Boredom, not hardship, has quietly become the bigger problem for many

Why do so many people who have exactly what they were told to want, stability, comfort, free time, still describe feeling hollow? Viktor Frankl, working as a psychiatrist in Vienna after the war, kept meeting patients whose complaint wasn't distress in the usual sense. It was a kind of inner emptiness they couldn't locate a cause for. He gave this condition a name: the existential vacuum.

His explanation runs through two losses. Early in human history, Frankl argues, people lost the animal instincts that once told a creature exactly what to do and when. More recently, the traditions that used to fill that gap, the inherited codes about what a person ought to do, have been thinning out fast. The result is a person with no instinct telling them what they have to do, and no tradition telling them what they ought to do, who sometimes cannot even say what they want to do. Frankl notices that people in this position tend to fall into one of two patterns: doing what everyone else does, or doing what everyone else wants them to do.

He backs this up with numbers rather than impressions. A public opinion poll in France found that 89 percent of people admitted they needed something to live for, and 61 percent said there was something, or someone, they'd be willing to die for. Frankl ran the same questions past patients and staff at his own hospital department in Vienna and got almost identical results, off by only two percentage points. A separate study of 7,948 students across forty-eight American colleges, run by social scientists at Johns Hopkins University, found only 16 percent rated making a lot of money as very important to them, against 78 percent who put finding purpose and meaning first.

The existential vacuum shows up, Frankl says, mainly as boredom, and he points out that the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had already noticed people swinging between distress and boredom as the two poles of human unhappiness. What's changed is the ratio. Frankl argues that boredom is now bringing more people to psychiatrists than distress is, and he expects this to get worse as automation hands people more leisure hours they don't know what to do with. He singles out Sunday neurosis, the low, formless depression that surfaces once the busy week's noise dies down and whatever's underneath becomes audible again.

Start by naming what you're actually feeling on your flattest days, if it's emptiness rather than acute worry, that's useful information, because it points to a different problem than stress does. Instead of asking yourself the huge, paralysing question of what life means in general, ask something narrower and more answerable: what does this particular week seem to be asking of me. Pick one concrete cause, task, or person to commit yourself to, rather than continuing to search for meaning as an abstract thing you might one day locate. And pay attention the next time a quiet Sunday leaves you flatter than the week did, treat that flatness as useful information about what's missing, not just as a mood to wait out.