#13 Ennui
The word ennui has few positive connotations. Ennui can be detrimental — in a self-perpetuating downward spiral, it feeds off itself.
Although the word ennui is commonly used, I only had a broad sense of it. On a whim, I recently read up more.
Ennui pronounced ‘on-wee’, is yet one more word that English has borrowed from French. It comes from the Latin word that gave us ‘annoy’. Ennui seems to have few if any positive connotations — it describes a sense of dissatisfaction, apathy, weariness, discontent rooted in satiety, lassitude, chronic boredom, disillusionment, a feeling that everything is uninteresting and unfulfilling, an attitude of lethargic disappointment, a preoccupation with the emptiness of existence, a feeling of pointlessness, a lack of energy caused by a vague annoyance with the world at large.
The German word equivalent for ennui: ‘Weltschmerz’ — a feeling of melancholy and world-weariness.
An interesting side to ennui is that it refers to the jaded feeling that comes from an indulgent life of too much ease. A sort of ‘fashionable boredom’, a ‘world-weary’ feeling. In Charles Lloyd’s “Stanzas to Ennui” he refers to this world-weariness as a “soul-destroying fiend” which visits with its “pale unrest / The chambers of the human breast / Where too much happiness hath fixed its home.”
Some artists and poets have laid claim to ennui, indeed worn it as a badge of superior spiritual depth and sensitivity. Therefore, ennui is sometimes deprecated as self-indulgent posturing that is chic to the point of pretentiousness.
There is classic ennui described above and there is modern ennui! Modern ennui comes from living in a technology driven society. People starved of human relationships crave for them, yet given the opportunity, find it difficult to relate face-to-face.
Person to person, people are awkward, tongue-tied. They feel more secure behind computer and smart phone screens, doing things that can be done with keystrokes. Exhausted from working all day on a keypad, they yet get on to a keypad as soon as they are home!
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Time spent online is often jaded and repetitive … there is not too much inspiring content; good original material is hard to find. Mindless boredom of unimaginable proportions. This is why social platforms are popular — their existence is proof of the human need to relate, to connect. Nonetheless, online alienation is all too common — “may your life be as awesome as you pretend it is on Facebook!” It is easy to feel alone even when one is with everyone else on the planet.
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard claimed that the gods created man because they were bored, and Baudelaire predicted that the “delicate monster” of boredom would one day swallow up the whole world in an immense yawn.
Reinhard Clifford Kuhn in his book “The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature”, puts it thus: “In the state of ennui the world is emptied of its significance. … Music is no longer an aesthetic world of sound, but a series of notes. Instead of a painting, one sees only a conglomeration of meaningless colors on a canvas; a book becomes a series of words, one strung after the other. It is a sensation very similar to that of watching a television program with the sound turned off…”
Ennui can be experienced in a general sense, or limited to a specific domain such as work or a hobby. Something that was earlier enjoyable is now meaningless, pointless, monotonous.
By its very nature, ennui can be detrimental. In an effort to escape it, people can choose dangerous, thrilling, hazardous outlets. Ennui is the dangerous vicious circle — it causes feelings of lethargy, fatigue, alienation and isolation … and in this state of mind it is experienced even more strongly. In a negative, self-perpetuating downward spiral that sucks in a person to lower and still lower depths, ennui feeds off itself!
Apart from the obvious connection with depression, other mental conditions associated with ennui are ‘anhedonia’ — the inability to feel pleasure, ‘acedia’ — a drained out state of being disinterested in everything, ‘melancholy’ — a typically introspective feeling of great sadness.
Some insights on ennui:
“I don’t feel like doing anything. I don’t feel like riding, the motion is too powerful; I don’t feel like walking — it is too tiring; I don’t feel like lying down, for either I would have to stay down, and I don’t feel like doing that, or I would have to get up again, and I don’t feel like doing that, either. Summa summarum: I don’t feel like doing anything.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?” — F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy in ‘The Great Gatsby’
“What a day-to-day affair life is” — Jules Laforgue
