The History of Boredom
This Sunday, 500 people will flock to a conference hall in East London to be bored. Over the course of seven hours, they will hear talks on, among other things, pylons, self-service checkouts, double-yellow lines - as in the ones on the road - shop fronts and gardening.
“Quite why anyone else would want to go is a mystery,” says James Ward, 31, the conference’s organizer. Ward, a marketer for a major British retailer, says that the conference started by accident: In 2010, after learning that the Interesting Conference, a day of talks put on by Wired writer Russell Davies, was cancelled, he tweeted - jokingly - that he ought to put on a Boring Conference.
His suggestion would have come to nothing if he hadn’t already earned a number of followers through his blog, a paean to mundane things like stationary. Within a half an hour, he says, the conference was happening. “Never joke on the Internet about doing something, because you may have to do it,” he says. Ward and his followers are in good or at least famous company: One of Andy Warhol’s celebrated bon mots was “I like boring things.” But as Ward admits, the Boring Conference isn’t actually boring. “It’s things that on the surface would appear boring, but aren’t,” Ward explains. In fact, a number of speakers from the cancelled Interesting Conference simply rehashed their talks for the Boring Conference that first year. “The name is slightly misleading, but it’s a good name.”
For Ward, boring and interesting are two sides of the same coin; one man’s pylons is another man’s Playboy. But what does it really mean to be bored? And more importantly, what does being bored do to and say about you?