we are intrinsically motivated to pursue. This is once again a matter of opportunity costs. Any choice we make comes encumbered with the costs of forgoing other possibilities. While I sail solo across a lake, I forgo the opportunity to relax on shore with a good book. But with all the time in the world I might become paralyzed, unable to assign values in a way that allows me to launch into one action at the expense of others.

We pursue things of value to us in the knowledge that we have limited time to achieve limited things. This is in part the gift that boredom gives us. It highlights the fact that opportunity costs are on the rise and we need to find some other goal to pursue, something more valued to us than whatever it is we're currently doing.12 In foisting on us the discomfort of disengagement, boredom makes obvious both our finitude and our need to be engaged as effective agents.

The insight is not novel. In a convocation speech at Dartmouth, Joseph Brodsky, the American/Russian poet, extolled students to embrace their boredom. For Brodsky, boredom signals the infinity of time and the insignificance of the individual: 

Brodsky is suggesting that time itself will make our lives subject to monotony and boredom. If true, then the infinite time of the immortal becomes infinitely monotonous and immeasurably boring. 

The physical immortality promised by some miraculous medical breakthrough is not the only way we hope for life everlasting. In most Christian and Islamic faiths we are promised the reward of heaven for a life well-lived (at least in Buddhism, reincarnation can be imagined without any carryover memories from our past lives — if we were able to remember all of our past lives, boredom would presumably loom large there too).14 The promise of an afterlife serves a range of purposes but one, at least, could be that of ridding us of the need to confront our mortality, the finiteness of our lives laid bare by Brodsky's exhortations.15 But again, just as with a medically driven goal of immortality, the promise of everlasting life in heaven ignores the specter of boredom and dismisses the notion that life is precious precisely because it is limited (and painful, and frustrating, and so on). 

Indeed, boredom may not be the only emotion/cognitive-affective state that shows us the value of a limited lifespan. In his recent book Propelled, Elpidorou frames boredom, frustration, and anticipation as motivating emotions that lead us to the good life.16 He argues that these experiences, whether exciting as in the case of anticipation, or unpleasant as for boredom and frustration, serve to keep us in motion, moving us towards goals we want. All such experiences might disappear for the immortal. How could one become frustrated when unlimited time essentially eliminates all impediments to success? A hindrance to your current goal pursuit is only temporary for the immortal even if it took millennia to overcome. The thrill of anticipation would also vanish in an immortal life — when all things are possible and differences in value evaporate, there is no joy to be had from the anticipation of finally attaining a goal. 

Perhaps those who seek solace most in the possibility of immortality are those most afraid of boredom. We know that the boredom-prone tend to adhere more strongly to religious ideologies.17 The suggestion is that the boredom prone are seeking meaning in their lives and religious systems do an excellent job of providing a strong meaning framework. But it is in religion and the promise of an afterlife that we remove the discomforting feelings that life might just be pointless. Were we able to embrace boredom, as Brodsky implores us to do, we might find meaning in experiences "charged with life, emotions, joy, fears, compassion" rather than hinging our actions on the promise of more time. 

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There's a quote I love from Nietzsche:

After creating the Universe and everything in it, even God would be forced to face the daunting question of "What now?" Personally, I am an atheist, but perhaps the notion of an omnipotent, omnipresent and interfering God — one who intervenes in our lives to punish or grant favors depending on our deeds and prayers — suggests a busy enough God for whom boredom would not be an issue! On face value though, Nietzsche's quote casts boredom in a functional light, as a call to action, a prompt to push us to engage more meaningfully with the world that we have access to right now. And in that light, despite the in-the-moment discomfort and restlessness of boredom, perhaps we can see the state as one of importance to the human condition. Without boredom we might become rudderless, unable to determine the path forward that matters most to us. 

If boredom's invaluable contribution, then, is to push us to act, it leaves open the challenge of which act to choose. Boredom shows the need but never provides the solution — which is precisely why it is painful (more to some than others). As Robert W. White suggested, humans (and other mammals) have a need to feel efficacious, a need to be engaged in actions that show us our own agency.19 We feel good when we are able to demonstrate our own agency, and boredom painfully shows us those moments in life in which we are failing to satisfy that drive. ²⁰

Boredom is uncomfortable, a feeling state whose goal is to eliminate itself. We need to extinguish boredom when it arises in order to maintain meaningful engagement with the world around us and to demonstrate that we are the authors of our own lives. With the endless horizon of immortality there would be no pressure to choose some things to pursue and not others. In the lifting of that burden of choice lies an absence of meaning and the weighty blanket of boredom. 

In the quotation that leads this piece there is a hint that life is worth living because of its fragility and finitude. Data, the android quoted in my epigraph, spends considerable time (both in the Next Generation series and in the more recent Picard series) trying to be "more human". Ultimately, (spoiler alert) he decides, like EM, that it is the limited nature of a life that gives it value. 

In other words, the android Data's immortal butterfly lacks all those things that make life worth living — emotions, fears, empathy. And I would suggest, goals. 

So, give me boredom or give me death. 

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James Danckert (@JamesDanckert) is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. He is the co-author of Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom (2020).

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