Boredom: The Poisoning of Man (Part 1)

Back in early May, I had the privilege of working on a young adult event at Nativity of Mary in Bloomington. We gathered in classic "theology on tap" style, but rather than doing a straight presentation, the pastor (Fr. Nathan LaLiberte) and myself decided to do more of a back-and-forth banter presentation of the topic. We read a quotation from an essay of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) and spent an hour piecing it apart to better understand it. It was such an interesting discussion that I thought it would be great fodder for an MSP Catholic article, and it swiftly grew into two articles, that are both kind of all over the place, but that's kind of how conversations tend to work. Enjoy! (Special thanks to the podcast Catholic Stuff You Should Know for first introducing me to this quotation many years ago!)

As I was preparing for that young adult event back in May, knowing that we were going to situate a lot of the discussion on the idea of boredom, I reached out and asked a whole wide range of people (mostly young adults) what they thought about boredom and how they experience it. One shared something their mom would always say to them when they complained about being bored: "boredom is more of a reflection on you than anything else." Another said "I get bored when I'm waiting for the things to come. I'm in my 20s and I'm experiencing a kind of bored homelessness." I was hanging out with a family and I asked the six year old what she does when she's bored, and she said "I go outside and find adventures. Also, dogs." A wife and expectant mother shared: "I get bored in relationships when I stop being attentive to the other and instead focus only on myself."

It seems then that we have a basic understanding that boredom is so much more than a lack of stimulation; these conversations revealed that people understand boredom as actually a serious reality that affects us all. Let's hear what Ratzinger has to say. 

Our quotation comes from the very end of Ratzinger's collection of essays A Turning Point for Europe. These writings, originally from 1994, seem tailor-made for the culture we live in today. In classic Ratzinger punchy prose, there's so much packed into a paragraph; give it a read, and then we'll jump into some of the points that he brings up.

“Goethe once termed the struggle between belief and unbelief the great theme of world history, picking up a theme of Augustine’s philosophy of history. Augustine himself, of course, expressed this differently: he sees in world history the struggle between two kinds of love, love for self, which goes as far as despising God, and love of God, which goes as far as despising oneself. Today, we can perhaps formulate this in still another way: history is marked by the confrontation between love and the inability to love, that devastation of the soul that comes when the only values man is able to recognize at all as values and realities are quantifiable values. The capacity to love, that is, the capacity to wait in patience for what is not under one’s own control and to let oneself receive this as a gift, is suffocated by the speedy fulfillments in which I am dependent on no one but in which I am never obliged to emerge from my own self and thus never find the path into my own self. The destruction of the capacity to love gives birth to lethal boredom. It is the poisoning of man. If he were to have his way, man would be destroyed, and the world with him. In this drama, we should not hesitate to oppose the omnipotence of the quantitative and to take up our position on the side of love. This is the decision that the present hour demands of us.”

Let's start with "quantifiable values." Ratzinger is claiming that when the only values that someone is able to recognize as values are "quantifiable," it leads to an inability to love and a "devastation of the soul."  There are a myriad of examples for what "quantifiable values" are; in our discussion at the young adult event we talked a lot about "streamlining" and "maximizing your time" in order to increase productivity. We talked through plenty of examples of ways in which we try to save time: new apps that promise to make xyz part of your life easier, paying for a subscription in order to not have to watch the advertisements, the emerging phenomenon of "life hacks" (which is a fascinating phrase in and of itself), etc. All of these things seemed focus on conserving and maximizing the use of various "resources," like time and money. It's a strange kind of irony, because we seem to be so focused on saving time and maximizing productivity so that we can spend more time doing what we want, but we also seem to be busier than ever. I go home to visit my family, and I can hardly stop thinking about the to-do list. I go to pray, and I wonder if there's a more "bang-for-your-buck" way of praying, because I'm not currently seeing a ton of fruit from this way of praying. Don't get me wrong, productivity is important (and your boss will probably have a difficult conversation with you if you don't think it is), but as Ratzinger claims, if you live your whole life defined by productivity and the to-do list, you are led to an inability to love. Everything starts to become poisoned.

Here's where we get to a fascinating distinction by Ratzinger: he claims that the opposite of boredom isn't actually stimulation. Usually when I think I'm bored, it's because there isn't much going on, my friends are too busy to hang out, there's nothing good to watch. Or maybe the opposite: I'm sometimes bored when I don't have a single moment of time, because I've committed to so many things that all seem so important, but I get stuck in the "what's the next thing?" mentality that pulls me away from paying attention to whatever is present there right in front of me (once again, a kind of poison). Regardless, Ratzinger's claim has nothing to do with stimulation; he is saying that the opposite of boredom is actually love. His definition of the capacity to love is fascinating: "the capacity to wait in patience for what is not under one’s own control and to let oneself receive this as a gift." Love is inherently patient and receptive, not striving after control and productivity. If you try and bring "control" into any kind of relationship, things get weird and testy pretty darn fast. This love, which all of us are called to, waits in patience and receptivity for the people around us.

It is precisely this patience and receptivity that comes under fire with the question of boredom and interaction with the culture. Ratzinger is claiming that this capacity for love is suffocated by "speedy fulfillments." When I am never required to wait in patience for something, I never actually have to learn the virtue of patience. We see symptoms of this all over the place: I remember back in the days before Netflix had a streaming service: our family had to pick out a movie or two that we all wanted to see, and then wait for a few days for it to arrive in the snail mail. Nowadays, you can be sitting down to any movie you want in less than ten seconds. And I don't even have to use the DVD player in the living room; I can use my phone and totally isolate myself from everyone around me. The same thing can happen with food: before the internet and cars and technology, if I wanted a meal I would have to cook it myself, and more often than not it would necessarily be with the people around me. Now, if I'm feeling lazy, I can open up an app, punch a few buttons, and have food delivered onto the doorstep within the hour. I don't even have to put on shoes. These speedy fulfillments might "increase productivity," but I never have to wait in patience. It seems as if this kind of mentality looks at leisure only in terms of amusement, of "how can this entertain me right now?" It becomes devastating when we bring this attitude into relationships: if I put pressure on my friends to "entertain me now," or "be at this place emotionally with me now," these relationships become strained and self-focused. There's a proliferation of language now about "cutting toxic people out of your life," and perhaps rightly so to some extent, but it seems to sometimes turn into an excuse to get rid of relationships that aren't serving me. Once again, things become poisoned. 

Approaching things and other people in patience and love, however, changes the discussion entirely. Several months ago, I was at my family's house, and my youngest sister wanted to spend some time with me, and my mother wisely tasked the two of us to make some dessert for our big family dinner that night. In my utilitarian mindset, I immediately just wanted to rush to the store and buy something, so that I could be off and do "more important things," but my sister shyly asked "why don't we try and make an apple pie?" I had never attempted something like that before, and I almost wanted to say "no" because I knew it would take all afternoon. But my mom gave me a look to let me know what I ought to be doing, and so I agreed. And it did take all afternoon. We made a mess in the kitchen. The quality of the pie certainly wasn't going to win any awards. But waiting in patience for this random pastry to come together led to some of the most present, peaceful, and personal conversation I had had with my sister in a long time. Even now, months after the fact, I still smile as I recall that afternoon, covered in flour, peeling apples in the kitchen.

Whew! There's so much in a Ratzinger paragraph... this is going to have to be a two-part post! Come back soon to read the rest of it!