When Nothing Happens

Heidegger on Boredom, Time, and What It Means to Be Human

We do not like being bored.

As soon as an empty space appears, we fill it. We reach for the phone. Read a message. Turn on the radio. Find something to do. While waiting at the doctor’s office, at the airport, or for someone to arrive, the hand almost automatically reaches for something that can make the time pass.

We call it passing the time.

The expression is strange. We try to make time pass, almost as if time were something that had to be driven away.

When Martin Heidegger gave the lectures later published as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World – Finitude – Solitude in Freiburg during the winter semester of 1929–1930, he did something surprising. Before seriously taking up the great metaphysical questions of world, finitude, and solitude, he spent a long time on something as ordinary as boredom.

Langeweile.

Long while.

The word itself already points toward what Heidegger is after. When we are bored, something happens to time. It does not merely pass. It becomes long.

Perhaps that is why boredom is philosophically interesting. Not because it is valuable in itself, but because it can reveal something we ordinarily fail to notice.

Being Bored by Something

Heidegger begins with the form of boredom we most easily recognize.

We are waiting for a train at a small station. There is a long time until departure. There is little to look at. We walk back and forth. Read the timetable even though we already know when the train leaves. Look at the clock. Look at the clock again.

We are bored by something.

Heidegger calls this Gelangweiltwerden von etwas — being bored by something.

The situation holds us fast. The train does not come. Time drags. And so we try to make it pass.

What interests Heidegger is not primarily the irritation. It is the relationship between ourselves and time.

Ordinarily, we hardly notice time. We work, read, talk, go somewhere, or do something else that occupies our attention. Time accompanies our activity without drawing much attention to itself.

But at the station, it steps forward.

Five minutes can feel long.

The clock shows the same kind of time as always. And yet time has become different.

Heidegger has already moved us away from the question, “Why am I bored?” toward a more difficult one:

What is time when it can be experienced in this way?

Being Bored While Something Is Going On

The second form is less obvious.

We have been invited somewhere. The food was good. The conversation was pleasant. Nothing in particular was boring. And yet afterwards, perhaps on the way home, we discover:

I was bored.

Now we cannot point to the train, the waiting room, or any particular person.

The boredom did not simply come from something around us. It permeated the situation as a whole.

Heidegger calls this Sichlangweilen bei etwas — being bored while or during something.

The difference from the railway station matters. In the first form, we actively try to make time pass. In the second, we have in some sense already handed the time over.

And perhaps, at the same time, we have left something of ourselves behind.

Here Heidegger’s analysis becomes uncomfortably close. A person can participate, talk, eat, laugh, and be socially present, and still notice that something is missing.

Not because the situation was bad.

Not because the people were uninteresting.

But because I myself was, in some sense, not fully there.

At that point boredom begins to concern more than a lack of entertainment. It begins to concern the way we are present in our own lives.

“One Is Bored”

Then Heidegger turns to the third and deepest form.

Here it is no longer a particular thing that bores us. Nor is it a situation that we can afterwards describe as boring. The German formulation becomes more impersonal:

Es ist einem langweilig.

One is bored.

Now the very relation between ourselves and beings shifts.

The usual ways of passing the time no longer work in the same way. Heidegger’s point is not that we simply lack something entertaining to do. It is rather as if the things around us lose their ability to grip us.

They are still there.

The table is there. The road is there. Other people are around us.

But they no longer offer us what they usually offer.

They no longer call us into activity in the same way.

In profound boredom, beings as a whole can, in a sense, refuse themselves to us. And precisely through this withdrawal, the whole becomes noticeable.

It sounds paradoxical.

But perhaps we recognize something of the experience.

We often notice meaning most clearly when meaning begins to waver.

When the World No Longer Keeps Us Occupied

This is where boredom becomes metaphysical.

For Heidegger, a mood is not merely a subjective feeling inside a person. A mood is also a way in which the world is disclosed to us.

During these years, he gives anxiety — Angst — a similar role. Anxiety, too, can tear us away from the familiar and allow das Seiende im Ganzen — beings as a whole — to appear in a different way.

The kinship between anxiety and profound boredom is therefore important.

In anxiety, the familiar loses some of its taken-for-granted character. In profound boredom, something related happens, but more quietly. Things are still there, but they cease to grip us.

It is not one particular thing that appears differently.

Our relation to beings itself shifts.

When the world ceases to keep us occupied, the world as a whole can become noticeable in a way it ordinarily is not.

Heidegger therefore examines boredom as a Grundstimmung, a fundamental attunement capable of breaking open the ordinary way in which we are absorbed in the world.

Boredom thereby becomes a path into metaphysics.

Not because it provides answers.

But because it can open the question.

The Age of Passing Time

Nearly a hundred years after Heidegger’s lectures, it is difficult to read these pages without thinking of our own everyday lives.

We have acquired possibilities for passing time that Heidegger could hardly have imagined.

A person today can stand in a queue for thirty seconds and already have taken out a phone. A moment without activity can be filled with messages, news, images, video, games, or music.

That does not mean the phone is the problem.

The more interesting question is why empty space must be filled so quickly.

What is it we do not want to encounter when nothing happens?

Here Heidegger’s analysis can become practical philosophy.

We do not need to turn boredom into a virtue or romanticize passivity. The question is simpler and at the same time more difficult:

What happens if we do not immediately flee from the empty space?

Remaining There

Practical philosophy is not primarily about finding theories that explain life. It begins in experience and returns to experience.

Heidegger’s analysis of boredom does precisely this.

He does not first ask us to define time.

He lets us wait for the train.

He lets us sit through the social evening.

And finally, he lets us remain in the more unsettling experience in which, for a moment, the world offers us nothing definite to seize upon.

Only then can the question arise.

Not merely:

What shall I do now?

But:

What am I really doing?

What am I allowing my life to be filled with?

What matters when the things with which I usually fill my time lose their grip?

Boredom gives no answers to these questions.

But it can open a space in which the questions can no longer be dismissed quite so easily.

On the High Plains

I recognize something of this from another experience.

During my walk toward Santiago, I eventually reached the Spanish high plains. The landscape was simple. Day after day I walked through much the same terrain. Long stretches with few people. Little to distract the attention. The road continued, the hours passed, and the world around me did not constantly offer something new.

It could resemble boredom.

But gradually, something else happened.

I had brought with me Kierkegaard’s The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air. There I had encountered the words silence, obedience, and joy. On the high plains, obedience in particular began to take on a different meaning for me.

Not obedience as submission to another person’s will, but as a willingness to receive what was actually there.

The road.

The day.

The body.

The silence.

The simplicity.

I could not make the high plains more interesting. I could only walk them.

Perhaps it was precisely in this repetition that something opened. As the need for constant new impressions weakened, another kind of attention emerged. The silence did not become empty. Solitude did not become merely the absence of others.

And obedience was accompanied by something I had not expected:

joy.

Here Kierkegaard and Heidegger part ways, but for a moment they stand close to one another.

For Heidegger, profound boredom can loosen us from what usually keeps us occupied and place us before world, time, and our own possibilities. In Kierkegaard, the simple and the quiet take a different direction. Silence and obedience are not primarily about seizing a possibility, but about becoming receptive to what is already given.

That is an important difference.

In Heidegger, the empty space opens toward possibility.

In Kierkegaard, it can open toward receptivity.

And yet both begin in an experience in which the ordinary noise falls silent.

Perhaps that was what I learned on the high plains:

When less and less happens, the world does not have to become poorer.

It can become clearer.

As I now read Heidegger, another image also begins to resonate. Throughout much of his life, he returned to the hut at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest, to work, walking, and quiet. I do not know what that silence meant to him, and I do not want to read his philosophy directly out of his biography.

But the image makes me stop.

Perhaps because I read him from a place I already know.

I do not read from an empty place.

I come to the text with my own roads, my own high plains, and my own experience of what can happen when less and less happens.

The Time We Try to Get Rid Of

There is a strange contradiction in passing the time.

We know that life is limited.

We want time. We complain that we have too little of it. We want more years, more days, more hours with the people we love.

And yet there are moments when the only thing we want is for time to pass.

We want to kill it.

Pass it.

Get rid of it.

Heidegger pauses before this paradox.

When time becomes long, we try to make it shorter. But perhaps long time shows us something precisely about the time we otherwise simply use.

It is tempting to draw a moral conclusion here: We ought to stop wasting time.

But then we might once again be fleeing from Heidegger’s question.

He asks something deeper.

He asks what time is for a being that does not merely live in time, but relates to its own time — and senses that this time is limited.

Boredom thus leads toward another of the fundamental words in these lectures:

Endlichkeit.

Finitude.

From Boredom to Possibility

But Heidegger does not stop at finitude either.

Profound boredom does more than empty the world of its usual significance. When what normally occupies us loses its grip, our own possibilities can also come more clearly into view.

Here another Heideggerian term appears:

Augenblick.

The moment.

But not the moment understood as a brief point on the clock. Heidegger’s Augenblick points toward a way of being present in which a person can seize their own situation and their own possibilities.

This does not mean that boredom automatically makes us wiser. It can just as easily lead to restlessness, escape, and still more ways of passing the time.

But it can open a possibility.

When the world no longer tells us what to do, the question of what we ourselves will do can emerge with greater seriousness.

This is where the connection between boredom and freedom becomes interesting.

Freedom does not merely mean having many options before us. It can also mean being confronted with the uncomfortable fact that my life cannot be filled in for me from the outside.

Something must be seized.

And something will always remain unseized.

When Nothing Happens

Perhaps this is why we find boredom so difficult.

When nothing demands our attention, something else can become noticeable.

Not necessarily anything dramatic.

Perhaps only time.

The room.

The silence.

That I am sitting here.

That life is passing.

But for Heidegger, profound boredom does not end with this experience. When beings as a whole no longer offer us anything definite to seize upon, we can also find ourselves confronted with our own possibilities.

That is why boredom is philosophically fruitful.

It can loosen us from what usually keeps us occupied and place us before a more demanding kind of freedom.

On the high plains I learned something that may lie close to this, even though the language was different.

When less and less happened, life did not necessarily become emptier.

Silence grew.

Obedience grew.

And joy grew with them.

We live in an age extraordinarily skilled at ensuring that something is always happening.

Perhaps, then, what we need is not first of all to learn how to avoid boredom.

Perhaps we can sometimes refrain from driving it away.

For when nothing happens, something decisive may become possible:

Time shows itself.

The world opens.

And I am confronted with how I will be.

References

Heidegger, M. (1983). Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit (F.-W. von Herrmann, Ed.; Gesamtausgabe, Vols. 29/30). Vittorio Klostermann.

Heidegger, M. (1995). The fundamental concepts of metaphysics: World, finitude, solitude (W. McNeill & N. Walker, Trans.). Indiana University Press.