BOOK REVIEWS
The latest self-help series entry focuses on dealing with boredom, but falls short of stimulating the reader By John Williams
There’s an art to being bored but an author’s tips on beating boredom fail to stir much excitement.
The School of Life is a London-based company “devoted to developing emotional intelligence through the help of culture.” Its best and worst qualities look a lot like the best and worst of its founder, the popularising philosopher Alain de Botton. At best, witty, elegant and insightful. At worst, of the softheaded but seemingly sincere belief that a more manageable life is just a well-chosen Virginia Woolf quote away.
The institute offers classes and lectures at outposts around the world, but its most visible work to bookstore browsers is a series of small, stylishly designed “how to” guides. The books are a balancing act. Primarily written in a way so as not to insult the intelligence of literary self-help seekers, they also want to keep you from fearing that certain things in life might just permanently not be OK. Concerned but cozy, they have titles like How to Stay Sane and How to Deal With Adversity.
Now comes Eva Hoffman’s How to Be
Bored, in keeping with the brand. Woolf is in here, as are Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-Paul Sartre, among other distinguished life coaches. But it is also one of the more confounding entries in the series.
The book’s title starts the trouble. Being bored is not something you do, it’s something that happens to you, envelops you like unexpected weather. You can get out of it, but you can hardly get into it. The “boredom” part of the book’s focus could be better labelled “How to Make the Most of Down Time.” But Hoffman touches so many bases — how we should approach culture, talk therapy, human contact, creative work — that she could have chosen from a thousand titles.
As a diagnostician, at least, Hoffman — a memoirist, novelist and former editor at
The New York Times, now in her 70s — is shrewd. She sets the table by writing about how ingesting one digital treat after another at our leisure can leave us “feeling both bloated and unfulfilled.”
On the clock, we are overworked to the point that companies like Google are enforcing naps and other breaks to increase efficiency. “I must admit,” Hoffman writes, “that the idea of napping or meditating on cue in order to work better in the afternoon fills me with slight dread.” Agreed.
Speaking of meditation, she also expresses a healthy scepticism for the Western world’s embrace of mindfulness. Meditation can be good for temporary relief, she argues, but it does not change the fundamental stresses
Technology proselytisers could simply dismiss Hoffman as a ‘get off my lawn’ type, and she might even embrace the label
that keep us feeling such a desperate need to meditate.
The most philosophically vexing problem she recognises is “the temptations of plenitude and the problems of freedom.” We are led to believe that we have a paralysingly large number of prospective romantic partners or career choices or recreation options.
And we face these forking paths without a compass; the acceptance of increasingly diverse lifestyles and values leave us with “few common criteria for making important life choices.”
So what about boredom, again?
It is best to stop expecting the book to be about that. Hoffman does.
She barrels ahead into solutions for our paradoxically harried ennui, including close listening to Mozart and keeping a diary. She also strongly suggests we get off the devices. Technology, a mixed blessing to be sure, is here a towering straw man, responsible for much of our unhappiness.
“Our coexistence with digital devices has affected our patience and shortened the span of our attention,” runs a typical sentence. She bemoans “the segmentation of thought encouraged by digital technologies,” “the constant barrage of external stimuli,” and the “virtual knowledge” we get from “the flat spaces of computer screens and via abbreviated communications.”
She’s a fan of “authentic human contact,” but worries that by texting and Facebook messaging so often, “we may be losing track of what such contact is, or how we can achieve it.”
Technology proselytisers could simply dismiss Hoffman as a “get off my lawn” type, and she might even embrace the label. But even this reader, a lip-service Luddite who has tired of interacting with his iPhone first thing each morning, thought Hoffman was making the case against technology sound too easy. There are dozens of unexamined assumptions in this book, about what humans are built for, how they best thrive.
And though Hoffman is mostly a lucid writer, she can lapse into fogginess, repeating the importance, for instance, of knowing ourselves in “three dimensions.” And there are a few low-calorie gnostic pronouncements: “We need to think inwards, and to think from within.”
Many of us would agree, vigorously, with Hoffman about the problems we share. But her analysis of those problems, and her proposed solutions for them, are a bit boring.