Yawn: Adventures in Boredom

by Mary Mann

Overview

The incisive and often hilarious story of one of our most interesting cultural phenomena: boredom

It’s the feeling your grandma told you was only experienced by boring people. Some people say they’re dying of it; others claim to have killed because of it. It’s a key component of depression, creativity, and sex-toy advertisements.

It’s boredom, the subject of Yawn, a delightful and at times moving take on the oft-derided emotion and how we deal with it. Deftly wrought from interviews, research, and personal experience, Yawn follows Mary Mann’s search through history for the truth about boredom, spanning the globe, introducing a varied cast of characters. The Desert Fathers—fourth-century Christian monks who made their homes far from civilization—offer the first recorded accounts of lethargy; Thomas Cook, grandfather of the tourism industry, provided escape from the mundane for England’s working class; and contemporarily, we meet couples who are disenchanted by monogamous sex, deployed soldiers who seek entertainment and connection in porn, and prisoners held in solitary confinement, for whom boredom is a punishment for crimes they may or may not have committed.

With sharp wit and impressive historical acumen, Mann tells the unexpected story of the hunt for a deeper understanding of boredom, in all its absurd, irritating, and inspiring splendor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374714420
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	291 KB

About the Author

Mary Mann is the author of Yawn: Adventures in Boredom. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Believer and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Editorial Reviews

At the beginning of the first day of my freshman high school
English class, our teacher went to the blackboard and wrote the word ennui. Then she drew a circle around the word; then she drew a slash through the circle. The message was clear:
Boredom, lassitude, and adolescent world-weariness would not be accepted in this classroom. I now recognize Mrs. Stebbins' strategy as a cat-herding tactic, a way to prime a group of kids raised on TV
to be interested and attentive to literature, with the added flair of an unfamiliar word. (Unfamiliar to me, anyway.) The irony, though, is that great literature is often filled with slackers, layabouts, and other souls whose drama is born of their boredom. What would
Proust have made of this no-ennui traffic cop?

This strange push and pull that boredom has on us -- the way it can stimulate and decelerate us, and how we can never quite shake it --
drives Yawn, Mary Mann's brief and lively book of reported sketches on the subject. Mann herself was inspired to investigate after she and her thirty-something friends were lamenting their workaday drudgeries, which is a common affliction: She cites a study that 70 percent of Americans are bored with or actively dislike their job. Worse, the supposed escape hatches from boredom -- sex, travel, "adventure" loosely defined --
tend to generate their own vortex of tedious clichés. Looking at dating sites, Mann observes plenty of good times of the zip-lines and martini-drinking variety, but rightly points out that "the thing about everyone seeming interesting is that interesting starts to seem boring after a while, or at least like something with too many predictable parts."

We're easily bored with "excitement" if we're too familiar with it --
it's the old nobody-goes-there-anymore-it's-too-crowded lament.
Even that complaint is boring: It's what the Internet would call a
#FirstWorldProblem, and Mann is alert to the ways that boredom is often a function of upper-middle-class existence. Boredom has always been with us, but it reached full flower with the rise of office work and leisure time. It's the motivating force behind the package tours that British entrepreneur Thomas Cook launched in the 1840s, launching a "tourism economy [that's] as much about catering to habits as it is about supplying novelty." It's the prompt for couples anxious to rejuvenate their sex lives with toys and "7
Ways to Drive Him Wild" techniques, "the Protestant work ethic getting all mixed up with sex." Presumably a lot of the people who are bored at their jobs are working in industries designed to relieve our boredom.

But boredom-as-affliction cuts across class lines, and Mann points to research suggesting that while boredom is distinct from depression, the two have a nervously close relationship. The former can slide easily into the latter; Mann speaks with Andrew
Solomon, author of the superb 2001 study of depression, The
Noonday Demon, who sees spates of boredom as an early warning system for more dire feelings. That relationship matters,
because it suggests that there are a lot of people on the brink. And it's on that point that Mann is at her best, exploring the boredom that stalks soldiers in war zones or refugees in camps. Yet expressing that boredom opens you to a culture-wide contempt.
She notes a report on Syrian refugees feeling bored in limbo that prompted one commenter to call them "ungrateful people"; another recommended somebody "drop a bomb on the camps." (Criticizing others' boredom is as much a #FirstWorldProblem as criticizing your own.)

"Feeling bored doesn't require any sort of privilege, but doing something about it often does," Mann writes. But what's the right thing to do, even if you have the privilege? Mann herself is at a loss to answer the question. Her travels suggest that we humans,
being creatures who crave nature and companionship, benefit from
"meaning" and "agency" and "narrative" and "purpose." We're uplifted by humor and free time and the ability to daydream, or even just the "stuff" that she sees Google employees enjoying on the job. I was never bored reading Yawn, but its wanderings also reflect the impatience of the modern-day ennui sufferer, bouncing from meme to book to interview, leaping from novels to Alaskan cruises to A. J. Leibling to Internet porn. I
felt, reading it, like I do after spending too long surfing Wikipedia pages or YouTube videos, gorged on data points but foggy with a sense of their disconnection. "Researching boredom meant researching everything," she concludes. But a tighter culling of material might have focused the story on the roots of boredom, not just the way it constantly stalks us.

But that's the trouble: Every experience, given enough time, is going to court boredom. (In David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel The Pale King, IRS drones are practically vibrating with it -- they're "wigglers" who labor at "Tingle tables.") As a culture we celebrate productivity, adventure, attention, novelty.
We deliver no-ennui dictats, and even our efforts to relax
(mindfulness apps, yoga classes) can feel a whole lot like work.
Mann closes on an up note, suggesting that the closest thing to a cure for "the itch, everyday restlessness of this troublesome mood
[is] other people." It certainly seems like a more enduring and less artificial option than the rest of the available choices. But the weariness we feel, it seems, is less something we can conquer than one we have to learn to live with.

Mark Athitakis is a writer, editor, critic, and blogger who’s spent more than a dozen years in journalism. His work has appeared in The New
York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Chicago
Sun-Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Washington City Paper,
and many other publications. He is currently a member of the
Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle.

Reviewer: Athitakis, Mark

The Barnes & Noble Review

02/13/2017
With Mann’s choice of title, one might think she is damning her own tome, but this book of essays on boredom is anything but soporific. Exploring such different settings as the workplace, war zones, and libraries, Mann offers a witty and enjoyable discourse on a ubiquitous state of mind. Certain topics are universal—“All sorts of things went through my head,” she recalls of restaurant hostessing, “but nine times out of ten they turned into sexual fantasy.” She notes, as well, that boredom can lead to anger and loneliness. Another central theme is curiosity as the cure for boredom, as Mann demonstrates by pursuing varied and quirky subjects. One chapter extolls the virtues of naptime, naming tech giant Google as a notable proponent of the practice; another discusses how U.S. service members spent their downtime in Iraq. In each chapter, Mann discusses how a particular topic relates to her life, inviting readers to take an empathetic view of a common emotion and its myriad causes. Mann’s wit and honesty will draw readers in, relegating actual boredom to the back burner until they’ve finished reading. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"I am now compelled to specify the two commodities that I most cherish in nonfiction: 1) lots and lots of authorial voice and, 2) a modicum of surprise . . . Ms. Mann has both these qualities in spades. By trade a researcher (“like being a private detective, without the danger and the sex”), the delightful Ms. Mann comes off as a funny, very hip nerd." —Hebry Alford, New York Times

"Mann's research traces several fascinating ways boredom has shaped social development and habits . . . [Mann] manages to avoid the biggest pitfall of a book on boredom—she doesn't solve it." —Genevieve Valentine, NPR.org

"[A] brief and lively book of reported sketches on [boredom] . . . I was never bored reading Yawn." —Mary Athitakis, Barnes & Noble Review

"This book of essays on boredom is anything but soporific. Exploring such different settings as the workplace, war zones, and libraries, Mann offers a witty and enjoyable discourse on a ubiquitous state of mind . . . Mann's wit and honesty will draw readers in, relegating actual boredom to the back burner until they've finished reading." —Publishers Weekly

"[An] engaging, essayistic examination" —Kirkus

"A lively exploration of a subject that's a lot less boring than you might expect it to be." —Booklist

“An exhilarating tour of apathy, restlessness, torpor, depression, paralysis and the places in between—all without a single longueur. Beautifully done.” —Stacy Schiff, author of The Witches

"Especially in interesting times, we need books by writers as nimble-minded and searching as Mary Mann. YAWN is fleet-footed and wise, grounded by Mann's methodical curiosity. Mann possesses that rare, rare thing—a big-hearted mind." —Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock

From the Publisher

2017-02-13
Studying a mood that "pops up in every facet of existence, from work to love to war."Mann likely won't mind if you find her debut book a little boring; in fact, she'll likely expect it. Her engaging, essayistic examination underscores boredom's pervasiveness, how most people find themselves bored by most things—work most of all. Recognizing her own tendencies toward boredom and the restlessness that often accompanies it, she decided to start exploring just what boredom is, why it is so common, and what, if any, purpose it serves. She finds she is not alone: "Boredom in 2015 was becoming something of a hot topic, an old feeling made new by media attention, and here we were at the very cusp of a trend," she writes of attending a sold-out event called "Bored and Brilliant." (Mann also learned about international conferences on the topic, but why spend the money to travel to Poland when there's so much boredom to study near home in Manhattan?) The author attended a sex-toy party for some insight on how to deal with boredom in bed or with monogamy in general. She explores how some consider travel an antidote for boredom, with a whole industry of tourism catering to that need. She writes of the "restless violence" to which teenage boys in particular are prone as they try to break the cycle (also termed "boredom-induced violence") and the deep depression into which some can descend, with boredom as a trigger or at least an early warning sign. She writes of boredom as a part of the creative process. Mostly, she distracts herself with the project, but even she can become bored with the study of boredom, recognizing the penchant that sparked her interest in the first place. She concludes that "the things I learned about boredom, and the ways I learned to talk about it, actually proved useful." Readers who come to share Mann's understanding could find the book useful, or at least a brief diversion from their boring lives.

Kirkus Reviews