Boredom and Alienation

by Elaine Sedelnikova, LP, NCPsyA, SCPsyA

The Color of Stagnation

The color of stagnation is brown.

It is the color of wood, "fecund substance of earth" and warm fertile soil. Humus, from which we derive the word humility, speaks to something grounding, generative, real.

But brown carries its shadow side too: an ever-present quality of decomposition, drought, and the draining of vitality. According to ARAS, brown can stand for "colorlessness or discoloration — rust, and dried blood, drought, brownouts of electricity or creativity, blandness, boredom or muddle," as well as collective identity and dependence, reflected in the brown of military uniforms. Brown is the color of things that were once alive and vivid, now faded into sameness. It is the color I want to sit with for a moment before we name what it represents.

Intrapsychic Combustion

The distinguished psychologist and writer Paul Diel offers an accurate definition to this state of deadness: intrapsychic combustion — the moment the innter fire goes out. He described a condition he called conventional banalization, in which the extinction of that interior flame produces a sense of meaningless or inauthentic existence, expressed in what he called "vague feelings of boredom." One of its most telling signs is the feeling of stagnation and monotony, the absence of joy, which Diel observed is quietly "replaced by a smug euphoria," a kind of numbed contentment that masks the void beneath it. He wrote:

"This is the consequence of an inner void which he endeavors to fill by frantic grasping at pleasure or by an automatism of obsessive work which is an attempt to realize exalted desires of material possession and of social position."

From a Jungian perspective, this is not simply a mood but a symptom. Boredom, at its deeper register, signals an alienation between the Ego and the Self, a disconnection from the psychic center of one's personality. This fire was kindling the connection to something essential within us.

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Elaine Sedelnikova

LP · NCPsyA · SCPsyA

Jungian psychoanalyst practicing in New York's West Village. This journal presents original essays on depth psychology, dreams, and the inner life.

About Elaine

Read Time

6 min

Essay

Essay №5

Published

April 30, 2026

"Nowadays more and more people, especially those who live in large cities, suffer from a terrible emptiness and boredom, as if they are waiting for something that never arrives. Movies and television, spectator sports and political excitements may divert them for a while, but again and again, exhausted and disenchanted, they have to return to the wasteland of their own lives."

— Marie-Louise von Franz

"L'Absinthe" by Edgar Degas (1876)

Acedia

Centuries before modern psychology gave it a clinical name, monks in the desert communities of late antiquity were already contending with it. The midday stupor of their monotonous, solitary lives led them to experience what they would eventually call acedia, translated loosely as sloth, though the original meaning is closer to a spiritual torpor, a paralysis of the soul. Even within the dedicated boundaries of prayer and devotion, the human psyche encountered the terror of alienation — from oneself, from one another, and from God. The Buddhist tradition, too, recognized this. Among the six hindrances to meditative contemplation — alongside pride, lack of belief, and insufficient devotion — we find distraction, inattention, and boredom. Across radically different spiritual frameworks, the same obstruction appears. This is not a modern inconvenience. It is a perennial wound.

The Fisher King Legend

Long before doctrine formalized the experience, myth and folklore were already recording it in their own language. Both are full of stories about a king who grew old and sick. According to Jung, this image describes the initial stage in the process of individuation — the moment when the ruling principle of the psyche loses its vitality. The legend of the Fisher King is perhaps the most resonant: his kingdom is decaying, the fields are withered and unable to produce crops, new generations cannot take root. The land reflects the inner state of its sovereign.

Here we encounter what might be called the archetype of the Impotent Lover, however, not in a narrowly sexual sense, but in the deeper sense that psychic libido has ceased to flow. Neither the Creator nor the Lover within us can move freely. What remains is flattened affect, listlessness, a paucity of psychic energy. One can feel it both psychologically and somatically: the inability to want anything deeply, desire without motion, presence without aliveness.

A Neuroscience of Longing

What is striking is that contemporary neuroscience quietly confirms what mythology has been encoding for millennia. The right hemisphere of the brain, we now know, does not experience boredom in the way the left does. As Dunlea observed:

"The right hemisphere relates to the chosen object with passionate and generous attention; it does not get bored or impatient but thrives on the associations it makes, and the quality of the relationship that it builds."

It is the left hemisphere with its goal-oriented, reward-seeking, and instrumental orientation that grows restless when there is nothing to optimize. And it is precisely the relentless pursuit of extrinsic rewards that can paradoxically generate the very boredom it seems designed to escape. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the father of the concept of flow, put it plainly: extrinsic rewards "compensate for the barrenness of experience." They do not fill the void. They paper over it.

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Trappings of Status Quo

The convenience of contemporary life is not nothing. Comfort matters. And yet somewhere in the smooth transition from one manageable day to the next, many of us have become automatons in our own existence. Everything is largely the same. The pace is sustainable. Occasionally, a crisis interrupts, and we frantically work to extinguish it, but ultimately the status quo reasserts itself, and with it that stagnant, indifferent sameness: the unconquerable boredom that seems to seep through the walls of even a life that, by all external measures, is going well. Edward Edinger wrote about this "individual and collective alienation that is characteristic of our time," and situated it in a striking image:

"The 'heap of broken images' surely refers to the traditional religious symbols which for many people have lost their meaning. We live in a desert and cannot find the source of life-giving water. The mountains — originally the place where man met God — have nothing but dry sterile thunder without rain."

This is not merely personal. It is cultural. A society that has outsourced meaning to consumption and social performance has collectively lost contact with its own interior life. The alienation is not incidental to the structure of modern life. It is woven into it so deeply, that oftentimes it makes us unaware and numb to our own deadness.

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"Stańczyk" by Jan Matejko (1862)

Entertained but Disenchanted

And so we turn to entertainment. To movies and sports and the scrolling feed and whatever spectacle is currently commanding collective attention. These are not without pleasure, but they are pleasures that circle back, again and again, to the same exhaustion. Marie-Louise von Franz observed this pattern with characteristic directness:

"Nowadays more and more people, especially those who live in large cities, suffer from a terrible emptiness and boredom, as if they are waiting for something that never arrives. Movies and television, spectator sports and political excitements may divert them for a while, but again and again, exhausted and disenchanted, they have to return to the wasteland of their own lives."

We are perhaps the most entertained civilization in history. However, the privilege of entertainment often becomes little more than a meaningless distraction and a weary resignation to escapism.

In Search of the Self

And yet, alienation, and boredom as its concomitant, is not only a symptom of psychic illness. According to Edinger, it is also a necessary stage in the life of the personality, whereby we participate in the endless process of circumambulation around the Self, the spiraling movement in which the Ego oscillates between inflation and deflation, between merger and estrangement, gradually drawing closer to the axis of one's existence. The Fisher King's wasteland is not the end of the story. It is the condition that makes the quest unavoidable.

Boredom, at its most honest, is the psyche's refusal to pretend. It is the moment when stagnation sets in and what no longer serves begins to decompose, that the faint possibility is born that something truer might one day grow from the very same soil.