Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 37:4

00218308

Simmel on Acceleration, Boredom, and

Extreme Aesthesia
KEVIN
Original
SIMMEL
Articles
ON
ACCELERATION,
BOREDOM,
EXTREME
AESTHESIA
Blackwell
Oxford,
Journal
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2007 AHO
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TheAND
Executive
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Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007

KEVIN AHO

In the wake of Reinhard Kuhns pioneering 1976 study The Demon of Noontide:
Ennui in Western Literature, there has been a recent upsurge of interest concerning
the contemporary experience of boredom. Patricia Spacks (1995) Boredom: The
Literary History of a State of Mind, Lars Svendsens (2005) A Philosophy of Boredom, and
Elizabeth Goodsteins (2005) comprehensive Experience without Qualities: Boredom and
Modernity have all tuned into the modern mood, a mood born in the urban
industrial centers of Western Europe and America and reaching a state of ubiquity
in the technological age. The mood can be recognized when there is a pervasive
cultural craving for immediate amusement, risk, and peak sensations, a momentary
aisthesis that briefly pulls us out of the emptiness and indifference of our everyday
lives.1 Anton Zijderveld (1979) explains how one can identify boredom.

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It can be observed that speech becomes gross and hyperbolic, music loud and nervous, giddy
and fantastic, emotions limitless and shameless, actions bizarre and foolish, whenever boredom
reigns. A bored individual needs these irritants of body, psyche and mind because he is not
behaviorally stimulated in any other way ( p. 77; cited in Spacks, 1995: 19).

However, to claim that modern culture is bored because it is not behaviorally

stimulated seems odd. We live in the age of hyper-stimulation, of global
travel, instant credit, and endless technological distraction. There are so many
obligations, choices, and products to pick from and consume, how can one possibly
be bored?
Twentieth-century social theorists and philosophers have pointed to a number of
overlapping causes that contribute to the modern malady. The Thomist philosopher
Josef Pieper (1963), for instance, has suggested that boredom emerges in modern
culture because in our obsession with utility and productivitywe have forgotten
the value of genuine, purposeless leisure, confusing it with instrumental distractions
like shopping, dining, or going to the movies, activities that we are fundamentally
indifferent to. Neo-Marxists, drawing on the work of Thorstein Veblen (1994),
have argued that capitalisms increasingly affluent middle-class has created a life
rooted in conspicuous consumption, spawning generations of bored citizens whose
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Kevin Aho

passions have been reduced to buying the latest clothes, cars, and electronics.
Martin Heidegger (1995) claimed that the fundamental mood of modernity is
boredom because nothing can stand out as unique or different anymore; all
beingsincluding humanshave been leveled to the status of a quantifiable
resource to be manipulated, used, and exchanged. And cultural critics influenced
by Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault have indicated that this emotional
flatness may emerge from the excessive repression of feeling and desire in a
technological culture that privileges rational control, discipline, and order.
While not dismissing any of these accounts, I want to suggest that the cultural
affect of boredom and the postmodern tendency towards, what I call, extreme
aesthesia, might also be attributed to the unique velocity or tempo of life in the
technological age. The work of sociologist Georg Simmel is important in this regard
because he is one of first to interpret boredom through the modern experience of
time-pressure and social acceleration, an interpretation that has had a significant
impact on contemporary social theory (Adam, 1990; Virilio, 2000; Rosa, 2003;
Scheuerman, 2004). According to Simmel, the rise of the rationalized, scientific
worldview and the emergence of the instrumental money economy have stripped
us of the enduring values and meanings that gave pre-modern life a sense of
cohesion and purpose. The result is a shared experience of emptiness where life
is reduced to the meaningless production and consumption of goods and services.
And with technological innovations, we can produce and consume more things
in smaller units of time, resulting in a life so accelerated that it is difficult to
qualitatively distinguish which things actually matter to us. We are so busy, so
over-stimulated and stretched thin, that we have become bored, blas to the frenzy
of everyday experiences. Yet, as Simmel reminds us, it is precisely because of this
blas attitude that we increasingly turn to more excessive, adventurous, and
risky behavior. In our indifference we search for something, anything that evokes
a strong aisthesis, momentarily breaking the spell of boredom.

I. THE RISE OF BOREDOM

Although the experience of boredom has ancient roots that can be found in the
Greek words for idleness (schol, lys and args) and an apathetic state of mind
(kros), the word that best captures the feeling is the Greek word akeda derived
from kedos which signifies a spiritual lack of interest, an indifference that takes on
a moral character insofar as it represents a sinful condition of the soul. (Svendsen,
2005: 4951; Kuhn, 1976: 40) From late antiquity through the Middle-Ages,
acedia was associated with a demonic tiredness or stupor of the soul that the
fourth century monk Evagrius of Pontus simply called the midday demon
(daemon qui etiam meridianus vocatur) who struck between the hours of ten and two
(Kuhn, 1973: 43). However, this pre-modern conception is, for our purposes, not
very helpful because it focuses largely on the immoral character of the soul or,
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Simmel on Acceleration, Boredom, and Extreme Aesthesia

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later, on the idleness of the leisure class. In this essay, we are focusing on a
specifically modern manifestation of boredom to the extent that it is no longer
restricted to those rare sick souls or a few wealthy socialites. It is, rather, the
consequence of existing in the modern world itself.
In this regard, it is worth noting that the English word boredom was not
introduced until the nineteenth century and the psychological term to bore did
not emerge until the middle of the eighteenth century (Spacks, 1995: 1314;
Goodstein, 2005: 10708).2 Similarly, the French word ennui, understood as
a personal sense of spiritual barrenness or indifference, and the German word
Langeweile, understood as an unpleasant feeling when one experiences an empty
stretch of time, both went through a modern process of democratization, whereby
the mood no longer belonged exclusively to the few but to the modern world as
a whole (Goodstein, 2005: 111112).3
For Simmel, the experience of modern boredom corresponds historically with
Nietzsches (1974) late nineteenth century pronouncement that God is dead,
referring to the breakdown of all absolute, universal truths and values in modern
Europe, truths that endowed pre-modern life with a sense of enduring meaning
and purpose (p. 181). In the ancient and medieval worlds, the value of things was,
in large part, understood in terms of an underlying natural order, a great chain
of being whereby people came to know their place in the world and came to
understand the divine purpose of their shared goals and projects. Simmel (1986)
confirms that the pre-modern worldview
gave life that absolute purpose . . . The salvation of the soul and the realm of God presented
itself to the masses as an unconditional value, as the definitive goal beyond everything particular,
fragmentary, senseless in life. And they lived for this final purpose until, in the last centuries,
Christianity lost its power over countless souls (Goodstein, 2005: 260).4

With the urbanization of modern Europe and the growing influence of a secular
scientific perspective, nature came to be increasingly understood, not as an
enchanted place filled with divine purpose, but as a vast and, ultimately, meaningless
storehouse of brute objects in causal interaction, objects that can be instrumentally
observed, measured, and controlled. On this view, human beings show up as just
one more piece of information, one more object among countless others that can
be explained rationally on the basis of specific calculative procedures.
In his 1918 speech, Science as a Vocation (Wissenschaft als Beruf ), Max Weber
(1958) warned of the danger of Europes growing commitment to a rationalized
society. According to Weber, this increasing intellectualization and rationalization . . .
means that there are no more mysterious incalculable forces that come into play,
but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means
that the world is disenchanted. (p. 159) Weber suggests scientific progress has
no meaning beyond the purely practical and technical. Such progress is endless
and ultimately meaningless in terms of the existential questions that are most
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important: What shall we do and how shall we live? and What is the meaning
of our own death? (p. 139) In the modern age, the human being comes to be
regarded either as an object to be manipulated and quantified or as a self-enclosed
subject, separate and distinct from a meaningful social background of enduring
beliefs and practices.
Simmel (1997b) sees the emergence of the money economy as the central
feature of this instrumental worldview. In the money economy, values are leveled
and equalized to the extent that they are detached from ones emotional
relationship to a whole community. Money comes to be regarded as the rational
equivalent for anything and everything. On this view, the value of things is
interpreted exclusively through the quantifiable grid of money (p. 249). The
consequence of this is twofold: First, the money economy cements the modern
sense of individual freedom from restrictive social norms insofar as the subject no
longer interprets herself/himself in terms of a binding relationship to a communal
background of enduring practices and beliefs. Second, because social life in the
money economy depends on the mediation of instrumental reason, there is a loss
of emotional connectivity, what Simmel (1978) refers to as the peculiar leveling
of emotional life (p. 432).
This leveling results in a feeling of emptiness and restlessness, what Simmel
calls the blas attitude. If value is understood only in quantifiable terms,
specifically in terms of the question how much is it worth? then our deepest
social, personal, and emotional commitments must also be quantified. Absorbed
in the money economy, the modern individual becomes increasingly indifferent
to things because they exist within a uniform and dull coloration, no longer
distinguished by variation (1997b: 249). Money becomes an absolute value, an
unquestioned end-in-itself, and the forms of life are controlled with merciless
objectivity through rational calculation, quantification, punctuality, and the
ceaseless exchange of goods and services (1978: 431). And, as the money economy
accelerates and expands with technological advances in communication, transportation, and production, the individual finds it increasingly difficult to keep up
with the things that they are frantically consuming and producing. The result, as
Simmel (1978) writes, is an extreme acceleration in the pace of life, a feverish
commotion and compression of its fluctuations, in which the specific influence
of money upon the course of psychological life becomes most clearly discernible
(p. 506).

II. ACCELERATION AND BOREDOM

At the end of the nineteenth century, the physician George M. Beard (1880)
introduced the word neurasthenia to refer to the nervous frenzy of the industrious
American caught up in the money economy, a frenzy embodied in twitchiness,
punctuality and busyness and which led to any number of emotional and physical
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Simmel on Acceleration, Boredom, and Extreme Aesthesia

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ailments including dyspepsia, headaches, paralysis, insomnia, and anesthesia

(p. vi; cited in Shorter, 1997: 130). Physicians and psychiatrists came to see
neurasthenia as a ubiquitous symptom of an accelerated urban life, a symptom
with no explicit physiological basis but one that appears to derive from uniquely
modern social conditions.5 Neurasthenia, as Michael O Malley (2005) writes,
served as a catch-all, general purpose diagnosis, much as Attention Deficit/
Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) does today (p. 384).
In his groundbreaking 1903 essay, The Metropolis and Mental Life (Die
Grossstdte und das Geistesleben), Simmel (1997a) follows Beards lead by suggesting
that the increasingly intense stimulation of the nervous system in modern cities
invariably leads to a temperament that is fundamentally blas.
Through the mere quantitative intensification of the same conditioning factors this achievement
is transformed into its opposite and appears in the peculiar adjustment of the blas attitude. In
this phenomenon the nerves find in the refusal to react to their stimulation in the last possibility
of accommodating to the contents and forms of metropolitan life (p. 179).

According to Simmel, the nervous system of the metropolitan subjectbombarded

by increasingly diverse stimuliinvariably reaches a peak of over-stimulation and
the body responds, out of sheer self-preservation, by relying on the intellect,
a protective organ that is rooted in emotional detachment.
The metropolitan type of man . . . develops an organ protecting him against the threatening
currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him. He reacts with
his head instead of his heart ( p. 176).

This intellectual detachment has both a positive and negative function. Positively,
because it is the least sensitive part of the psyche, the intellect provides a selfpreserving emotional barrier, anesthetizing the subject from the sensory shocks
and inner upheavals that are symptomatic of metropolitan life (p. 176). Negatively,
it results in a life that is based not on personal and emotional connections to the
social world but on instrumental logical operations. The consequence of this
type of calculative individualization is, for Simmel, boredom, a disengaged
indifference to our everyday choices and commitments.
Simmel suggests the indifference characteristic of the metropolitan subject is
unavoidable. It is, in large part, a natural response that stems from the velocity
and ceaseless nervous stimulation in the modern city (p. 175). There are many social
forms that contributed to the increased pace of life at the turn of the century:
the emergence of new communication technologies with the press, telegraph
and telephone; advances in transportation with the steam engine, railroad, and
automobile; and mechanized forms of mass production (Urry, 2000; Rosa, 2003).
The combined impact of these technological developments rapidly changed the
tempo of metropolitan life and contributed to a growing sense of nervousness.
Indeed, some have argued these inventions burst onto the social fabric so quickly
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that the nervous system was simply unable to adapt. Max Nordau offers a portrait
of this turn of the century urban nervousness when he writes:
Every line we read or write, every human face we see, every conversation we carry on, every
scene we perceive through the window of the flying express, sets in activity our sensory nerves
and our brain centers. Even the little shocks of railway traveling, not perceived by consciousness,
the perpetual noises and the various sights in the streets of a large town, our suspense pending
the sequel of progressing events, the constant expectation of the newspaper, the postman, or
visitors, cost our brains wear and tear (Kern, 1983: 125).

Indeed, as O Malley (2005) and others have argued, acceleration and the overstimulation of the senses stemming from late nineteenth century technological
innovations may represent the most dramatic social change in human history. To
this end, the most important machine that altered the tempo of modern life may
not have been the railway, automobile, or telegraph, but the introduction of the
mechanical clock itself. (Levine, 1997) Indeed, Simmel (1997a) goes so far as to
suggest that without the clock, the whole rational social structure of the money
economy would break down into an inextricable chaos.
If all of the clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only
by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long
time. (p. 177)

In his essay on the Metropolis, Simmel explores the psychic costs of a life
increasingly governed and regulated by the clock, when punctuality, calculability,
[and] exactness are forced upon life by . . . metropolitan existence, and experiences
are increasingly compressed by the universal accuracy of a stable and impersonal
time schedule (p. 177). Accordingly, the clock, as an instrument of rational
calculation, becomes a symbol of the money economy, leading to the universal
diffusion of pocket watches. The watch allows people to precisely calculate,
measure, and quantify the various moments of their lives, thereby transforming
the world into an arithmatic problem (p. 177).
In chorus with Simmels findings, the classical sociology of Marx, Weber, and
Durkheim had begun to engage the phenomenon of clock-time and its adverse
effects on modern social life. Marx (1978), for instance, revealed how the manipulation and exploitation of time as a measurable commodity is fundamental to the
machinery of capitalism, forcing the working class into longer, more intense, and
competitive workdays that tore at the fabric of social life and strained physical
reserves (p. 469500). Weber (1998) showed how the emergence of clock-time and
the rise of capitalism resonated to an increasingly disciplined Protestant work
ethic in Europe and America, where the wasting of time became the most serious
of sins.
Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is
infinitely short and precious to make sure of ones own election. Loss of time through sociability,
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idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary to health . . . is worthy of absolute moral
condemnation (p. 157158).

And Durkheim (1979) addressed the more extreme consequences of a life

increasingly regulated by the impersonal structures of clock-time which resulted
in the fragmentation of stabilizing social norms. In his 1897 essay, Le Suicide,
he suggested that it was on the basis of accelerated socio-economic changes in
the Industrial Age that an earlier sense of communal belongingness and social
integration was being destroyed, creating an underlying sense of anomie and
loneliness that increasingly ends in suicide.
For Simmel, clock-timewith its preoccupation on speed, precision, and the
fads and fashions of the momentdestroys a more original sense of time that is
rooted in the organic, value-laden memories of our past, memories that create a
sense of being anchored and oriented in the world. The result of this destruction
is a culture that fosters increasingly bizarre behavior and nihilistic attitudes.
Lawrence Scaff (2005) explains Simmels position in the following way:
In the absence of a temporal anchor and orientation, the anything goes of style and
acquisition takes over. But since style and acquisition are insubstantial and meaningless, the
modern response is to invent meanings, no matter how bizarre, tendentious, or self-destructive
(p. 20).

Benjamin Whorf s (1956) ethnography of the Hopi Indians and Pierre Bourdieus
(1963) classic study of the Kabyle peasants of Algeria, support Simmels claim
that the pre-modern experience of time conflicts dramatically with the modern
understanding. The Kabyle, for instance, understood time not as a measurable
commodity to be effectively manipulated and controlled by available technologies
but as a shared social context of lived experiences that orients a people and gives
meaning and significance to their lives. Bourdieu explains that for the Kabyle
Time . . . is not . . . measured time . . . [Instead] the parts of the day are lived as different
appearances of the perceived world, nuances of which are apprehended impressionistically:
when the sky is a little light in the East, then when the sky is a little red, the time of the
first prayer, then when the sun touches the earth, when the goats come out, when the
goats hide, and so on. ( p. 57)

The Kabyle viewed the introduction of the European clock with suspicion
because it pulled them away from the fragile, organic unfolding of life, turning
lifewith all of its tragedies and joysinto something to be mastered rather than
accepted. Consequently, the clock was seen as a symptom of diabolical ambition
and often referred to as the the devils mill (p. 59).
For Simmel (1997a), the ubiquity of time piecesand other turn of the century
inventions as mundane as artificial lightingmeant that the natural rhythms and
instincts of life were being increasingly controlled and regulated by machines,
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resulting in an exclusion of [humanitys] irrational, instinctive, [and] sovereign

traits (p. 178). In the metropolis, we are forever being pulled away from the
natural movement of life that tells us, among other things, when to sleep, when
to eat, and when to wake up. Today, the clock artificially determines these organic
needs, and we are invariably compelled towards speed, punctuality, and being on
time.6 Moreover, with the ceaseless innovation of new time saving devices, more
and more things can be compressed into a particular moment, resulting in a
contraction of the present, where the sheer consumption of experiences and
things increases while the span of a given unit of time decreases. (Rosa, 2003)
The contraction of the present can be experienced on any given day. For
instance, as I drive to the office, I occupy a present span of time. This span
contracts as I make appointments and check messages on my cell phone, pick
up my dry cleaning, grab lunch at a drive-thru restaurant and eat it behind the
wheel, check my notes and calendar as I wait in traffic, all without leaving my car,
all while moving toward my office. The present contracts to the extent that a
measurable span of time has been efficiently filled with activities. The consequence
is a heightened state of nervous arousal, of pressure and over-stimulation rooted
in a need to do more things in less time. Hartmut Rosa (2003) points out that the
social experience of time pressureemerging in tandem with increasing rates of
production and consumptionresults in a self-perpetuating feedback loop. If
the world around you is busily engaged in producing and consuming things,
then the idea of slowing down or taking time out from acceleration starts to look
old-fashioned, out-dated, and anachronistic.
Thus, people feel pressed to keep up with the speed of change they experience in their social
and technological world in order to avoid the loss of potentially valuable options and
connections (p. 11).

Social forms of acceleration, therefore, not only force me to fill my calendar with
an endless series of activities and obligations, I am also sucked further into the
acceleration cycle, turning to newer, faster technological gadgets which hold out
the false promise of freeing up more time which will, in turn, make it possible
for me to catch up with everyone else (p. 11).
Social psychologists (O Connor, 2005; Gergen, 1991; Cushman, 1995; Levine,
1997) have increasingly pointed to time-pressure, overstimulation, and social
fragmentation as core contributors to a growing number of serious psychiatric
conditions including: depression, anxiety disorders, impulse disorders, and the
increasingly ubiquitous personality disorder, ADHD. And cardiologists have
begun to identify how the social construction of the competitive, driven Type A
personality has increased the proliferation of heart disease, high blood pressure,
obesity, emotional fatigue, insomnia, and tendencies towards hostility and rage
(Freidman and Rosenman, 1959; Ulmer and Schwartzburd, 1996). What makes
Simmels observations so compelling, however, is that the consequence of
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Simmel on Acceleration, Boredom, and Extreme Aesthesia

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acceleration need not be as dramatic as a diagnosable psychiatric or physiological

disease. The blas attitude is much more pervasive and, consequently, more subtle.
For Simmel (1997a), boredom emerges insidiously as we are busily occupied
with our workaday routines. It is on the basis of our harried busy-ness that we
have difficulty responding qualitatively to the various tasks and projects we are
engaged in. In short, it is modern life itself that makes [us bored] because it
agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they
finally cease to react at all (p. 178). The result is an inability to distinguish which
activity actually matters to us, creating a devaluation of the whole objective
world, a devaluation which in the end unavoidably drags ones own personality
down into a feeling of the same worthlessness ( p. 179). If family obligations,
work, exercise, shopping, and dining must all be efficiently performed within an
increasingly compressed schedule, then it becomes difficult to identify which of
these activities is more meaningful or significant than others. In our heightened
state of nervous indifference all of our choices take on an equal significance; we
do not have a strong emotional reaction to any of them. Things, says Simmel,
begin to appear in an evenly flat and gray tone, [where] no one object deserves
preference over any other (p. 178). Accelerated existence, therefore, begins to
exercise a tacit but elemental control over us, carrying us along with little or no
conscious awareness of what is going on, as if in a stream, and one needs hardly
to swim for oneself (p. 184).
For Simmel, it is because the modern subject no longer has the capacity to
react emotionally to everyday sensations and experiences that extreme measures
need to be taken to break out of boredom. The consumer and the producer must
find new ways to differentiate mundane stimulation from specialized experiences
that are unique and exceptional. Thus,
the seller must always seek to call forth new and differentiated needs of the lured customer. In
order to find a source of income which is not yet exhausted, and to find a function which cannot
readily be displaced, it is necessary to specialize ones services (p. 183).

Simmel refers to this as a need to exaggerate, stand out or be different from

the blas stimulation that bombards the individual in everyday life (p. 18384).
The inability to feel anything, therefore, pushes us towards more intense, risky,
and excessive experiences that will spark, albeit briefly, some sort of strong
emotional reaction.

III. THE RISE OF EXTREME AESTHESIA

In his 1911 essay, The Adventure (Das Abenteuer ), Simmel (1997c) refers to the
character of Casanova as an adventurer, a person who activity seeks to live in
the present by embarking on a series of erotic encounters (p. 223). These
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adventures are important to the modern subject insofar as they create momentary
experiences of intense feeling, of differentiation within the blas entanglements of
everyday life. Lost in the immediacy of the moment, the adventurer, like the
gambler, is thrust into a unique relation to time. He is not looking forward,
anxiously fretting about the obligations of the future, and he is not looking
backward, brooding over the mistakes and choices he made in the past. The
atmosphere, says Simmel, is absolute presentnessthe sudden rearing of
the life process to a point where both past and future are irrelevant ( p. 230). The
adventure represents a momentary aisthesis, an intense feeling or sensation that is
torn off from the mundane stream of life experiences ( p. 228).
Kierkegaards (1973) Johannes the Seducer provides us with a model of such a
character, a wealthy aesthete who embodies the modern need to stave off boredom.
For Johannes, the spell of boredom is broken only by means of gratifying particular
short-term pleasures. Johannes deliberately plans his entire life around turning
a brief moment of pleasurein his case the seduction of a beautiful womeninto
a little eternity. These experiences pull Johannes out of the dull busyness of his
everyday existence. However, as soon as the excitement and passion of the little
eternity ends, and the seduction is complete, Johannes becomes indifferent again
and the rush of pleasure dissipates. In describing the waxing and waning of his
seduction of Cordelia, Johannes laments,
How Cordelia engrosses me! And yet the time [it] is soon over; always my soul requires
rejuvenescence. I can already hear, as it were, the far distant crowing of the cock . . . Why
is a young girl so pretty, and why does it last so short a time? I could become quite melancholy
over this thought and yet it is no concern of mine. Enjoy, do not talk. The people who make
a business of such deliberations generally do not enjoy . . . ( p. 76)

Johannes cannot rest. After the thrill of the seduction he must, with no guilt, move
on to the next moment, the next adventure.
Kierkegaard sees such a life as one that ultimately leads to despair because it
is fundamentally fragmented and disjointed. It is an existence with no overarching
coherence or purpose. Life becomes an endless series of increasingly intense
moments with nothing eternal that binds these disparate moments together.
Kierkegaard describes the fundamental futility of the aesthetic life in the
following way:
One tires of living in the country, and moves to the city; one tires of ones native land, and
travels abroad; one is europamde, and goes to America, and so on; finally one indulges in a
sentimental hope of endless journeyings from star to star. Or the movement is different but still
extensive. One tires of porcelain dishes and eats on silver; one tires of silver and turns to gold;
one burns half of Rome to get an idea of the burning of Troy. This method defeats itself; it is
plain endlessness (p. 25).

Like Kierkegaards seducer, Simmel (1997c) sees the professional adventurer as

someone who seeks a life with no continuity, one that is based solely on satisfying
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individualistic and selfish desires (p. 221). Such an individual longs for the
exhilarations of risk and chance, attempting to turn these momentary accidents
into necessities (p. 224).
What makes Simmels critique so fundamental to contemporary ways of living
is his understanding that an existence based on experiencing intense pleasure
quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. In todays hyper-accelerated world,
what is novel and exciting today no longer excites the nervous system tomorrow;
yesterdays pleasures become boring and uninteresting. Thus, a life in boundless
pursuit of pleasure makes one blas because any risky or intense experience alltoo-quickly becomes routine (1997a: 178). Leslie Paul Thiele (1997) refers to this
postmodern phenomenon as the routinization of novelty, whereby novelty
becomes institutionalized into technological modes of production requiring
increasingly intense stimuli . . . to achieve the same level of pleasure (p. 24). In this
regard, the ordinary pleasures of shopping for the latest fashions and traveling to
the trendiest resorts are no longer interesting enough to break the spell of boredom.
The consequence is that each adventurer must become more extreme, more
adventurous because experiences that were previously regarded as exceptional
and euphoric have now become banal (Simmel, 1997c: 222).
In his 1895 essay, The Alpine Journey (Alpenreisen), Simmel (1997d) offers
a case of how technological progress has made the turn towards extremism
inevitable. For previous generations, the Alps provided a few healthy individuals
an escape from the routine novelty of the metropolis because access to these peaks
was difficult. However, technology has made venturing into the Alps mundane,
bringing boredom to the mountains. Simmel writes:
Destinations that were previously only accessible by remote walks can now be reached by
railways, which are appearing at an ever-increasing rate. Railways have been built where the
gradients are too steep for roads to be constructed . . . Like all social averages this depresses those
disposed to the higher and finer values without elevating those at the base to the same degree
(p. 219).

It is possible that the mortal danger and intensity of mountain climbing may bring
the question of ones existence sharply into focus, perhaps forcing a personal
reevaluation of ones everyday choices and commitments. However, this existential
confrontation becomes less significant when the peak is crowded with tourists,
when the climber next to you is being pulled up the mountain by a guide.
The mountaineer must, therefore, take more extreme measures to break out of
boredom.
Writer and mountain climber Jon Krakauer (1990) offers an example of this
search for extremes in Chamonix, the self-proclaimed Capitale Mondiale du Ski et
Alpinisme. After climbing an extremely difficult spire called the Grand Capucin
in the Alps, Krakauer sparks up a conversation at a downtown bar with Patrick,
a locally renowned French mountaineer. He soon realizes that what he thought
was a dramatic climb with his partner was quite ordinary for the circle of expert
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climbers in Chamonix. For a truly extreme experience, one must now climb
the peak solo, without ropes, and then parachute (or parapente) off the summit.
You did not solo and you did not parapente the Capucin? asked Patrick. Did
you not find the experience a littlehow you say in Englishbanal ? (p. 86)
And today, even the Alps are not enough. An ordinary but physically fit tourist
can now pay upwards of $70,000 to experience what only a few seasoned
high-altitude climbers could twenty years ago. Staying in a nylon tent city with
hundreds of other tourists, drinking Starbucks coffee at 18,000 feet, and sucking
on oxygen tanks, they have the opportunity for the extreme rush of being
guided to the top of one of the most remote summits on earth, Mount Everest
(Krakauer, 1997).
A recent article in Travel and Leisure magazine captures this contemporary
shift towards extremes by identifying a new breed of retired travelers, perpetual
wanderers who ceaselessly fly from one destination to another with only
brief stops in between. In earlier times, an annual vacation cruise to an exotic
location may have been enough to momentarily pull one out the emotional
flatness of everyday life. Today, however, the cruise ship itself must be filled
with novel sensations, endless buffets, rock-climbing walls, and all-night casinos.
But the recent emergence of the perpetual wanderer reminds us that this
is not enough because, as Simmel (1997d) says, the sensory excitement
and euphoria . . . subsides remarkably quickly (p. 220). In order to avoid the
inevitable emotional let-down of an adventure, there is only one thing to do,
never stop.
This new breed of extreme traveler resonates to Simmels theory of boredom.
If one is forever globe-trotting, consuming an endless number of experiences and
things, it becomes more difficult to distinguish the uniqueness of one experience
from another. Perpetual wanderers see so much, so fast, says the author Jeff
Wise (2003), its hard to figure how they can process much of anything ( p. 156).
Indeed, the goal of the perpetual adventurer is notat the deepest levelto learn
about the world or expand cultural horizons based on these exciting experiences.
Indeed the goal is not even to relax. Rather it is to keep the boredom of everyday
life at bay by seeking out new experiences, as many as possible . . . as a way of
adding intensity to their lives (p. 156). To this end, it is not the distinctive aspects
of each adventure that is important; it is to fill an underlying emptiness in life by
continually feeling the rush of the adventure itself.
Of course, the nihilistic culture of the rush is not limited to those economically
privileged enough to be world-travelers or mountain climbers. Although it is a
reference to technological culture in general, the desire for peak sensations
transcends class distinctions. Sociologist George Ritzer (2002) has pointed out
that, in a McDonaldised society, sensations are provided by means of massive
clock-driven enterprises that use technology in the most rational, efficient, and
cost-effective ways to create a myriad of affordable, consumable experiences, vast
cathedrals of consumption embodied in the biggest Vegas casinos and shopping
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Simmel on Acceleration, Boredom, and Extreme Aesthesia

459

malls, in mega-churches and amusement parks ( p. 13). Indeed, in the age of

globalization, one does not even have to leave home to have these experiences.
The cheap manufacturing of personal computers and Internet access, for instance,
has made it possible for any American to fill the emptiness of their own lives with
instant pleasures by playing video games, maxing out credit cards on gambling
websites, endless shopping on eBay, or looking at extreme forms of pornography.
As Cornell West (1996) says, this pattern of hedonism and cheap thrills, made
possible by globalization, technological innovation, and easy credit, has made any
talk of race, class, or gender difference, as it pertains to boredom, irrelevant
(p. 109111).
This sweeping turn towards extreme aesthesia in consumerist society is indicative
of a cultural crisis. Today, West (1985) says, the shock effect of Nietzsches
announcement of Gods death has worn off. Nihilism itself has become boring
and uninteresting (p. 259; cited in Thiele, 1997: 24). When my life is so accelerated
that I am unable to identify which obligations and commitments are important
to me, then nothing stands out anymore, nothing is important. When what counts
as valuable is now mediated by the impersonal structures of time and money that
organize my actions and decisions in quantifiable terms of how big, how
much, and how many, then everything is equalized and devalued. When the
exposure to a barrage of sensory stimulations, choices, and distractions ultimately
deadens the nervous system, my everyday engagement in the world begins to feel
empty and flat. And I am, out of sheer boredom, pulled toward more extreme
experiences and momentsexcesses of violence, sex, travel, drugs, religionthat
elicit any qualitatively different feeling whatsoever, anything but indifference.
Indeed, as the writer J.G. Ballard says, the transgressions of extremism may be
the only escape from boredom today.
People believe in nothing. There is nothing to believe in now . . . Theres this vacuum . . . what
people have most longed for, which is the consumer society, has come to pass. Like all dreams
that come to pass, there is a nagging sense of emptiness. So they look for anything, they
believe in any extreme. Any extremist nonsense is better than nothing . . . I can sum up the future
in one word, and that word is boring. The future is going to be boring. (Cited in Svendsen,
2005: 83)7

However, the fact that we are engaging in more extreme forms of pleasureseeking in order to escape the busy indifference of our daily lives is not, in itself,
the most serious problem. Underlying the public need for peak experiences is an
unwillingness to face or acknowledge our flight from boredom itself. When the
world as a whole no longer shows up as enchanted place but merely as a storehouse
of things to be consumed and manipulated in order to break the spell of the
boredom, then there is reason for concern. Insofar as we are absorbed in this
instrumental worldviewa worldview that mediates both work and leisure
it becomes increasingly difficult to ask about the meaning of our own busy
existence. We are unable to confront the urgent historical question of why we are
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Kevin Aho

bored in the first place, and, to this end, we remain largely unaware of our own
emptiness.8
Kevin Aho
Florida Gulf Coast University
10501 FGCU Boulevard South
Fort Myers, FL 33965-6565
kaho@fgcu.edu

NOTES
1
The Greek aisthesis is a reference to sensation or feeling and is related to the word
aesthetic.
2
According to Spacks (1995), the first occurrence of the word boredom appeared in
a private letter in 1768 from Earl Carlisle announcing his pity for Newmarket friends,
who are to be bored by these Frenchmen ( p. 13).
3
Martin Heideggers (1995) interpretation of mood (Stimmung) is helpful in coming
to grips with this democratization of boredom. In his 1929/30 Freiburg lecture course,
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger refers to boredom as a ground-mood
(Grundstimmung) that captures the atmosphere of European existence in the twentieth
century (p. 67). Understood as an atmosphere or inconspicuous silent fog, the mood of
boredom is not interpreted as a subjective state of mind contained in me, in the inner
recesses of my consciousness or soul. Rather, moods are public; they are already out
there in the world I am thrown (geworfen) into ( p. 77). Moods, therefore, determine in
advance the way things will count or matter to me. To be human, for Heidegger, is to
be already actively situated and engaged in a shared world, with shared moods that shape
the way things show up or come into being for me. And today, in the flurry of our turbocapitalist existence, it is the mood of indifference that increasingly attunes me to the things
and experiences I am involved with. Boredom is that in which we first immerse ourselves
in each case and which then attunes us through and through (p. 67).
4
This translation from Simmels 1906 essay Schopenhauer und Nietzsche: Ein Vortragszyklus
is taken from Edith Goodstein (2005).
5
In American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History, Tom Lutz (1991) cites important
works of turn of the century American literature that capture the neurasthenic experience,
particularly for women. The narrators growing insanity in Charlotte Perkins Gilmans
(1892) story The Yellow Wallpaper, Edna Pontelliers suicide in Kate Chopins (1899) The
Awakening, Curtis Jadwins breakdown in Frank Norriss (1903) The Pit, Lily Barths death
at the end of Edith Whartons (1905) House of Mirth, Martin Edens suicide in Jack Londons
(1909) autobiographical novel of the same name, Eugene Witlas breakdown in Theodore
Dreisers (1915) Genuis (p. 6).
6
Robert Levine (1997) points out that it was not until the introduction of the
mechanical clock that the English word speed took on its distinctively modern
characteristic, referring not to good fortune as in the phrase Gods speed but to someone
who is punctual and arrives at precisely the appointed time. (p. 57)
7
Lukas Baar, Dont Crash: The J.G. Ballard Interview, KGD, 7(1995). As cited in
Svendsen (2005: 83).
8
This may be, as Martin Heidegger says, the most fundamental distress (Bedrngnis),
namely, the absence of distress itself. (1999: 163)

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