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    NEXT: The Future Will Be Boring

    A pilot program in the United Kingdom has produced striking results that might indicate enticing possibilities about the future of work. The companies that volunteered to participate in the study allowed their workers a four-day work week (or some other combination that had employees working only 32 hours a week). Everyone—both employers and employees—approved of the results. 

    “‘Before and after’ data shows that 39% of employees were less stressed, and 71% had reduced levels of burnout at the end of the trial. Likewise, levels of anxiety, fatigue and sleep issues decreased, while mental and physical health both improved.”

    The UK’s Four-Day Week Pilot
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    Benefits extended outside of the office. According to the report, “Employees also found it easier to balance their work with both family and social commitments – for 54%, it was easier to balance work with household jobs – and employees were also more satisfied with their household finances, relationships and how their time was being managed.” 

    Additionally, over the six-month trial, “Companies’ revenue, for instance, stayed broadly the same over the trial period, rising by 1.4% on average, weighted by company size, across respondent organizations. When compared to a similar period from previous years, organizations reported revenue increases of 35% on average – which indicates healthy growth during this period of working time reduction.” 

    Given the success of this pilot, one wonders whether the 32-hour work week will become the norm.

    One effect of the pandemic and the greater availability of remote work is that there is a growing desire for worker autonomy and a demand for greater work/life balance. More free time—even above more pay—seems to be what workers are desiring. 

    Consider the recent threatened railway strike: while employees’ demands included pay raises, the real sticking point seems to be over time off work (of which they currently have next to none). The extra eight hours of non-work time each week the pilot project granted workers was used to attend to care-giving, household errands and other chores, which left them more free time on weekends. 

    For now, that time away from work is being used effectively by employees. But if the work week continues to shrink—spurred on, perhaps by automation—what will we do with this surfeit of leisure? Could too much leisure lead to increasing boredom?

    To be clear, boredom does not equate to leisure. If leisure is free time—or the personal control over one’s time—boredom refers to the state of being weary and restless through lack of interest. Boredom is hardly a new phenomenon, and indeed might be a condition of modernity. Will an excess of boredom prove to be a condition of post-modernity? 

    I did a quick search of Google Books using its n-gram reader (which measures word frequency over time, how often a word appears in a given year across all of the books scanned into Google Books). I was surprised to learn that, since 2000, the frequency of the word “boredom” has increased. (This is also true of Spanish and German.) 

    This could indicate that scholars and commentators are writing more about the phenomenon (and not that there is a measurable increase in boredom). Or it could mean that the word is on everybody’s lips because we are experiencing so much more of it. If there will be ever increasing amounts of boredom in the future, perhaps the future has already arrived? 

    If there is more boredom in the future, the causes could very well have to do with an increase in disengagement with the world. More people could feel greater despair at the prospect of the future—a warming planet, and the disasters that await; a fractured politics and polity; looming technological unemployment—and wonder why they should expend the energy fighting it. Indeed, why do anything at all, since our problems seem so intractable and insurmountable? Some college professors are observing that students are currently exhibiting “debilitating levels of anxiety, hopelessness, and disconnection — what one professor termed ‘militant apathy.’” Societal perceptions of the future might be a leading cause of increasing disinterestedness. 

    Perhaps in the future people will demand control over their own boredom. I recently listened to a friend complain about having to sit through endless, pointless meetings at work, my friend disinterested and bored. In business, this is called “boreout” (rather than “burnout”) and is certainly a feature of contemporary office culture. Might we see “boreout” gush out of corporate culture and expand across the whole of society? At work, boredom is inflicted upon the employee: in the same way workers today are demanding greater control over their time, will future workers similarly strike for an end to boredom? Or might they agitate for greater autonomy over their boredom? 

    Enterprising companies will surely seek ways to monetize increasing amounts of boredom. They do this anyway, of course, by attempting to engage consumers with diversions. But what if entertainment and other forms of “engagement” become so ubiquitous that by virtue of its plenty, people become numb and inured of it, disengaged even when “engaged?” Rather than seeking ways to fill up or eliminate boredom, future entrepreneurs might discover ways to induce it.

    I can also imagine a future dystopia where boredom is criminalized. In a similar way that loitering—standing around without purpose, with connotations of indolence—is considered a minor offense, “disengagement,” and “disinterestedness” could be made misdemeanor crimes as a desperate way to exert the illusion of authority over the bored. 

    The autonomous economy means that bots or autonomous agents will be performing more tasks on our behalf. To take one example, the rapid rise of ChatGPT means that bots will almost certainly be creating more content, will like/comment/repost it, will generate artificial outrage over this content—in other words, the AI will “engage” with its own content—all the while humans stare at a disinterested distance. When designers say that in such autonomous systems it is vital that humans remain “in the loop”—meaning never fully ceding decision-making to an artificial intelligence—it means that humans must monitor the activities of autonomous systems. How engaging will this be? Increasing boredom may well prove to be an emergent effect of the necessary—but tedious—supervision of autonomous systems. 

    David Staley is an associate professor of history, design, and educational studies at The Ohio State University. He is host of the “Voices of Excellence” podcast and is president of Columbus Futurists. He was named “Best Freelance Writer” in 2022 by the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists for his “Next” column.

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    David Staley
    David Staley
    David Staley is president of Columbus Futurists and a professor of history, design and educational studies at The Ohio State University. He is the host of CreativeMornings Columbus.
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