Can Boredom Be Positive? Heidegger, Stevens, and Leth

Published 6 September 2026. Updated 6 October 2026 to add related reading links.

Boredom has a bad reputation. We associate it with idleness, indifference, and wasted time. When it appears, our most immediate response is therefore to make it disappear: we look for another activity, another conversation, another place, or simply something capable of occupying our attention. Boredom presents itself as a hole that ought to be filled as quickly as possible.

But what if this response makes us overlook something? What if boredom is not only an absence of content but also an experience that can change our relationship with what is already around us? And what if its meaning is not fixed in advance, but depends on how we respond to it?

These were the questions behind my 2005 master’s thesis in Comparative Literature, Positive Boredom: Towards a New Concept of Boredom—Heidegger, Stevens, Leth, submitted at the University of Copenhagen. Its title was deliberately paradoxical. My intention was not to claim that being bored is always good or pleasant. I wanted to examine whether boredom could be understood as something more than an exclusively negative condition.

The thesis expressed its answer in one concise sentence: Boredom depends on how it is managed.

What matters, in other words, is not only that boredom occurs, but what happens in and after it. Boredom can lead to apathy and an increasingly restless search for distraction. Yet it can also become a zero point: a pause in our habitual exchange with the world, during which something is temporarily suspended and a different connection may therefore become possible.

To develop this argument, I read Martin Heidegger alongside two writers who might initially appear very different: the American poet Wallace Stevens and the Danish poet and filmmaker Jørgen Leth. Heidegger provided a language for Nothingness, mood, and openness. Stevens and Leth offered two concrete artistic ways of managing boredom’s zero point. Stevens takes a route through the imagination in order to return to the world. Leth directs his gaze outward and frames the concrete details of the world so that they can appear again.

What follows is an accessible account of the thesis’s central argument. It is neither a new theory of boredom nor a literal reproduction of the Danish text from 2005. It is an introduction to its main idea: that the emptiness of boredom may also contain an opening.

Why do we regard boredom as negative?

Boredom has almost always been described through negative images. It is a fog settling over things, an exhaustion of meaning, a sluggishness in which time refuses to pass. The individual becomes indifferent to the world, and the world becomes indifferent to the individual. Whatever once held our attention loses its force.

This experience is real. Positive boredom does not begin by denying the discomfort. Boredom can feel like a painful absence of direction, and in prolonged or more serious forms it can be closely connected with isolation and paralysis. The point is simply that the negative character of the experience does not necessarily exhaust its meaning.

When we call something boring, we often locate the cause either in the object or in the person. A film is boring. A lecture is boring. A place is boring. Or, conversely, the person who is bored lacks imagination, fails to take responsibility for their attention, or is unable to engage. In the first case, the world is at fault; in the second, the subject is.

Both explanations seem inadequate. The same work of art, landscape, or company can be absorbing one day and devoid of appeal the next. The same person may be engrossed in an activity that others find unbearably monotonous. Boredom is therefore neither a stable property of an object nor merely an isolated inner substance carried around by the subject.

The thesis’s first crucial claim was therefore: Boredom exists in between.

It arises in the connection between subject and world when their exchange no longer functions. Something in the world ceases to call upon us, while our attention ceases to reach meaningfully outward. It may be impossible to determine which side initiated the breakdown. Boredom is the disturbance in the relationship itself.

This relational view changes the question. Rather than merely asking who or what is boring, we can ask: what has happened to the connection? Which forms of attention, expectation, and meaning have broken down? And can the relationship re-emerge in a different form?

Boredom as a zero point

When the connection between ourselves and the world is interrupted, time changes character. It can feel slow, motionless, and almost physically present. We wait for something to begin without knowing what that something might be. The thesis describes this suspension as a zero point.

The zero point is not absolute Nothingness. The bored person is still present in the world, surrounded by objects, people, and possibilities. But things have temporarily been emptied of their usual appeal. Their functions and meanings formally remain, yet they no longer concern us in the accustomed way. The familiar appears exhausted.

This is precisely why the zero point can feel threatening and also be productive. It is threatening because our normal orientation fails us. But when habitual connections are suspended, they no longer stand in the way of other connections. What used to be self-evident can become visible again.

Here we find the difference between romanticising boredom and recognising its dual possibility. The zero point does not automatically produce insight, creativity, or change. We may remain stuck in it, flee from it, or repeat the same attempts to drown it out. But we may also manage it: endure the pause long enough to change perspective, create a new frame, or encounter the familiar without its habitual labels.

The word management is important because it neither promises a universal technique nor reduces boredom to an individual choice. To manage something is to take care of a situation we have not necessarily chosen. Boredom often arrives uninvited. Its possible value only emerges in the way its emptiness is transformed.

In the thesis, I called such transformations zero-point strategies. These are devices that do not merely fill the standstill with arbitrary content, but use its distance to establish a new relationship. Shifts in perspective, framing, repetition, variation, notation, cataloguing, and imagination are different examples. They are not solutions for every situation. They are artistic and cognitive forms developed in very different ways by Stevens and Leth.

Heidegger, Nothingness, and the possibility of an opening

Martin Heidegger provides the philosophical starting point of the thesis, particularly through What Is Metaphysics? and the lectures published as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, in which boredom plays a prominent role.

For Heidegger, a fundamental mood is not simply a private emotion colouring an otherwise neutral world. Mood is one of the ways in which the world is disclosed to us at all. In anxiety, individual things lose their habitual hold and Nothingness emerges; in profound boredom, beings as a whole become indifferent. Everything slips into a strange undifferentiated state in which nothing in particular is able to captivate us.

The essential point is that this withdrawal does not merely leave an empty space behind. When individual things cease to occupy us in the usual way, our relationship with beings as a whole can become perceptible. The meaning of things is therefore not simply something they each possess. It depends on a more fundamental openness normally concealed by practical tasks and fixed categories.

The thesis developed this thought through several deliberately exploratory concepts. Boredom was described as “the emissary of Nothingness” and as a “mini-Nothingness.” These are my formulations, not Heidegger’s own concepts. They were intended to capture the way boredom introduces a limited experience of nothingness into everyday life: not everything ceases, but our normal dealings with things are put on hold.

Boredom can consequently be understood as a small deconstruction of habit. Things remain, but their names, functions, and self-evident place have become weaker. This can be experienced as loss, but it also creates distance. And without a certain distance, it is difficult to see anything anew.

In the thesis’s most speculative movement, this “mini-Nothingness” therefore also becomes a possible “mini-Being.” Boredom does not reveal Being once and for all, and it offers no philosophical shortcut to truth. But by loosening our habitual attachment to particular things, it can open an experience of the possibility that the world might appear differently.

This reading makes boredom both a symptom and a potential response. It is a symptom of too much finitude and objectification: we are trapped in a world of already organised objects, demands, and categories that no longer mean anything to us. But by bringing this order to a halt, boredom can itself create a small surplus of freedom. For a moment, it suspends the demand that we must immediately be occupied by something specific.

The response, importantly, is not simply more stimulation. If boredom is caused by a breakdown in a relationship, one more object of attention may merely extend the same form of connection. Heidegger’s significance to the thesis is therefore not that he advises us to sit down and deliberately become bored. He makes it possible to view emptiness as an opening before it is filled again.

Philosophy alone, however, does not tell us how to manage this opening. The thesis therefore turns to literature. Literary works do not merely describe boredom from the outside; they can give shape to its movements and test other ways of seeing. Wallace Stevens and Jørgen Leth become two different experiments.

Wallace Stevens: returning through the imagination

In Wallace Stevens, boredom arises as an experience of separation. The subject inhabits a world divided by the categories, names, and compartments of reason. The thesis gathers this experience in Stevens’s word “apartments,” which suggests both dwellings and divisions: being apart rather than a part.

The problem is not that the world lacks objects. On the contrary, it may be crowded with things that have already been defined. But the subject is no longer connected to them in a living way. Reality appears as a collection of fixed meanings, and boredom becomes the experience of being unable to get through to anything beyond them.

In the long poem Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, this condition is connected with the desire to return to “the first idea.” This is not a historical origin that can actually be recovered, but a poetic image of the world before it was covered by inherited designations and explanations. The moon must be seen without the customary idea of the moon. The gaze must attempt to meet reality as if the connection had not already been decided.

Here, boredom’s zero point acquires a creative function. Once old meanings have been exhausted, a kind of de-creation becomes possible: the world is emptied of the already known so that the imagination can begin its work. The blank slate is not the end of the work, but its beginning.

The imagination should not, however, be understood as an escape into a private fantasy world. In Stevens, it remains in constant tension with reality. Fiction does not replace the world; it makes it possible to experience the world anew. The imaginary becomes an intermediary that restores the connection between the observing subject and what is observed.

This makes Stevens’s movement paradoxical. To move closer to reality, he must first step back from its established forms. He moves inward through language, variation, and imagination, but the aim is a renewed encounter with the outside world.

A clear example is Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. The title itself turns perspective into method. There is no single, final view of the blackbird, but thirteen ways of seeing it. Each short section produces a new constellation between the bird, the landscape, and the observer. The object is simultaneously the same and different.

The thesis identifies two related zero-point strategies here. The first is the shift in perspective. When a particular gaze has become monotonous or exhausted, the relationship can change when the position changes. This does not necessarily require a new world, only a new way of connecting its parts.

The second is condensation. Stevens’s brief images remove almost everything and leave only a few elements behind. Reduction creates intensity. When the background is emptied, the relationship between the blackbird, the snow, the mountains, or the gaze becomes clearer. This is the same basic figure as the zero point: an absence of abundance makes presence possible.

Repetition also plays an important role. We often associate repetition with boredom because the same thing returns without difference. In Stevens, however, repetition becomes productive when it is accompanied by variation. The blackbird returns, but never from exactly the same angle. Language repeats and corrects itself, tests new images, and refuses to fix the relationship between words and reality.

The opposite of boredom is therefore not simply novelty. What matters is mobility. The familiar can become alive if perspective does not grow rigid. Conversely, an endless stream of new things can become boring if we encounter them through the same unchanging gaze.

Stevens’s response to boredom is an artistic circulation: first separation, then emptying, followed by imaginative variation, and finally a new encounter with reality. The world is regained through fiction, but never once and for all. The supreme fiction is precisely something that must continually be created and recreated.

Jørgen Leth: framing the world so that it can be seen

In the thesis, Jørgen Leth represents a movement in the opposite direction. Where Stevens initially experiences the world as insufficient and seeks a detour through the imagination, the world in Leth is potentially interesting already. The problem lies in our way of seeing it.

Boredom therefore appears as a stationary subject while the world passes by. Images, bodies, movements, colours, and events may be everywhere, yet remain ungrasped. The flow of television can serve as an image of this condition: a constant supply of new material without the creation of any stronger connection.

Leth’s response is not to invent another world, but to establish a method. He delimits a field, chooses a point, sets rules, and records what appears. Art becomes an apparatus for attention.

This produces one of the thesis’s more unusual propositions: boredom is not always caused by too little coherence; it can also be caused by too much coherence. Reason attempts to gather the fragmented world into a single narrative and assign everything a fixed place. When that order becomes too smooth, the details lose their own force. The world becomes predictable because we believe we already know what its parts mean.

Leth’s anti-epic form resists this compulsion towards totality. He allows fragments to remain fragments, records movements, and enumerates objects without immediately gathering them into one overarching explanation. This does not mean that the form is random. On the contrary, it is carefully constructed. But the construction is intended to leave room for chance and the concrete to appear.

The note is a central zero-point strategy. A note preserves a detail without necessarily explaining it fully. It is provisional, point-like, and open. It can record a gesture, a colour, a location, or a statement and allow this single element to acquire weight.

The note thus protects the world against a premature synthesis. At the same time, it contains a danger: cataloguing can turn the person recording into a sovereign organiser of a passive world. The thesis therefore points out that the method must preserve its own uncertainty. The frame should not prove that everything has already been understood; it should make the encounter possible.

This is connected with what the thesis calls point consciousness. In Leth, the subject is not a stable core gathering all experiences into one identity. It chooses a point, occupies a position, and can then choose again. This lack of a fixed centre may resemble emptiness, but it is also the freedom to begin again in each moment.

Self-staging can be viewed in this light. If there is no final, authentic self behind every role, a role is not necessarily a lie. It is a chosen frame from which something can be seen and said. The subject is itself part of the experimental arrangement.

The catalogue and the zero point meet in the figure of something and someone against a background of nothing. By reducing coherence and isolating the detail, Leth allows it to appear with almost demonstrative clarity. A person performs a movement. A body is placed in a room. An object is seen from a specific angle. The insignificant is not explained into importance; it is made visible.

Framing is the second principal strategy. The camera delimits a section of reality. The frame excludes almost everything, but in doing so it can show something. It produces a tension between conscious form and the life unfolding within that form without ever becoming entirely controllable.

Leth’s cinematic method thus makes limitation productive. Rules are not merely inhibiting; they can create a stage for chance. Sport becomes a particularly clear example because it already unites a fixed frame with unpredictable events. The playing area, the duration, and the rules are determined, but the decisive moment cannot be planned. The frame makes the drama visible without producing it.

This orientation towards the world distinguishes Leth from Stevens. Leth does not need a higher synthesis that overcomes fragmentation. To a greater extent, he accepts that the world consists of points, sections, and shifting perspectives. But fiction is unavoidable for him as well. The camera’s position, the text’s selection, and the person’s role are constructions. Objectivity does not arise by removing the gaze, but by making its frame concrete.

Where Stevens uses the imagination to move back towards reality, Leth uses method to allow reality to become visible. In both cases, boredom is a starting point because the old connection has broken down. But their routes out of the zero point lead in opposite directions.

When I met Jørgen Leth after completing the thesis and spoke with him about his own experiences of boredom, it became clear to me that boredom could also take a far heavier form. Some of the periods he described were close to depression. His artistic methods could therefore be understood not only as techniques for making the world interesting, but also as more existential strategies for maintaining a connection with it. This did not change the thesis’s central argument, but it made me more cautious about the word “positive”. The possibility does not lie automatically in boredom itself, but in what happens to it and how it is managed.

Two routes back to the world

The thesis’s central construction can be summarised as a seesaw movement.

For Wallace Stevens, the world initially appears insufficient or exhausted. The subject retreats into the imagination, dissolves inherited images, and creates new perspectives. Through fiction, it becomes possible to encounter reality again.

For Jørgen Leth, the subject’s gaze initially appears insufficient. Rather than leaving the world, the subject develops a method for turning towards it: the note, the catalogue, the frame, the camera, the role, and the chosen limitation. The concrete detail acquires new intensity.

Put simply, Stevens moves inward in order to reach outward. Leth moves outward in order to transform the place from which he sees.

The difference clarifies their similarities. Both reject the notion that the world can simply be received neutrally. Every encounter is shaped by perspective, language, and choice. Both use variation and repetition. Both suspend habitual connections and create a kind of empty stage. And play is important to both because it loosens what appears necessary and allows things to enter into other relationships.

The concept of zero-point strategies attempts to gather this work under one heading. These strategies do not create meaning out of absolute nothingness. They alter the conditions under which something can mean something to someone. Boredom does not become positive as an isolated feeling. Its positive possibility lies in the transition from an exhausted relationship to a new one.

This also clarifies what is meant by management. If the boring world is immediately replaced by a new object, the fundamental relationship may remain unchanged. If boredom is instead allowed to create distance, we may discover that change does not necessarily require more content. It may require less: fewer elements, a narrower frame, another point of view, or a slower form of attention.

In this sense, positive boredom is an aesthetic possibility. Here, “aesthetic” does not mean beautification. It refers to a reorganisation of perception and attention. Art matters because it does not only discuss this reorganisation; it performs it. A poem or a film can set the reader’s or viewer’s gaze in motion.

What the argument can – and cannot – say today

The text was written in 2005 as a thesis in the humanities, grounded in literary analysis and philosophy. Its conclusions are not results from experimental psychology, and “positive” does not mean that boredom is automatically healthy, creative, or desirable. Some forms of boredom are associated with genuine distress. Others lead nowhere at all. The thesis makes a more limited claim: the value of boredom cannot be determined independently of the situation and the response of which it forms a part.

The philosophical concepts must likewise be read as interpretations. “Mini-Nothingness,” “the emissary of Nothingness,” and “mini-Being” are my own developments of Heidegger, not a neutral account of his philosophy. Stevens and Leth are not evidence for a general psychological law. They are artistic investigations that make particular possibilities visible.

Viewed from the present, it is nevertheless striking that more recent research also describes boredom as a regulatory or relational experience rather than a simple deficiency. The Boredom Feedback Model understands boredom as feedback about insufficient engagement between attention and activity. The philosopher Andreas Elpidorou has similarly argued that the discomfort of boredom can serve a function: it signals that the current situation does not meet our needs and motivates us to pursue other goals.

This is not identical to the thesis’s theory. Recent research asks, among other things, how people switch activities and goals. The thesis is particularly concerned with how the zero point can change an encounter with the same world. But the convergence underscores the value of the earlier formulation: boredom is located neither solely within us nor solely in things. It arises in a relationship that can change.

Digital everyday life makes the question more pressing. The opportunity to interrupt every empty moment has moved close to the body. Waiting, travelling, a pause in conversation, or a few seconds without occupation can immediately be filled by a screen. Recent research has, among other things, examined connections between boredom avoidance and smartphone use.

It would be too simple to make the smartphone the cause of all modern boredom. But constant access to stimulation raises a question that the thesis’s concept of the zero point can help us formulate:

What happens to us if we always interrupt boredom before it has time to become a zero point?

Perhaps we lose not only a discomfort, but also the distance from which our habitual interests, categories, and connections might become visible. This does not mean that every idle moment should be cultivated, or that boredom should become yet another self-improvement project. The moment the zero point becomes an obligation with a guaranteed return, it has already been filled with expectation.

The more modest possibility is to leave boredom open a little longer. Not as an end in itself, but as a transition whose direction has not yet been decided. Stevens and Leth show that the way forward may pass through imagination, shifts in perspective, limitation, notation, or a more precise gaze upon what is already there.

An open conclusion

The thesis did not end with a recipe. It questioned whether zero-point strategies were too closely tied to individual artists, whether repeating the strategies could itself become boring, and whether positive boredom presupposed an artistic life that could not simply be transferred to everyday existence.

These are genuine limitations. But perhaps transfer is the wrong figure. Art need not provide techniques that are subsequently applied to life. It can enlarge the area in which we register our way of seeing at all. The poetry of Stevens and the films and texts of Leth do not merely show interesting objects; they show how something becomes interesting.

The thesis’s central sentence therefore remains: Boredom depends on how it is managed. Boredom is not positive because emptiness is good in itself. It can become positive because the habitual relationship has been paused, and because that pause makes other connections possible.

Boredom is a stop. But a stop is not necessarily an ending.

About this text

This article presents the central argument of Jonathan Wichmann’s 2005 master’s thesis in Comparative Literature, originally submitted at the University of Copenhagen as Den positive kedsomhed – anslag til et nyt kedsomhedsbegreb. Heidegger – Stevens – Leth. It is an accessible introduction rather than a revised version of the thesis.

The complete thesis is now available in an English translation and new edition, preserving the argument, structure and historical frame of the original work:

Download Positive Boredom: Towards a New Concept of Boredom — Heidegger, Stevens, Leth (PDF, 2026)

The article is also available in Danish as “Kan kedsomhed være positiv? Heidegger, Wallace Stevens og Jørgen Leth”. Further information and the original Danish thesis are available on the Positive Boredom project page.

Selected contemporary perspectives

Tam, K.Y.Y. et al. (2021), “The Boredom Feedback Model.”
Elpidorou, A. (2018), “The Bored Mind Is a Guiding Mind: Toward a Regulatory Theory of Boredom.”
Tam, K.Y.Y., van Tilburg, W.A.P. & Chan, C.S. (2026), “Whatever Will Thrill Me: Understanding Excessive Smartphone Use Through the Boredom Avoidance Framework.”

Can Boredom Be Positive? Heidegger, Wallace Stevens, and Jørgen Leth