Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Kevin Gary: The real problem of boredom really gets at the problem of being able to pay attention. It's this tendency to flip from one thing to the next, and the undergirding hardware of that is this despair of the self. I just can't really focus on one thing because I'm really just not comfortable in my own skin.

Kierkegaard talks about someone who just lives his life to avoid boredom. It's just a very curious mood state that doesn't give us clear data at times. Boredom just flies under the radar. So I'm in a bored state, and I just completely avoid it or toggle away from it. When we think about leisure, we think about vacationing or kind of, you know, vegging out. I just need to unplug and uncheck, and that is not leisure. The word school coming from the Latin 'schola' is to be able to, not just to attend to something, but to be receptive to something, and the practice of leisure going back to the early church was really trying to set up very simple ways that you can just attend to something.

We could do that in very small, mundane ways, and in doing that, you begin to tackle that despair.

Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Picture yourself. The exact middle of summer, the exact middle of the day, feeling exactly in the middle of nowhere.

You're bored, discontented, and disconnected from the place you're in and the moment you're in. It's a special kind of mind numbing hell. And with more free time to kill these days, we all know the slow drag of boredom. And though it's sometimes presented as a modern bourgeois phenomenon, it's been around a long time.

Here is a quick, incomplete history of boredom. First up, the preacher of Ecclesiastes laments over human toil: "everything is vanity and chasing after wind. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing," around 250 BC. The stoic Roman philosopher Seneca noticed the nauseating tedium in his famous letter "On Tranquility," describing it as a "vacillation of a mind that nowhere finds rest, and the sad and languid endurance of one's leisure. Thence comes mourning and melancholy and the thousand waverings of an unsettled mind...Thence comes that feeling which makes men loathe their own leisure and complain that they themselves have nothing to be busy with." A few hundred years later, the ancient Christian monks of the desert struggle with the noonday demon, acedia, a vice of spiritual boredom, with their vocation of prayer and faithfulness.

Thomas Aquinas and other Scholastics disciplined the "roving mind." And variants of the English "boredom," including being bored to death, show up in Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville around the mid 19th century. Kierkegaard calls it the root of all evil. Heiddeger sees it in a more positive light, saying that philosophy begins in the nothingness of boredom.

C.S. Lewis's Uncle Screwtape advises that "anything or nothing is sufficient to attract the wandering attention" of Jr. Demon Wormwood's human patient. And of course, the French bourgeoisie nailed it with "ennui," that many a suburban latchkey kid can relate to. In the King-Kubrick masterpiece, The Shining, boredom goes very dark when, "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

And in 2007, humanity finally achieves the cure for all boredom when the first iPhone was created.

Just kidding.

Well, today we're hoping to do much more than entertain you with a bit of boredom. My colleague at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, Drew Collins, joins me for a conversation with Kevin Gary, Professor of Education at Valparaiso University and author of Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life.

Together, we talk about the phenomena of boredom, the childhood experience of it, how to define or even understand what boredom is, it's connection to entertainment and education, and finally, the role of attention and leisure in cultivating a healthy understanding and response to being totally bored out of our minds.

Thanks for killing time with us today. Enjoy.

Kevin, Drew, it's so good to be with you today.

Kevin Gary: Great to be with you. Thanks for having me, Evan.

Drew Collins: It is great to be with you guys.

Evan Rosa: We're discussing your new book, Kevin, Why Boredom Matters, and I thought I would set a little bit of a stage here with a personal story that perhaps each of you can relate to. My daughter Lux just turned 10, and she regularly walks up to me, sometimes while we're already having fun or being entertained, and it's pretty classic scenario: "Dad, I'm bored." And my go-to answer is, "I'm fine with that Lux." And I'm just curious if that resonates with you, or if I'm doing something wrong. How do you guys handle boredom in your children?

Kevin Gary: That certainly resonates with me, and so this is a work that is very personal, growing up as a child suffering with boredom. But as a teacher of high school students and then college students, boredom is kinda like the elephant in the room that I was afraid of and sort of guiding my teaching. When I think about my children and my students and paying attention, I notice really two ways that we tend to respond to the problem of boredom, and I think these are culturally conditioned ways.

The first is we just find ways to avoid it, to steer clear of it, to just move on to the next thing. And I think the smartphone is perhaps the most iconic device that we've created for doing that very thing. And so avoidance is the number one response. And then the second response, and this kind of speaks to your daughter and your response is, I noticed we resign ourselves to boredom.

I visit a lot of classrooms. I'm actually a philosopher of education and get to see a lot of classrooms, and I'm always amazed often at just how boring the classes are. And what's striking to me is the students, I kind of expect there to be a revolution, I mean, just given that they're doing such dull, worksheet-type work, and instead they just kind of- they're complacent.

And so there's sort of either avoidance on the one hand or there's this resignation that there's nothing to be done. It's a boring situation, and I just have to accept it. And I think the resignation also stems from the fact sometimes adults, when children will say they're bored, and I don't think you're saying this Evan, but sometimes adults just say, "well, that's life, get used to it."

Evan Rosa: Right.

Kevin Gary: And I find both responses to be very problematic and instead of avoidance or resignation, what I'm calling for is, what does it look like to really think about this problem? To reflect on it in a thoughtful way. And your response, it sounds like you're going in that direction: what are you gonna do with that?

You know, where are you gonna go with that?

Drew Collins: Yeah. We've taken a slightly different approach. I have pretty young kids. I've got a daughter who's seven and twin boys who just turned four. And every morning, without fail, after breakfast this entire summer, they finish breakfast and quickly thereafter, they will come up to my wife or to me with the same refrain every single day: "I'm bored." And we've currently adopted the approach of telling them, treating it as if it's a profanity, and so, they are not allowed to tell us that they're bored. And that of course, there are situations where obviously that would not apply. There are of course, many boring circumstances in which they might find themselves.

That's just usually not the case when they tell us that they're bored. They see themselves, they experience themselves as being bored. And so we've been treating it, I think as a sort of, as a failure of their expectations in some respects. So to me, the problem is not so much boredom itself, but the way in which boredom so often seems to communicate a diminishment of their agency and also their ability just to truly see their surroundings.

Kevin Gary: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, so to be bored situationally, it's to be in a situation that you don't find stimulating, and there's a loss of agency and really it's a loss of the imagination, an ability to see possibilities. And the temptation as a parent is to solve the problem, is to give them- to do the imagining work for them.

So that's the hard part. And as parents, we tend to, I mean, I capitulate and want to hand them something that will do the imagining or direct them down some algorithmic path to solve it rather than let them stay with that just for a little while. I used to have these tech fasts with my family when my kids were about your age. And I was always amazed when we just say, there's gonna be no technology this weekend, and it would be painful. But then it would turn into building forts in the living room with the couch pillows and just to see the imagination get activated. I mean, I think that's what I see is just a failure of imagination that happens.

Drew Collins: One of the most prominent responses when I talk to parents, to other parents about this, rather than, you know, oh, "well, I'm okay with that," or "that's life," I increasingly hear parents who say, well, they- their response is, "Good, that's good. I'm glad you're bored," as if boredom is somehow the antidote to an overstimulated world, to a world filled with screens and entertainment, and that boredom is somehow now in the 21st century in America or wherever is a good thing, a sort of eating our vegetables.

And I don't know what you guys make of that. I really find that to be wrongheaded in important ways, but I don't know what you guys think about it.

Kevin Gary: Yeah, I've seen articles on the goodness of boredom where boredom is good, and I'm very skeptical of that. You know, acedia, boredom's ancient precursor, acedia was one of the eight deadly thoughts, and it was the- kind of the wellspring of all these other possible thoughts, resentment, anger. And in the boredom research, boredom is causally correlated to all kinds of problematic behaviors: addiction, overconsumption, overeating, gambling, student misconduct, student dropout. So it's a precarious state, and so to just say, "oh good, you're bored," it can go down a lot of very, very problematic pathways. And so just putting kids in a bored state and hoping it's gonna turn out right is also a very risky wager that I think we need to be careful with.

Evan Rosa: I wonder if we could do a little bit of work on the definition of boredom and talk a little bit about maybe the kinds of boredom. You bring up acedia, this ancient- it was considered a vice, a kind of spiritual boredom or a spiritual torpor that resisted the call, right? Like it resisted one's vocation at a kind of existential level. And you bring up Kierkegaard, you bring up Heiddeger in the book, and you do a little bit of interacting with both, and from one vantage point, boredom is just this kind of product of the bourgeoisie, the middle class, and it's benign. And that might help to support either the view that it's either good or productive or just you kind of live with it and are resigned to it. But then when you listen to Kierkegaard on boredom and he says something like, it's the root of all evil and it's the despairing refusal to be oneself, kind of poses it in a much different direction, so like, understanding the enemy so to speak here if boredom is in fact the enemy, or understanding the friend if it's in fact the friend, how do you like to construe it? What's- how should we wrap our heads around the definition of it?

Kevin Gary: Well, it is fascinating that historically boredom was considered to be morally hazardous terrain, so when I'm feeling bored, we should be morally on alert. And in the last 60, 70 years, the boredom research has kind of neutralized boredom. It's just a mood state that comes and we can go all kinds of ways with it, and so that's really striking. And so in my book, I'm really drawing back to that tradition that Kierkegaard- that thread that Kierkegaard's pulling on, which is saying, no, there's something morally worrisome about the bored state. In terms of the definition, I mean, situational boredom is being in a situation that's not stimulating. I'm restless because it's not stimulating, and I wanna get out of it. But if you're really stuck in it, you don't have agency, you don't know what to do to get out of it. Heiddeger makes the distinction, though, between situational and existential, and existential is, quoting Tolstoy, it's "a desire for desire." So I'm in a situation that I'm not enjoying, but I don't know what situation will get me out of this deeper malaise. And so existential boredom is a more profound, serious state. But really, the neutralization of boredom, I argue in the book, is very problematic. And so I'm trying to make a case for why we need to be morally on alerts, and that's really what Evagrius in the fourth century was calling us to. And so that's where I'm going with it.

Drew Collins: Yeah, I mean, I tend to think of boredom as a species of alienation. And so there's a sense in which, when I'm- when I or my children or someone experiences boredom, they are experiencing a certain form of alienation from their surroundings. There's a sense of which, yes, the place in which they are and the time in which they are holds no promise for them, it's sort of emptied and it's- and their existence is, somehow, there's no relationship between themselves, their imagination, and the place and time in which they currently find themselves. And I think to me, that's important. And Kevin, I know that this is a part of your book as well. I'd love to hear you say more about this.

There's something important there. While I don't want to champion boredom as a good in any significant respect, it does seem to hold a certain sort of diagnostic power, which is to say there are in fact, there have always been, perhaps, but perhaps more than ever in the history of the world today, places that are alienating. To experience boredom in a cubicle seems to me to be broadly apt. A cubicle is designed to be a boring place, and so to experience boredom in those contexts seems entirely understandable and in that sense, though it's still not good, what's bad about it is that it names the sort of the problems of our surroundings, of our circumstances. So the problem there is not boredom itself, but the context and the conditions, the circumstances.

Kevin Gary: Yeah. It's an interesting mood state because it both- there's sort of a subjective and an objective quality. So the cubicle, we could say objectively, there's something boring about this environment, but it's the subject that's making that interpretation and boredom is curious because it's kind of like- you know, I think of like an engine light goes on and you realize, okay, something's amiss here, but with boredom, you're not quite sure what it is. There could be situations where, you know, I had a college roommate who I thought was very boring, and my decision early on was, okay, I'm gonna limit the amount of time I spend with Craig, and because I had to spend time with Craig, I came to discover that Craig was a really interesting person and I just completely misread him, and so the boredom indicator light was not a helpful guide in that context. But in thinking about my career or vocation, if I'm in a cubicle and I'm bored out of my mind, it's an indicator that's saying I need to rethink what I'm doing here. So it's just a very curious mood state that doesn't give us clear data at times.

And so what happens most of the time though, is we really tend to act out of it without even noticing or thinking about it. And that's what really I think is problematic. When you think about when you get angry, you feel the anger in your system. And imagine a time when you get angry and you over overreact and it causes you to reflect on this mood and think about my relationship with this mood. And that often doesn't happen with boredom. Boredom just flies under the radar. So I'm in a bored state and I just completely avoid it or toggle away from it. And so we can- Kierkegaard talks about living lives of, you know, someone who just lives his life to avoid boredom. And I think that also is a very powerful diagnostic of modernity, really. And sort of what we're contending with now.

Drew Collins: Yeah, I think that's- I mean, I loved that you named that.

Evan Rosa: So you point out that Kierkegaard considers boredom ultimately a form of despair. And here we're not just talking about the situational side of things; this is a very deeply existential aspect of what boredom is. And this is ultimately the kind of boredom that you end up engaging and talking about. I want to understand what you mean by despair as well, and you suggest that we really need to understand the self and the forms of despair that come to us.

Kevin Gary: When I had to take my son Gabe to kindergarten a few years ago, and we were visiting the first day of school and there were workstations, four at a table, and at each workstation, every student on the very first day had an iPad sitting there. And that caused me to feel despair, and perhaps I'm showing some blood inclinations here. You know, I think there's this tendency to avoid boredom, and Kierkegaard would say there's something deeper going on there, where we're really not comfortable with ourselves; there's something amiss there, and he's trying to unpack the self, and he's gonna say, there's two things. On the one hand, you are chasing novelty because you know nothing is really holding your interests, and so you're constantly looking for the new or the next possibility, on the one hand. Or, you've just sort of given up that there is gonna be any novelty and you've kind of resigned yourself. And so Kierkegaard, this really dense, complex definition of the self being a self that, you know, is a combination of necessity and possibility that holds those two together, is really setting up this really delicate dialectic. And so on the one hand we veer towards avoidance, and on the other hand, we veer towards necessity, sort of resigning ourselves. And then what I'm trying to do is to look at the practice of leisure. And this actually was one of the aims for education at the beginning of the 20th century, that we need to cultivate- students need to know how to be worthy people of leisure, that they know how to use it well and wisely. And this is something that's completely absent in our educational discourse now; we're really about competing and beating out China or Russia with math and science. And yet if we don't get a handle on boredom, we think about the consumption, the needless wants and consumption of our culture, it really comes back to looking for the next new thing, we are gonna need to take this kind of Kierkegaardian turn. Heidegger also was deeply influenced by Kierkegaard, and in the Heiddeger reading, and this is difficult to unpack in Heiddeger, but his response is, when you're bored, what you really need to do is you need to sit with it and just go into it and push through it, and in doing that, you're gonna find who your authentic, true self is. And so he holds up this idea, and Charles Taylor talks about the authentic self and, sort of, if I can just be my authentic me, I'll overcome the existential boredom that I seem to find myself getting caught up in. And turning to Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard really doesn't have this idea of an authentic self. His- the authentic self, he wouldn't call it that, would be the self that's resting transparently in God. And so that's where it gets somewhat opaque in my view, and so what I'm trying to do is draw out an idea or a practice of leisure and just sort of see what that looks like. And partly when we think about leisure, we think about vacationing or kind of, I use the expression in the book very familiar when "vegging out." I just need to unplug and uncheck and that is not leisure. Leisure, the word school coming from the Latin "schola," is to be able to, not just to attend to something, but to be receptive to something. And we could do that in very small, mundane ways, but the real problem of boredom really gets at the problem of being able to pay attention. And it's this tendency to flit from one thing to the next, and the under- kind of the undergirding hardware of that is this despair of the self. I just can't really focus on one thing because I'm really just not comfortable in my own skin. And the practice of leisure, going back to the early church, was really trying to set up very simple ways that you can just attend to something. And in doing that, you begin to tackle that despair. That's kind of what I'm trying to get at. But with Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard is very difficult.

Evan Rosa: Well, I wonder if attention, if it's worthy to kind of go into a little bit of your interaction with Simone Weil in the book, who experienced boredom through the kind of tedium and monotony of blue collar work, which she undertook as a form of solidarity, and yet it really pushed her toward an antidote of attention.

And so I would like to camp out on attention because I think we are in- one, we have been described as we live in an attention economy where brands are constantly after our attention, and to hold the attention of an audience is to exert some kind of power over them. If we think about power even in the good use of it, right, to kind of steward the attention of a student or to steward the attention of the congregant or the sermon listener. Let's talk about attention.

Kevin Gary: Yeah, she was working at the Renault car factory and you know what's really quite troubling in that journal entry, she talks about she lost the capacity to even name her experience, and she found herself describing it with sort of platitudes and clichés that were just sort of out there, and sort of this grinding, alienating kind of work creates situations where boredom is just awful. And so she's seeing that, on the other hand then, her wonderful essay and study on how to study in a way that is almost, not almost, can be an act of prayer, she's talking about attention, but she's talking about attention in kind of a different way. When we think about attention, she describes the student who's kind of clenching their hands and they're really focused and it requires a lot of effort and a lot of kind of determined agency, and she's not talking about that attention so much as she's talking about a kind of receptivity where you're attending to something, but at the same time you're also kind of, rather than your fists clenched, your hands are open and you're receiving a gentler directing of the gaze in a way that opens you up to whatever it is you're doing. And that's really what practices of leisure are about.

Pivoting now to philosopher Albert Borgmann. He talks about focal practices: very simple ways that human beings over time have found ways to cultivate kind of deep attention. I mean, I think you're right, we live in an economy of attention, ways to capture and hold and divert and redirect our attention, and we constantly put ourselves in situations where our attention can be interrupted at any moment. And focal practices set up sort of guardrails to avoid that. And Borgmann talks about very simple things. He talks about go out and chop wood for an hour. Just do that and don't try to be great at it, but just do that for an hour or go for a walk for an hour without your smartphone. These really simple ways that you begin to kind of redirect your attention and move into a kind of attention that's more receptive than this task that I need to achieve.

Drew Collins: I think it's so interesting, your emphasis on attention, because it's so common, I think, in our world today to assume that the opposite or the antidote to boredom is entertainment. But they're actually caught up in this sort of perverse, binary orbit, those two, boredom and entertainment.

Evan Rosa: That's a great point.

Drew Collins: Right, and they're sort of circling around each other in a sense.

Evan Rosa: Well, I wanted to say that my daughter, when she's telling me that she's bored, she has this tacit assumption that entertainment is in fact the solution. And I think you've helped me be able to articulate when I say, "I'm fine with that," I'm recognizing that if I were just to entertain her more, I'm actually just increasing the likelihood of her being caught in the despair of her boredom. And I want to even that out in the same way that, you know, that it's that addiction to entertainment that like, you just keep needing more of it, and you're just on this cycle of boredom and entertainment, and boredom and entertainment.

Drew Collins: No, I think that's exactly- I think that's really helpful for me too. And I think the upshot of that for me is both, on the one hand, the antidote to boredom is not entertainment: it's attention. But at the same time, going back to the Simone Weil anecdote, some places, some contexts, some circumstances are not worth attending to - maybe that's the wrong way of saying it - diminish our ability to attend to them or limit the horizons of our attention in intentional ways, and that's perverse. And her experience in that Renault factory is an indictment of the factory, right? And more than it is of herself. But the other way of thinking about that- some other implications of that are, I think for her, is that attention is the antidote to boredom, although they're also closely intertwined in some respects because some of the things that are worth attending to are hard.

She says this in that article about attention in the classroom, in school studies. That the things that are really worth our time and our focus and our energy are not often the things that come naturally or easily or that sort of are immediately engaging. Some of the things that are most worth our attention take some work and some effort and might strike us initially as boring. It can cut both ways. Sometimes that's an accurate reflection of the thing that we're focusing on, we're looking at, and sometimes, it's a call to sort of attend more deeply.

And then entertainment is also, therefore, not necessarily the problem. It is not as if good books, good movies, good television shows, you know, are the problem or the source of boredom today. Quite the opposite. There are forms of entertainment that ask- are demanding of our attention, and that I think sort of inoculate us in some respects from the experience of boredom.

Kevin Gary: Well, the entertainment-boredom cycle, as you put very well, I mean, it becomes even more boring. And so you're almost hitting a deeper level of boredom. And so in that sense, you can have an epiphany and realize, I need to figure out how to break out of this cycle. But it really does feed into, Evan, as you were saying, the kind of despair that Kierkegaard is alerting us to.

Evan Rosa: I want to dig in a little bit more to leisure as that antidote. So if attention has an important place to play, and as Drew was talking about, there's a kind of work or effort of the mind- of the conscious mind to attend to something and really take on a task like you suggest, Kevin, just going out to chop some wood or take care of a garden, whatever that mindful or attentive practice is there, make the connection point to leisure for us. And I think we need to kind of pull out some of what you really mean by leisure, because I think there's in- just as there is confusion about what boredom is, I think there's gonna be confusion about what leisure is. Most people associate leisure with just white privilege, and not just bourgeois, but, you know, like just a lazy, like, I've got nothing to do, I don't need to lift a finger, everyone's gonna take care of me, whatever. Tell us what leisure really is and how it's the antitode.

Kevin Gary: Yeah. Yeah. In thinking about leisure, I'm really drawing on the Sabbath tradition. Abraham Heschel's talk in his wonderful book on man and time talks about the Sabbath was this sort of oasis in the context of the Roman Empire that was trying to the hegemonic tendencies of work to fill up every second of our lives. And so in that respect, no I'm not talking about the privilege leisure of being able to go on a vacation, it's really talking about a different kind of way of engaging with very ordinary experiences that we contend with in our day-to-day lives. Part of this is- so the bored mind is a restless- Thomas Aquinas describes it as a roving mind, and so the solution to the bored mind is novelty, distraction, and just going from one thing to the next. And so the practices of leisure - washing dishes can be a very leisurely activity - to the bored mind just look kind of repulsive like this is- that's ridiculous. A friend of mine a few years ago invited me to go birding with him. Have you, I dunno if you've ever been birding. And he described it, we'll be out there for about three hours with binoculars. And I have to say it- I'm kind of a bored soul, and I was like- that sounds like- I don't wanna do that. But when I thought about it again, I realized, oh, actually that would probably be very good for me. I'd have to slow down, I'd be walking, I'd have to be seeing and just, and what's distinctive about that activity is it creates a whole structure of circumstances that set you up to attend. I think part of the problem with the tension is we don't have a liturgy, you know, literally guide rails to guide and direct our attention. We're constantly in environments that are just rife with distraction, and so part of entering into leisure is setting up circumstances that enable it to even get off the ground. But from the outside looking in, leisure looks plain, mundane, and just not very enticing. And so this is where the apprentice has kind of a blindness to this idea of being a person of leisure. You know, in the book I talk about having a friend. So my friend, Justice, who goes birding, just trust, Justice, trust that he's onto something here, and I just need to be an apprentice and go out and begin to see and experience in a new way.

And so entering into leisure is entering into a practice that redirects your attention, but not just in kind of a grasping way, but in a more receptive kind of way. And that's taking kind of the roving, bored mind, really kind of settling or quieting that down. And it can be done in very ordinary ways.

I mean, part of the ways we deal with boredom is we do lots of engaging things like we've got hobbies that we can do or... But, what I'm trying to make a case for in the book is that once the hobby's done, life seems kind of dull and we have to do all the ordinary, mundane things. And so to enter into mundane things, we use the word mindful, and I think that's a really good word because I think with boredom avoidance, there's kind of a mindlessness that is happening there, and so leisure is trying to speak to that.

Drew Collins: One of the things that came up for me, maybe a weird connection, but I started thinking about Gordon Wood, the historian and his history of the American Revolution and this ideal from the beginning of a founding of America, the United States, that the ideal politician was a man of leisure, essentially a man of independent means.

And the reason for that was because they could be disinterested, right? Which is not uninterested, not disengaged, but is able to attend to things free of a certain sort of perverse instrumentalization of them, right, for their own projects and ends. They could sort of let the political debate and the decisions that needed to be made, they could attend to them without making them about themselves always. And I wonder if there's a struggle against instrumentalization that you're describing when you talk about leisure as an approach to education in the sciences and maths and things like that. What I hear in what you're saying is there's a certain way of practicing leisure that lets things surprise you, lets things be what they are in a way that you're not always trying to make them do something specific or sort of assert your own program on them.

Kevin Gary: I think that's well said. Alistair McIntyre talks about the intrinsic goods of a practice. So I enjoy doing something and I could get fame or win at some sport, but to partake of the intrinsic goods is to actually kind of be surprised and to recognize, well, I'm really enjoying this, or there's something about this that I'm experiencing here, and being kind of instrumental and goal-driven is an anti-leisure state. And so it's partaking of those intrinsic goods, but doing it in very simple ways as well is in more complex things. So there's intrinsic goods of chess, but there are intrinsic goods of doing the dishes. And I think the dishes, I tend to just wanna get through them and be done with it so I can get on to watching something on Netflix.

And so the bored mind is missing an opportunity for leisure. It's gonna go on to watch Netflix and continue this sort of the cycle.

Drew Collins: Yeah. I love to fish, and one of the things that I think I've experienced when fishing, especially with people who don't necessarily like to fish, is if you're not catching fish, people often experience that as sort of boring, right? There's no like- you're there to catch fish. Any fishing guide will tell you, they call it fishing, not catching, for a reason, right? You hope to catch fish, but you are not there to catch fish, you know? That is not the horizon of success necessarily. You're there to be in the world in a way and to attend, whether or not it yields the sort of results that you're hoping for.

Kevin Gary: To your point, Evan, about leisure being kind of the privilege of the elite, having resources does not guarantee an experience of leisure. In fact, it can be an impediment because you expect things to be a certain way, and so you're kind of looking towards some end goal and not really attending to what's before you.

And so in arguing for leisure, arguing for a good that I think is accessible to more of us than we realize, and a lot of us who could have it are not able or to partake of it, just given the way we're letting ourselves be habituated by cultures of novelty and distraction.

Evan Rosa: Yeah, you encapsulate it in your discussion of Pieper and Heschel and the Intellectus Wonder tradition, and you say that the leisure tradition upholds a vision of the human being as both active and contemplative, and that really seems to capture the sense in which leisure can be the antidote to boredom and can- and plays an important role in a flourishing life.

Kevin Gary: You know, I think that the leisure state is kind of the opposite of the bored state. The bored state is on the move, on the lookout; leisure state is in the moment and present. And in a leisure state- Jean Luc Marion talks about this notion of a saturated phenomena. Other human beings are saturated phenomena. Trees are saturated phenomena. And that is to say that it's- what it's giving exceeds what you can even comprehend or understand. And so a bored mind looks at a tree and just is ready to move on to the next thing. A leisure mind is able to pause and actually realize that, oh, there's something really worth seeing here.

Evan Rosa: Kevin, thanks so much for your time today.

Drew Collins: Thanks, Kevin.

Kevin Gary: Thank you. Thank you, Evan. Thank you, Drew

Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Kevin Gary and Drew Collins, production assistance by Macie Bridge and Logan Ledman. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show.

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