Y-a-a-wn. I am so bored. I feel tired and listless, and I can’t think of anything to do. Everyone around me is also bored, which suggests that boredom, as we know it, must be a common universal feeling. Not so, says anthropologist Yasmine Musharabash of the University of Western Australia in Crawley, Australia. Musharabash studied boredom in Warlpiri Aboriginies at Yuemdumu, a settlement in the outback northwest of Alice Springs. She discovered that the Aboriginal idea of boredom is strikingly different from the Western idea of ennui. For the Warlpiri, boredom has nothing to do with having nothing to do. Instead, being bored means there just aren’t enough people around to make life interesting. Our Western idea of boredom is apparently a product of the times. Before the 18th century, Musharabash explains, people weren’t all that bored; world-weariness was experienced only by those with the time to be bored-the rich, the clergy and the unemployed. But soon everyone was bored, suggesting that boredom rode in on the coattails of industrialization and the rise of the middle class. For a long time, boredom was also moral issue, a sin, because it might lead trouble. Kierkegarrd wrote […]