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The Big Match or even more light bedtime pursue my memory with Proust's insistence. The dead-end evenings the youth, the dutiful visits to the relationship, the equally dreary meetings, which later came the terrible social responsibilities of adulthood and all the many non-event events: can help I 't, they as bits of life that are irreplaceable, stolen deposits or premonitions of death.

My fear is, therefore, to focus what has been called by the German psychologist Martin Doehlemann "situational boredom". This is the kind of bored with watching paint dry, connected, and it 's as old as the color. It is from the first century graffiti in Pompeii, the boredom, refers to the ironic sensibility of an old Banksy: "wall" it calls into Latin. "I ask that you please haven 't in ruin, if you support all the boredom of your inscriber \."

Doehlemann drew a distinction between this long-standing situational boredom and its newer intellectual cousin, "existential boredom", the type that goes to the very core of post-Enlightenment modernity (incidentally, the verb "to bore" didn't arrive in English until the second half of the 18th century). It refers to the affectless despondency resulting from the death of God, the Romantic search for personal meaning, and the metaphysical encounter with nothingness over which legions of writers from Flaubert to Ballard have wept buckets of ink.

Although existential boredom is not a temporary situation as a tiresome chore domestic bound, it is no less the fruit of circumstance, unless they of a certain wealth and leisure stems. By and large, illiterate peasants in the field all day don 't have the luxury of despair at the continual collapse of the culturally produced meaning in a godless world.

Apart from these classifications for a moment, \ it's reasonable to say that boredom is not an easy question. For starters, there is a direct relationship between boredom and boring? It 's probably say that we have a name for the latter - a "hole" - but none for the former.

What about the 30 hours of TV viewing the same average Briton is supposed to run up in a week? As someone who moonlights as a TV critic, I find it hard to accept that there is at least 24 hours of non-boring scheduling that I miss. Which brings us to another vexed question: is there any greater virtue in being exposed to an experience and not perceiving it as boring than knowing that you are bored and complaining of the boredom?

were not sitting around doing nothing. But I wouldn't like to say which activity – thinking in lieu of writing or unloading cement – is most susceptible to boredom.

: "Boredom always contains an awareness of being trapped, either in a particular situation or in the world as a whole." Reading those words instantly transports me to a boxed-in chair at an insufferable dinner party or the middle of the stalls at an excruciating play.

Waugh took his title from a line in TS Eliot's signature text of modernism , wherein the anti-hero, Antoine Roquentin, finds reality turning to dust as he realises that he is imprisoned by freedom, that everything is futile because existence is arbitrary.

The novel rehearses many of the ideas of existentialism that Sartre would later enlarge upon in his philosophical treatise

It would be too severe to say that I was bored – for one thing there were far too many interesting people to look at – but I did experience a vertiginous sense of insignificance, of cultural meaning collapsing before my very eyes. Toohey's book contains a number of illustrations of artworks in which characters appear in various displays of boredom – yawning, stretching, and so on. What it doesn't include is the glazed-eyed expression worn by so many gallery visitors when called upon to appreciate an artwork in a context not unlike that of a supermarket shopper standing in front of an aisle full of brightly packaged washing detergents.

Despite their own struggles with boredom, both Toohey and Svendsen present positive sides of the argument, suggesting that we might, so to speak, be bored to life. For Toohey, boredom is an adaptive characteristic in the Darwinian sense. The ability to be bored, which he describes as a form of mild disgust, is beneficial to humanity. Just as it's been shown that disgust enables us to steer clear of disease-bearing environments, so does boredom guide us away from situations that might be detrimental to our mental health. Toohey goes on to argue that boredom is not merely a negative function. It's often, he says, the precondition for creativity.

boring." And with that she abruptly turned and walked off to look for more entertaining company. I wasn't boring, by the way. Honestly. No, really, let me explain…