by Kate Greene
It made me think about how much training Apollo astronauts undertook before going to the moon, so much so it seemed difficult for many of them to fully appreciate the enormity and literal awesomeness of their accomplishment while they were doing it. Landing a capsule, stuffing rocks in a bag, driving a buggy, planting a flag. The simulation was the real thing. These were test pilots. Dealing with emotions like wonder or awe or fear wasn’t on the flight plan.
Our crew was in no way trained like real astronauts. Our preparation for the mission was mostly ad hoc and much of what we learned about HI-SEAS and the facilities and scientific studies was on the job. The basics were there, though. For the most part, we were a crew of people who had been selected for our tendency toward analytical thinking and problem solving and could, supposedly, when needed, emotionally detach to complete a task. But then sometimes a different kind of person might slip through the selection process. A person, say, who by all outward appearances is rational and in control and yet, given the right circumstances, is somehow unraveled by the scent of pineapple.
III
ON BOREDOM
The scene: I’m in my room inside the dome. It’s only a couple weeks before the experiment is to end, and I’m lying on my bed with my laptop, sorting three months of sleep-study data. My door is open. From the corner of my eye, I see a stranger walk into the bathroom a few meters away. That’s odd, I think, to see a stranger. We’re so isolated here, living on a volcano away from towns and roads, almost like living on another planet. And then suddenly this realization—that there’s a stranger casually using our facilities—jacks my senses to high alert.
As still as possible, I watch as the unfamiliar person goes into the bathroom and splashes water on his face. Do I know him? Why can’t I tell? If he’s an intruder, why is he here? And what will he do when he’s done freshening up and sees me staring at him? Of my three male crewmates, the man washing his face looks like none of them. It’s not Angelo, who shaves his head. This man has thick brown hair, slicked back. Oleg almost always wears buttoned-up long-sleeved shirts. The stranger is in a baggy black T-shirt. Simon is larger than the unfamiliar man and has curly red hair and a beard. This man is clean-shaven.
At last, the stranger steps out of the bathroom and confronts me. “What,” he says, less a question, more a bark. His voice slaps me back to reality. It’s Simon, who’s evidently shorn his beard and lost more weight over the mission than I’d previously noticed.
Still, my heart’s racing and a surge of blood warms me from earlobe to toe. “I didn’t know who you were,” I say. He nods and gives a slight smile. Then we both laugh at the absurdity. After all this time, it’s almost impossible to imagine someone else in our home.
And it was shortly thereafter, as the tail end of my terror entwined with the emergent joy of relief, that I noticed I hadn’t felt anything so strongly in months. I had been living in a kind of haze. I had believed myself to be quite busy and occupied with important tasks during our mission but, somewhere along the way, mental fatigue had become my baseline state. I was loath to admit it at the time, because it implied a poor personality match with adventurers and those of the explorer class in which my crew and I fancied ourselves. Yet, in retrospect, there is no escaping it: I was bored and had been bored for quite some time.
What kind of person gets bored? Only a boring one, ha ha. Or children who have piles of toys but no motivation to play. Also teenagers, who use YouTube to fascinate (or bore) each other with the details of their lives, video game–play, and makeup tutorials. But to be bored as an adult? Perhaps you aren’t as busy with family and work as you should be. Hasn’t technology obliterated opportunities for boredom? Don’t people reach for phones at the first itch of idleness, to check the Facebook feed, thumb through work emails, or text a gif to a friend or enemy? Conventional wisdom tells us that an adult with enough downtime to be bored has surely taken a wrong turn in life.
There are exceptions, of course. It is, for instance, acceptable that you, an adult, can be bored with certain tasks, or with your career, or even your life. You can decry the fact that your days blend into weeks, and weeks into months, Wednesday barely distinguishable from October and so on. Maybe you are more bored than ever when you watch movies and television, read books and have conversations. You might even become bored scrolling through never-ending and inane Facebook updates, or an infinite Twitter feed of the master-crafted self-promotion and outrage of your peers, celebrities, and demi-celebrities.
On the other hand, maybe you’re someone who never gets bored. Suppose you can honestly say you are fully engaged and interested, almost always, in life and its offerings. You might find comfort in all of this busyness, but science has some bad news for you. Recent psychological research suggests boredom could be good for a person. It can lead to pro-social activities such as donating time or money to charity. And the daydreaming it prompts can produce insights and spur creativity, it could enable happiness you didn’t even know you were missing.
But now, say you are often bored. Maybe you’d rather not be bored or maybe you don’t care, but either way, you simply can’t avoid it. Bad news for you, too. Psychological studies have concluded that boredom can lead to accidents and poor performance at work, to substance abuse, to overeating and binge eating, and even to heart attacks.
So what is it, then? Is boredom bad or good? Should you do your best, for the sake of your health and employment, to avoid it? Or has boredom become the psychological equivalent of a glass of red wine, to be enjoyed, guilt-free, but only in moderation? Is the moderation of boredom desirable or even possible? How many successive rhetorical questions does it take to bore a reader?
According to the contemporary Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, the concept of boredom as we understand it today is distinctly modern. In A Philosophy of Boredom (2005), Svendsen notes that while it’s “always possible to find earlier texts that seem to anticipate the later phenomenon … boredom is not thematized to any major extent before the Romantic era.” It was during that time, he writes, that the concept became democratized, and not solely “a marginal phenomenon reserved for monks and the nobility.” “Boredom is the ‘privilege’ of modern man,” he writes.
And so here we are. Whether you believe we are experiencing peak “boredom privilege” or whether you believe that a life well lived simply offers no time for boredom, most people agree: boredom itself is interesting. If only anyone knew what it actually was.
You might have a sense of what boredom feels like to you, but it’s the very subjective nature of boredom that makes it difficult to agree on a single definition. Psychologists believe, broadly, that boredom can be divided into two major categories: situational boredom and existential boredom. Situational boredom is the kind that arises when an environment or situation doesn’t hold our interest, like staring at an uneventful radar screen for an hour. Existential boredom extends beyond discrete situations. It wraps itself, like a wet woolen blanket, around every aspect of life, so that a sufferer lacks almost any satisfaction.
The German psychiatrist Martin Doehlemann identifies two categories of boredom beyond situational and existential. These are a boredom of satiety, when one gets too much of something so that it loses its meaning, and a creative boredom, which is characterized by the way it compels a person to try something new.
But that’s not all. It seems there might also be five other boredom categories, wholly distinct from Doehlemann’s, as derived by the German psychologist Thomas Goetz. In 2006, Goetz outlined four categories of boredom based on questionnaires. And in 2013, he announced the surprise discovery of an unexpected fifth type of boredom.
Boredom, then, is a multifaceted jewel with a glint dependent on ambient light. One of the great paradoxes of boredom is that it often plagues those in the seemingly most exciting professions: explorers, astronauts, pilots, firefighters, sailors, and soldiers. In these fields, boredom is considered a real danger, because long periods of downtime must
be endured between bursts of alertness and adventure.
Perhaps nothing is more boredom producing than the monotony, idleness, and sensory deprivation endured when stranded for months on an ice floe in the Antarctic awaiting rescue. Such was the fate of Shackleton’s adventure-seeking crew on that 1914 attempt to cross the Antarctic continent.
In his diary, first officer Lionel Greenstreet wrote:
Day passes day with very little or nothing to relieve the monotony. We take constitutionals round and round the floe but no one can go further as we are to all intents and purposes on an island. There is practically nothing fresh to read and nothing to talk about, all topics being absolutely exhausted … I never know what day of the week it is except when it is Sunday as we have Adélie liver and bacon for lunch and [it] is the great meal of the week and soon I shall not be able to know Sunday as our bacon will soon be finished. The pack around looks very much as it did four or five months ago …
Around the same time that Greenstreet complains of monotony, one of the expedition’s surgeons, Dr. Alexander Hepburne Macklin, writes on idleness:
I am absolutely obsessed with the idea of escaping … We have been over 4 months on the floe—a time of absolute and utter inutility to anyone. There is absolutely nothing to do but kill time as best one may. Even at home, with theatres and all sorts of amusements, changes of scene and people, four months idleness would be tedious: One can then imagine how much worse it is for us. One looks forward to meals, not for what one will get, but as definite breaks in the day. All around us we have day after day the same unbroken whiteness, unrelieved by anything at all.
More recently, in November 2011, the British explorer Felicity Aston embarked on a solo journey across Antarctica, skiing for a total of fifty-nine days. The secret of her motivation, she told the Travel Bite website in 2012, was the simple act of following a routine, as well as a mix of more than eight hundred music tracks—although, by the end of it she was, she said, “bored with pretty much all of them.”
Aston also described a visual monotony and social isolation she experienced while skiing that seemed maddening:
Because I had no one else to talk to I found that I started talking to the sun (as it was the only different thing in the landscape!), as if it was a friend accompanying me on the trip. Sometimes the sun would even answer back, asking why I was doing such a silly thing!
It’s conditions such as these—monotony, idleness, tedium, sensory deprivation, loneliness—that concern NASA psychologists who want to send a crew to Mars. Using existing technologies, a trip to the Red Planet will take two hundred to three hundred days of travel. Most of the time will be spent inside a cramped capsule. There will be a communication delay with Earth of up to twenty-four minutes due to a span of hundreds of millions of miles. Real-time chatting or video calls with friends and family and mission support will be an impossibility—the limitation is the speed of light—that no new technology would be able to overcome.
Mars crews would likely need to operate with a high level of autonomy because of this communication delay. Many people believe autonomy, which implies freedom of choice, can stave off boredom. Indeed, work imbued with personal meaning can be a potential solution, but it can’t fix everything. In addition to the isolation and sensory deprivation, there will still be repetition of meals and routines and clothing and conversations between crewmembers. The workloads will still likely be full of tedium, with narrow margins for error. In short, a mission to Mars has the perfect ingredient list for boredom and disaster borne of boredom.
Crewmembers aboard Antarctic exploring vessels need to climb masts, secure lines, and so on. And even if they’re not involved in these activities, they likely at least feel the sensation of wind against their bodies and wood and ice underfoot, all tangible reminders of the passing of time and the harshness and dangers of the environment. Mars explorers, in contrast, would live in a much smaller ship with far fewer sensory inputs. Technology, from propulsion systems to plumbing, would lay hidden behind panels, displays, and buttons. Time will more easily blur and dangers will be more difficult to sense.
When Shackleton’s Endurance was trapped in ice, the crew could hear the creaking, whining, and eventual explosions of the wooden hull, leaving no doubt as to the seriousness of their situation. On a Mars-bound ship, danger might creep into crew consciousness with a blinking light or a beeping alert. To bored crewmembers, a system failure might present itself as something like an alarm clock feebly trying to rouse a person from the fog of sleep.
On the ISS, 250 miles above the planet’s surface, astronauts spend much of their leisure time gazing at and photographing Earth. As a Mars-bound ship drifts millions of miles from home, this major source of interest and connection to humanity will recede into darkness.
A trip to Mars, with its invisible technology and vast, unprecedented distance from home, could estrange or alienate a crew to an unprecedented degree. Such a distance could produce an entirely new kind of boredom, impossible to imagine on Earth.
Or, it might not be so bad. In addition to selecting astronauts with sound minds, providing the crew with careful and considerate mission support, and enabling crew autonomy in work and leisure (such as with games and films), another way psychologists suppose NASA could beat boredom could be through interior design. One suggestion has been to include a periscope inside a Mars-bound ship that could magnify an image of Earth for gazing. Another is to include a system that projects Earth images onto a screen, or a kind of holodeck, like the one from the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation.
It could also be important for mission support to remind the crew, often and in varying ways, about the importance of the goal, for all humanity, of exploring Mars. The nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in his essay “On the Vanity of Existence” (1851), “As things are, we take no pleasure in existence except when we are striving after something.” This would seem to be especially true for high-achieving people such as those traditionally selected as astronauts.
Some creative people claim that there are generative benefits that come from spending time in a state of low arousal and monotony, as though boredom primes their minds to receive new ideas and connections. Siegfried Kracauer, the twentieth-century German writer and critic, wrote an essay called “Boredom” (1924), in which he argues its virtues and claims:
If … one has the patience, the sort of patience specific to legitimate boredom, then one experiences a kind of bliss that is almost unearthly. A landscape appears in which colorful peacocks strut about and images of people suffused with soul come into view. And look—your own soul is likewise swelling, and in ecstasy you name what you have always lacked: the great passion. Were this passion—which shimmers like a comet—to descend, were it to envelop you, the others, and the world—oh, then boredom would come to an end, and everything that exists would be …
This sentiment accompanied David Foster Wallace while he was writing The Pale King (2011), a novel about IRS employees and boredom, published after his suicide in 2008. In a note supplementing the manuscript, Wallace wrote:
Bliss—a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom … Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping back from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
This bliss is just the sort of thing that might launch a creative project or spur a major life change, for better or worse. It might have been a kind of boredom, coupled with the remnants of that childhood dream, that prompted me to apply to the four-month isolation experiment to simulate a Mars mission. And, in full-circle fashion, that’s where I finally came to know my own particular flavor of boredom and how it manifests in me. Though HI-SEAS was designed to investigate the spe
cific monotony of menu fatigue, I suspect that the variety of food available was sufficient so that cuisine wasn’t my major source of boredom. There were other, more insidious culprits.
About halfway through the mission, the journalist Maggie Koerth-Baker emailed to ask how we were holding up, boredom-wise. She was writing a New York Times Magazine piece on the topic. As a crew, we discussed it: we certainly didn’t feel bored. We always had something to do, from personal projects, to exercising, to chores and maintenance, to putting on space-suit simulacra for mini expeditions outside, to writing reports and summaries of our activities, to filling out the numerous, sometimes lengthy, daily surveys, and writing journal entries.
In fact, we felt like we couldn’t quite catch up. A good night’s sleep proved difficult for most of us; you could often hear at least one person tapping away on a keyboard well past midnight. But in retrospect, our leisure time was quite minimal. Two nights a week we watched a movie that, while scheduled and usually enjoyed, often felt a little forced. Sundays were mostly free days, although surveys and meal reports were still required, and many of us used that day to catch up on lingering work obligations. We did, however, celebrate monthly milestones and birthdays with music and specially prepared food.
With some distance from the project, I see now that it had its own brand of monotony that began to wear us down. Some of us, such as myself, didn’t go outside much. Putting the suits on was a hassle and it seemed to detract from personal projects, most of which were done indoors. We kept the same daily schedule for exercise, meals, chores, and work; we sat in the same seats around our table; we answered the same survey questions day after day; we wore the same few outfits week after week. The dome, while beautifully designed, was covered in white vinyl that none of us modified with paint, fabric, pictures, or posters. We began to joke about our “puffy white walls,” and an institutionalized life.