The original Noonday Demon

Ever since Andrew Solomon’s book The Noonday Demon, An Atlas of Depression in 2001[i], the phrase “noonday demon” has come to be associated with depression. But it wasn’t always the way. Peter Toohey points out in his book Boredom: A Lively History that is was medieval monks who first coined the term, and not because they were depressed – but because they were bored.

Cloistered life can’t have been that stimulating. Long hours of silence and prayer that in themselves would feel isolating, and when prayer was done, study would begin. In fact, the noonday demon apparently reared its ugly head most frequently when the monks pursued their studies of math!  (disclaimer: math is awesome, stay in school kids).

There’s a lot you could extrapolate from this, not the least of which might be that isolating yourself from normal (whatever that might mean) human interaction has consequences. Boredom is a problem even for people who do things we might normally think of as exciting – exploratory missions to the arctic and Antarctica for instance.[ii] But even in those situations, isolation can be tough. We like to interact with one another (in fact, I would argue we need it to survive). There’s a whole other rant about social isolation and social media that might come another day, but for now, the monks may have gotten bored because they just didn’t talk to one another enough. They needed the medieval equivalent of the water cooler to gossip around.

Why the monks got bored is not really what I’m interested in. Nor do I want to trace the evolution of the phrase from a referent of boredom to one of depression. Rather, I want to raise a challenge in boredom research that I think has gone under the radar for a long time – what is the association between boredom and depression?

It’s a ground zero finding. Ever since people have examined boredom proneness they’ve know that it is associated with increased rates of depression. But what is the temporal relation here? Is boredom a prodromal symptom of depression? We don’t know and it’s time we started to figure it out.  To put my money on something before I have any data, I will say I think that boredom does precede depression and that boredom may in fact be a risk factor for developing depressive symptoms. There – I’ve made a bet. We’ll see if I’m right once the hard work is done.

Boredom is a sign of dissatisfaction with the moment. Felt often enough it can become dissatisfaction with life more generally. I tend to think of boredom as discontent directed outward – the world is not enough. Whereas depression is more clearly discontent directed inward – my life is not enough. That’s all too vague and still fails to propose a mechanism that turns one kind of discontent into another. But it does highlight what is common – the struggle to be optimally engaged with life.

[i] Reinhard Kuhn wrote The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature, Princeton Universtiy Press in 1976 – but this was about the original use of the term to refer to ennui or boredom and how that played out in literature.

[ii] Nicola, M., et al., (in press). The data on psychological adaptation during polar winter-overs in Sub-Antarctic and Antarctic stations. Data in Brief.