Boredom

Marsh treats boredom not as a trivial state but as a sign of severe distress, and gives it precise causes. It occurs when an interaction is offered that the person cannot access, or when a third party is intercepting an interaction, cutting them off from a connection they would otherwise have, or when there is simply no interaction available at all. Underneath these, boredom is the inability or refusal to exercise will and seek interaction, a failure or withdrawal of the will that reaches out to engage with the world. Its gravest form is chronic: this, she says, is the standing condition of an endoself, the self so cut off from primary anima and so sublated in its will that it can no longer reach out for genuine interaction at all. Read this way, boredom is not idleness but a symptom of blocked or collapsed connection.

Psychology treats boredom as an emotional state of low arousal and dissatisfaction linked to lack of stimulation or meaning. Marsh's account is more severe and more specific: boredom is distress caused by blocked, intercepted or absent interaction, and a failure of will, with its chronic form diagnostic of the endoself rather than a passing mood.