Bored Out of Our Minds

You will not be bored reading Kevin Hood Gary’s Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life. The slender book delivers on the title’s ambitious promise. How do we cope with boredom? And what is the “optimal” way to address boredom? Boredom, Gary argues, is a painful condition that has something to teach us if we will attend to it. The key to coping with boredom is to practice leisure so that we may confront boredom at its source—within ourselves rather than our environments.