HOW EASILY we are bored. It has become fashionable, even before the election is announced, to declare languidly that the whole process is frightfully, unbearably boring. Charles and Camilla’s nuptials have already been dismissed as deadly dull. There are even people declaring themselves bored of the Olympics we may or may not be hosting seven years from now. We are bored of tragedy, prey to charity fatigue. Chelsea Football Club: tedious. Posh and Becks: yesterday’s yawn.

Big Brother: inspirationally boring, a live programme about people being bored.

Here are some of the things that I have found boring in the last few weeks alone: magical realist novels, The Daily Telegraph letters page, house prices, Franz Ferdinand, rain, rhododendrons, Welsh rugby supporters, Welsh people who don’t like rugby, non-Welsh people who like rugby, Monopoly, Howard Flight, horse-show trials and hedge-clipping. I am also bored of people saying how bored they are; as Mark Twain observed, the bored tend to be “incredibly boring people ”.

But what is boredom? This “savage torpor” (Wordsworth) to which we are all prey, this accusation we level at anything that fails to grab and hold and hold our constant attention (ie, just about everything). Boredom is a defining feature of the modern age, and avoiding it has become an obsession. Yet we seldom seek to understand this universal phenomenon that Dostoyevsky described as “a bestial and indefinable affliction” and Kierkegaard called the “root of all evil”. The world’s boredom threshold has never been lower, thanks to a culture that urgently promises to entertain and stimulate us, all the time, and necessarily fails. Every English-speaking child knows that this one word with two heavily-stressed syllables is the ultimate dismissal: “Bor-ring.”

Lars Svendsen (boring name), a professor of philosophy (boring subject) from Norway (boring country), has written a quite fascinating book entitled A Philosophy of Boredom, which concludes that people are often more spurred into action out of boredom, or the desire to escape boredom, than through mental stimulation or interest. “Boredom,” he writes, “is a typical phenomenon of modernity . . . relevant for practically everyone in the Western world.

”

In the broad history of human experience, boredom is itself a novelty. The word “bore” was invented only in the 18th century, with the growing expectation that life should be interesting, rather than simply good. Even the Germans, amazingly enough, had not discovered boredom (Langeweile) before this point.

True, there was plenty of boredom around. It is quite possible to be busy and bored; indeed, that is probably what most people have been through most of history. Seneca wrote of tedium vitae, the weariness of life, and the hermits of Lower Egypt complained of the “noonday devil” that sapped vitality and made all those hermit chores seem doubly dull. Early Christian fathers condemned acedia, the pre-modern ancestor of boredom, as a sin from which all others spread. In a way they were right, for boredom is statistically linked with a range of ills from drug-abuse to promiscuity, violence, suicide and afternoon soap operas.

Poets and artists have wrestled with boredom. Some positively revelled in it: Proust in his cork-lined room, Beckett endlessly waiting for Godot and Baudelaire sprouting fleurs du mal on “planes of Ennui, vacant and profound”. It took Romanticism and the corresponding rise in introspection to democratise boredom; before then, only monks, nobles and writers had the time and leisure to be bored. Boredom was a status symbol. Even today, when everyone has an equal right to be jaded, a declaration that one is bored lends a fake air of sophistication.

Boredom separates us from animals, which may be unstimulated, but never quite bored. We may be bored to death, but we also know instinctively that boredom is itself an intimation of mortality, a threatening shadow of the approaching nothingness. At some point in the 19th century, boredom mutated from a phenomenon due to personal inadequacy (“It is our own fault if we ever know what ennui is,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1787), to something inflicted on us by external factors.

Fear of tedium is a modern luxury. While it seems probable that the amount of happiness and unhappiness, love and hatred, joy and anger have remained pretty constant over the centuries, the quantity of boredom in the world has increased massively in recent times, forcing us to find ever more contorted ways of avoiding it. Eluding boredom has become a moral imperative, a multibillion-pound industry of cell phone ring tones and instant messaging and downloadable diversion via the internet, the ultimate anti-boredom device. Our economy has become dependent on the cycle of boredom, briefly assuaged by fresh entertainment, followed swiftly by more boredom and then more novelty.

Politicians are experts in boredom. To sit through a select committee on local transport issues needs superhuman boredom defences, or a vat of Red Bull. And the aura of boredom is the mark of death to a politician. Some have tried to turn their own lack of lustre to advantage. “I am a quiet man,” Iain Duncan Smith said, attempting to disguise his own worthy dullness under a thin euphemism. From that moment, IDS was toast. “What’s wrong with being a boring kind of guy? ” wondered President George Bush Sr, shortly before he was ousted from the White House. Nothing is more hilarious than the spectacle of a naturally tiresome politician attempting to make himself seem interesting by, say, wearing an amusing hat.

The poet Joseph Brodsky believed that the only way to combat boredom was to embrace it wholeheartedly. “When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.” The same advice applies to elections.

The coming election will be defined by boredom, though itself far from boring. Victory will not necessarily go to the best candidates, but to the least boring ones. For the next four weeks, every politician in the land will be trying desperately to combat the modern scourge of boredom — and nothing could be more interesting than that.

Join the Debate
Send your e-mails to debate@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone