My current book project responds to a lived paradox: in a rapidly changing world replete with crises and challenges, distractions and pleasures, boredom is ubiquitous. Amidst unparalleled connectivity, purpose and connection elude us; repetitive, seemingly meaningless tasks demand but fail to engage our attention; indifferent diversions proceed across our screens. In the face of historic challenges, as increasingly dystopian futures loom, thwarted desires for change stoke apathy and helplessness—and feed ever-expanding industries of consumption and distraction. With social media turbo-charging sensationalism and discord and fueling the data-driven, monetized and spectacularized politics that is intensifying polarization and social isolation, faith in historical progress has given way to cynicism, hopelessness, and fatalism. In boredom, despair vies with denial: “Nothing to do.”

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I approach this convergence of historic urgency and widespread malaise as an opportunity for a constructive intervention that brings interdisciplinary humanistic inquiry to bear on real-world problems. As a lived crisis of meaning and purpose, boredom is linked to anxiety, depression, addiction, and compulsion, to despair and violence; its pervasiveness attests to the intertwining of psychological and collective challenges in the contemporary world. Opposing the tendency to focus too narrowly on the individual in approaching what are simultaneously symptoms of pervasive loss of meaning in modern life, Nothing to Do draws on philosophy and literature, psychology, history, sociology, and cultural theory to situate boredom and related phenomena in a broad cultural, political, and ethical frame. By exploring the material and affective links between widespread subjective malaise and the cultural and sociological transformations of late modernity, I aspire to help readers understand and overcome helplessness, despair, and anxiety in the face of global crisis and to disclose horizons for positive change in everyday life.

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Drawing on my past work and engaging a burgeoning literature documenting the negative psychological and socio-political impacts of social media and cell phone dependency, Nothing to Do explores how boredom’s prevalence both reflects and problematizes the relations between money, meaning, and technology in a globalized and highly virtualized world. Boredom did not come into being with mass media or the computer revolution, but its role in the subjectivation and disciplining of modern subjects cannot be overlooked. Today it is being systematically produced and disseminated as new technologies extend the mobilization and management of attention and distraction ever further into our social, political, interpersonal, and intimate lives. And yet the experience of boredom is not entirely manageable. Like its venerable religious and philosophical antecedents, it conjoins discontent with the world as it is with longing—and hope, however dampened—for a better future. By foregrounding this ambiguous critical potential within boredom itself, Nothing to Do aspires to help readers understand and overcome the accompanying symptoms of helplessness, hopelessness, loneliness and anxiety that paralyze thought and distract from ethical action in the contemporary world.