Boredom

Boredom, too ( Austrian ) or boredom (French ) Ennui [ ɑny ˘ i ː ], is the queasy feeling that is caused by forced idleness or can come up with a perceived as monotonous or demanding activity. The boredom is the subject of philosophical, cultural studies, psychological and educational viewing.

Distinction between

In contrast to the leisure which is the people welcome, boredom is perceived as forced and unpleasurable. However, unlike the acedia ( inertia of the heart) and taedium vitae ( Lebensekel, weariness of life ) it is usually temporary.

Philosophy and Literature

In the philosophy of existentialism Boredom is a fundamental condition of human existence.

In the more recent history of philosophy, the feeling of boredom is become as much about how the feelings of disgust, fear or despair.

Among other things, the philosopher Martin Heidegger analyzed the boredom and divided them into different phases. He specified ( mutatis mutandis for the book A master from Germany by Rüdiger Safranski ) the three phases as follows:

"Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be located in a perfect calm, without passion, without business, without diversion, without employment. He will then feel his nothingness, his price condition, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. Incessantly is from the bottom of his soul ascend the ennui, the blackness, the sadness, the grief, the omission, the despair. "

In poetic work Charles Baudelaire, the French term for boredom, ennui, a central role. He referred to a emotional state of big city people in the combine disgust and revulsion with the alienation from existence. The Baudelaire also central and closely related concept of spleens Ennui has the Christian- Platonic character of a sin, namely the disenchantment and the fascination of evil equal. Les Fleurs du Mal, Au Lecteur:

"In the infamous menagerie of our vices / Is an even uglier, more vicious, even dirtier! [ ...] / The boredom is it! "

Émile Michel Cioran was reflected in a in the Christmas 1994 edition of the Frankfurter Rundschau printed interview on the subject as follows:

"The experience of boredom, not the vulgar due to lack of society, but the absolute, was personally important to me. If someone feels abandoned by his friends, so that's nothing. The boredom in and of itself happens without reason, without external influences. Thus, the feeling of empty time, something like emptiness that I 've always known links. I can well remember the first time five years. I was not in Sibiu, but in Altrumänien with my whole family. Since I became aware at once, which is boredom. It was against three clock in the afternoon when me such a feeling of nothingness, the insubstantiality crept. It was as if everything was suddenly somehow disappeared, the model of all these attacks of boredom, the entry into the nothingness and the beginning of my philosophical reflection. This intense state of being alone made ​​me so concerned that I wonder what it could mean. Not to fight against it and to get rid of it not by reflection, and the idea that it returns, if you have experienced it once, which unnerved me so much that I accepted it as a landmark. At the peak of boredom one experiences the sense of nothingness, inasmuch as this is not a depressing state, as it represents a non-believer the opportunity to experience the Absolute, such as how the last moment. "

Peter Bichsel once remarked positively about the boredom. In his childhood he had always bored. Since he was not good at football that he had borrowed works of world literature from the public library and start reading and thereby at the same time unconsciously laid the foundation for his later work as a writer. Here it is clear that boredom may be something constructive and positive well by bringing us to think and asks us to make decisions for a meaningful design of our lifetime.

Others say, in the midst of total fun society, the boredom sometimes turns out to be the intelligent answer to a exuberant offer from decadence and gluttony. For children and adolescents, the boredom is often viewed as a not long to yield sensation; they try to finish it positive or bridge then with all sorts of spontaneously formed activities and games.

Other thinkers who have dealt with the boredom, are Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans Blumenberg, Georg Büchner, Siegfried Kracauer and the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. Schopenhauer as understood under the boredom an emotional state that would only befall average people, because it would never get bored of the great spirit about him. This gladden rather his inner wealth just when he was alone.

Education

In the English-speaking world, the habitual actions of the child of boredom applies as a result of poor parents role model and as an expression of a problem in the parent- child communication. The American family therapist Wendy Mogel has enjoyable to hang around the inability of many children and nothing to do, explained by the habit of their parents, these children überzubehüten and to book with außercurriculären activities. Have children for many seemingly banal (such as moments of unsupervised, free time) an innate appreciation that they - if the parents are rushed and not pay attention to such things - with the growth but again lose. The susceptibility to boredom is the greater, the less the child will practice how to deal with free time on their own, and the sooner the parents are willing to entertain a of bored child.

In the classroom research is just beginning a discourse on boredom, which is surprising when you consider how present they can be in school. According to a study by Lohrmann already one in four primary school pupils are bored regularly in the classroom .. Larson and Richards found in a study of 392 subjects in the 5th to 9th grade, that young people were bored 32 % of class time .. In addition, correlations between boredom and a number of negative effects suspected. Götz et al. and Lohrman found relations between boredom and experience school failure, absenteeism, deviant and delinquent behavior, aggression, drug abuse and less willingness to work hard, which in turn einwirke on the perception of the teaching and the perceived usefulness of the content and learning ..

A few works refer to the positive potential of boredom: the ability to (self-) reflection. Relaxation and brainstorming, thereby triggering the creative processes and finally the outgoing of her action initiation. Lohrmann reported that especially powerful students experience boredom as quite positive. You use the time for pauses and repetitions. If they are bored because they have already mastered the material, they should go from positive conclusions for their ability to self-concept.

Götz and Frenzel found four categories of boredom experience.

The trigger of stuffiness sensation apply:

• The assessment of a situation as subjectively insignificant
• Under or over exposure by teaching content and tasks
• Lack of excitation
• Too high or too low a degree of subjective control over to students and the teaching situation

But there are only a few exploratory studies on the origin and causes of boredom in the classroom.