Why Your Life is Boring | Soren Kierkegaard Either/Or

Most people don’t like being bored, however, every now and then we find ourselves in that state. Kierkegaard, writing under the character of an aesthetic philosopher in his book Either/Or, states that boredom may actually be a root of evil. Even if we may not go that far, we’d still like to know how to deal with boredom when it comes.
Kierkegaard has two main suggestions for dealing with boredom. First, we should try to cultivate enjoyment intrinsically rather than extrinsically. Instead of chasing after more and more, constantly pursuing change, we should try and train ourselves to enjoy the smaller things in life. By being able to find amusement in anything, we can almost always escape boredom in even the most limiting circumstances.
The next big suggestion is to actually limit our enjoyment of an experience if it starts to become too strong. Kierkegaard suggests that we train ourselves to forget easily so that experiences seem novel and brand new even when we re-encounter them. To do this, he suggests reining in our enjoyment if we find ourselves being swept away too much during an experience. #existentialism #philosophy #kierkegaard