V

Since boredom first coined as a term in Charles Dickens’ novel “Bleak House”, it has been one of the most noted and discussed content of various researches, arguments and artworks.

While psychological approaches analyse the effects of boredom on individual and reflecting it as an element of daily life, philosophy addresses boredom as anxiety that directs questions to existence of human being and as one of the main elements for apathy that leads the perceptions on nothingness and worthlessness.

This text wishes to analyse boredom as a modern phenomenon that has a cultural dimension and study it through different researches of science and philosophy including boredom as a source of creativity.

Along with this study the aim is to identify the role of boredom in daily life thorough examples and references of these two fields and finding a consistent relation between boredom and creativity. As a photographer my goal is to reconsider my photographic output as photographic diaries which takes place in a certain period of my life and relate it within the perception of storytelling and boredom.

IV

We need to divide the researches on boredom according to approaches of science and philosophy in two parts. Along with philosophical approaches, it’s obvious that boredom has strict relations with the existentialism which is a philosophy that emphasizes individual existence, freedom and choice. It is the view that humans define their own meaning in life, and try to make traditional decisions despite existing in an irrational universe. It focuses on the question of human existence, and the feeling that there is no purpose or explanation at the core of existence.

This approach can be seen in various researches of philosophers and authors such as Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Sartre, Dostoyevsky and Camus. Almost all of these names and many others had sticked their ideas and perceptions to a common ground where the bad reputation of boredom basically comes from.

Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once wrote that “Boredom is the root of all evil, the despairing refusal to be oneself.” According to American writer and critic Susan Sontag, “Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.” And, French existentialist author Albert Camus observes, “The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”

As we fundamentally perceive from these standpoints, philosophical approaches commonly focuses on boredom’s negative effects on the individual and leads the observations to a significant type of boredom which is determined as “chronic” by various researches and group experiments and it appears as depression, anxiety or to suffer from a variety of addictions and mental illness; particularly personality disorders. 

III

Commonly, boredom has always been considered as a condition that you find your self having nothing to do or being disconnected from what you are doing. Beside these perceptions there are various approaches on boredom according to researches of science and philosophy.

Basically, there are two major aspects of boredom in psychological researches. First one is considering boredom as a privilege of a free mind which is helpful for improvement and second is perceiving boredom as a damaging situation for creativity.

According to John Eastwood from York University in Canada, there are two distinct types of personality that suffer from boredom. For the first type; Eastwood says boredom often goes with a naturally impulsive mindset among people who are constantly looking for new experiences. For these people, the stillness of life just is not enough to hold their attention. The second type of bored people have almost exactly the opposite problem; the world is a fearful place, and so they shut themselves away and try not to step outside their comfort zone. However, along with the second type of personalities, there is also a danger emerges by cause of the fear of public; and this is chronic boredom.

While we try to keep ourselves away from boredom constantly, we try to occupy our brain with the things we like to do and always try to obtain something to dedicate ourselves. This unconscious flow turns into a circle that we devote our lives as long as we feel sympathy to the life. However, when the chain is broken because of any reason, this is the first place where boredom appears.

II

There are many definitions of boredom according to psychology, philosophy, sociology, art and popular culture. I would like to steer my research on relationships of boredom with art and incidental creativeness. In parallel with art, boredom comes along with philosophical approaches especially on existence. When I started my basic research I faced with the sophistication of this fields relation with artworks and I got confused in every step. 

I decided to stick my research on Heidegger’s approaches on boredom and try to find some relations with my photographic output as photographic diaries.

My state of mind was taking shape by the ordinariness of the days when I was working in a bar in Istanbul. Those ordinary days came with new experiences such as living in a city that I am not familiar with and working as a waiter for the first time. I started taking photographs unconsciously just for keeping moments as memories. Afterwards, those photographs led me into a habit. I was creating same pattern everyday with photographs.

I quit the job, went back to my city and kept going on taking photographs every single day. In that period I didn’t go to school for one year, my entourage changed, I was not living with my family and all I had just vacant, ordinary days.

Therefore I started to think about manipulations of reality and I was questioning myself about my honesty through my photographs. I did not know any examples of photographic diaries or any pioneers of the genre. So why I was doing that ? What was the point to take photos everyday ? Why boredom led me into this particular way ?

I

I will struggle with floating ideas in my brain, my leftover images, and try to write on boredom and laziness.

I’ve been thinking on what boredom is due to changes of my life and decisions I made in past 3 years. Do I find any freedom or joy in my engagement with boredom ? Does it lead me to a particular kind of laziness ?

I believe there are many different facts on the way our consideration of boredom. The city I live in where I was born and raised has been always a challenge for me to see my future even though how much I love it. In my point of view, getting bored in where we live also drives us into a mood that we dreaming on what we desire without doing anything.

Keywords

Boredom, Doubt, Solitude, Silence, Expectancy, Mistakes, Coincidence, Laziness, Personality, Curiosity