“It’s a sin to be bored,” my mother would say, usually during summer vacation, or whenever she found one or more of her children doing nothing and also complaining about it.
Mom considered boredom a choice. And she believed that choosing to allow yourself to be bored was a bad choice — a wrong choice, an immoral choice. Boredom was an attitude and an action that you chose instead of choosing something better. To choose to be bored was to choose to be incurious, lazy, and purposeless.

So if we were bored during summer vacation, or on a rainy Saturday, it was our own choice and our own fault. You can sit around and be bored or you can go to the library.
My mom’s moral understanding of “boredom” is somewhat shared in David Roth’s recent piece on the drone hysteria in the state he and I grew up in:
Whatever these sightings actually are, and they seem mostly to be people mistaking airplanes or stars for some scarier other thing TBD, they also feel symptomatic of this broader moment’s and this particular milieu’s combination of generalized unease and all-devouring boredom. “One thing we know is that humans, when they see something in the sky, they’re really bad at telling how far away it is,” the communications director of the flight tracker Flightradar24 told NJ.com. “Our depth perception is awful, particularly at night.” Another thing we know is that humans, when primed to believe that Something Is Going On Up There but also just in general, will get weird and stay weird about stuff more or less for yuks. Whether this is people acting out some wish to see the unease they feel inside reflected by a world that otherwise doesn’t acknowledge them or just indulging in the classic suburban pastime of noticing something and then calling the police and/or doing some weird online posting about it, it all comes out more or less the same. …
State and federal agencies have fielded and investigated reports of drone sightings for nearly a month—the first sightings in New Jersey were reported on November 18—and have found nothing of note. This has done nothing to stop people from wandering out into their yards and taking and posting (and posting, and posting) … photos and video of the night sky.
“Can you explain this?” these concerned citizens say, thrusting the absolute shittiest photo you’ve ever seen towards…well, just thrusting it outwards, mostly. At an unlucky neighbor, maybe, but more likely just at anyone scrolling past on some platform or other, and more generally in the direction of The Media, or The Government. The lack of response, or the type of response, or the actual substance of the response, is as one unemployed Maryland man baffled by these lights put it, “entirely unacceptable.”
(The “unemployed Maryland man” there, as Roth’s link shows, is form Gov. Larry Hogan, who demanded an official explanation for the obviously disturbing presence of drones he filmed himself, “drones” that turned out to be — yes, really — the constellation Orion and Sirius.)
The “all-devouring boredom” that makes people search the heavens for signs of something, anything that might interrupt their otherwise uninterrupted tedium bears all the hallmarks of the “sinful” boredom my mother scolded us for. It’s lazy, purposeless, and incurious. (Curiosity seeks answers. Answers infuriate these folks.)
But there’s also, I think, another component to this “all-devouring boredom” — the sense that people have no agency, that their lives are controlled by other people and other powers that effectively make all of their decisions for them, and that nothing they do or don’t do actually matters.
That last bit would also have seemed sinful to my mom. Everything we do matters, she would have said. His eye is on the sparrow and the very hairs of your head are numbered, etc. But it takes a lot of faith to believe that when your mortgage and your health insurance and your employment and your government all seem beyond your control. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?” But are not all those things — the banks, the insurers, the employers, the government — run by people who would eagerly, happily sell us all two for a penny? And does it seem like there is anything you could ever do to change that?
What Roth describes as “all-devouring boredom” is similar to what Thoreau scolded as “quiet desperation.” It’s desperate, and despair-ing, but not yet utterly without hope. And so what that boredom is desperate for is something, anything that might break through or disrupt the status quo.
I initially dismissed this drone mania as “this year’s Chinese weather balloons.” And that has, indeed, been the trajectory of it — breathless hype quickly deflated by mundane reality. It’s not a Chinese invasion or an Iranian invasion or an alien invasion. That should be good news — a relief — but it lands, instead, as a kind of disappointment. This story had been exciting, and now that it’s over, folks have to go back to nothing being exciting.
Some of that is boredom of the kind my mom described — the sinfully lazy, purposeless, incurious, pointlessness of children still so immature as to think this great big world revolves around them. This is the boredom of children who ought to know better — who ought to know that everything is exciting.
But some of it is also the boredom of the kind Roth gets close to describing — the desperate sense of powerlessness and a lack of agency that comes from seeing most of your life and security and options placed far outside of your control. If that’s what your world looks like, or what it feels like, then any alternative starts to seem preferable — even if it’s space invaders.
The thing about mass panics like the recent drone madness that swept through New Jersey is that they really are mass events. They have everyone’s attention. For a while, they’re what (almost) everyone is talking about.
So when such things happen, they’re an opportunity to speak to that attention. They’re a chance to be heard reminding folks that there are options and possibilities still available, that they still have some agency, some power, despite all that has been done to trick them into believing they don’t. It’s a chance to remind them that a better world is possible without a War of the Worlds scenario.
And then — after you’ve reminded them of all of that — then you can Scully all their drone nonsense and point out that, yeah, that’s just a line of planes queuing up to land at Newark.
But try and do that in a way that doesn’t suggest that the sky above New Jersey is boring, or that the world is boring, or that the possibilities before them are boring or pointless or purposeless or powerless. Because none of that is boring, and it’s a sin to think otherwise.