Should We Fight for Our Right to Be Bored?

When was the last time you were bored? Nadia, Jem and Keir wonder if ennui is a feeling that belongs in the past, and what a boredom-free life might be missing, in the latest ACFM episode.

Is compulsive scrolling a modern symptom of boredom? Why are spiritual practices often based around tedious repetition? Do bored workers make better organisers? What about the “stuckness” experienced by migrants, or the drudgery of housework?

The gang offer their theories of Boredism (and Post-Boredism) in a perfectly mind-numbing Trip, with ideas from Lukács, Gramsci, the Pet Shop Boys and loads of 1970s punk.

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Music: The Adverts – Bored Teenagers / Boredoms – Seadrum / Buzzcocks – Boredom / The Clash – I’m So Bored with the USA / Harvey Danger – Flagpole Sitta / Green Day – Longview / Pet Shop Boys – Being Boring / The Fall – Rowche Rumble

Books and articles: Peter Toohey – Boredom: A Lively History / Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea / Karl Marx – Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 / György Lukács – ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ / Timothy Bewes – Reification: or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism / Alasdair Gray – A History Maker / Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello – The New Spirit of Capitalism / Cory Doctorow – Enshittification / Ghassan Hage – ‘Waiting out the Crisis: on Stuckedness and Governmentality’ / Betty Friedan – The Feminine Mystique / Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook / Institute for Precarious Consciousness – We Are All Very Anxious / Richard Sennett – The Corrosion of Character

Films: Modern Times (1936)