厌倦在18世纪的英国作为一种新近被识别的状态出现，到1840年代几乎达到“流行病”水平，到了1850年代，狄更斯写下“厌倦到死”，达尔文到丘吉尔等重要人物都把厌倦当作现代生活的标志之一。趋势却已逆转，当代英国反而对厌倦的稀缺更为焦虑，评论界称“厌倦时代”已经过去。

语言学家把“bored”一词追溯到1768年，解释虽归咎于资本主义、社会主义、年轻人或法国等不同对象，但更明显的模式是社会本身对这种情绪的文化执着；到1980年代，美国学者已建立了“厌倦易感量表”。这一实证化路径发现高厌倦与酗酒、对同龄人伤害行为及轻度残忍行为相关，且《科学》杂志的实验显示不少人宁愿按电击按钮，也不愿独自面对自己的思绪。

尽管直接测量仍然薄弱，因为厌倦没有幸福指数式的全球指标，也没有像抑郁那样的世卫组织级项目，但间接数据表明其在下降：英国人尤其是年轻人饮酒更少、阅读更少、性生活更少，尼尔森IQ BookData显示亨利·詹姆斯书籍十年内销量下降50%。与此同时，技术利润上升，智能手机“暂时阻挡”厌倦，但研究者担心这种压制减少了有意义且持续的活动，也使厌倦在“压力流行病”和“焦虑流行病”盛行的背景下成为被忽视但值得重估的公共健康信号。

Boredom appeared in Britain as a newly recognized condition in the 18th century and by the 1840s had reached near-epidemic levels, with Dickens in the 1850s writing “bored to death” and figures from Darwin to Churchill treating boredom as a defining feature of modern life. The trend has since reversed, and contemporary Britain now shows greater anxiety about the scarcity of boredom, with commentators saying the age of boredom has passed.

Linguists trace the word “bored” to 1768, and although explanations blamed capitalism, socialism, youth, or France, the stronger pattern was cultural fixation on the feeling itself, with American scholars creating a boredom-proneness scale by the 1980s. That empirical turn linked high boredom to binge drinking, peer cruelty, and trivial harm, while a Science experiment found many people preferred pressing an electric-shock button to being alone with their thoughts.

Direct measurement is still weak because boredom lacks happiness-like global indices and WHO-level programs for depression, but indirect data indicate decline: Britons, especially younger people, are drinking less, reading less, and having less sex, and NielsenIQ BookData reports Henry James book sales falling 50% over a decade. At the same time, tech and smartphone use rise, with technology “staving off” boredom, while some researchers argue this suppression reduces sustained meaningful activity and makes boredom an understudied but renewed social signal amid stress and anxiety epidemics.

Source: Britons are less bored than they used to be. This is bad

Subtitle: It’s time to find boredom interesting agai

Dateline: 4月 09, 2026 04:28 上午