You Won't Be Bored by this Story on Boredom

Is it the cultural referents, the good writing, or only me who finds this article well-written, insightful, even arguably important? And although the author highlights Las Vegas (where life is writ large) to make his point, I believe his insights are applicable anywhere:

• Of course, if boredom has any foothold in shock-and-awe Las Vegas, then nowhere is safe. Kids are bored at school. The rest of us are bored at work or in marriages. The suburbs are boring. The Midwest is boring. Underneath every new bell and whistle, every fad and trend, every new celebrity, gadget, hot spot, hot town, hot neighborhood and hot club can be heard a resigned sigh. "Interesting," we say, having turned an antonym for boredom into its euphemism. "Um ... is there anything else?"
• Does our boredom point to an emptiness at the heart of our culture—or in the fabric of existence itself? Or does it suggest something is wanting with us? Historian Laird Easton described boredom in terms that Las Vegas should understand: "Much of modern Western culture," he says, "has been a wager against boredom, just as most of premodern life was a wager against death."
• ... it's safe to say that boredom comes in two basic varieties. There is small-b boredom. This is temporary boredom: the boredom of a traffic jam on the 215, cleaning the house or running errands. It's the drag of routine, the blahs that come and go on a dead Saturday afternoon when you want to be doing something but can't think of anything. The small-b boredom is at worst just an inconvenience, a headache that will pass with a good night's sleep. The big-B boredom is the silent predator that hides on the backs of progress and prosperity. It is the vague and vertiginous sense that behind the neon façade of our modern world exists a deep emptiness of purpose or meaning that no casino, no show can address. It stalks us and poisons our society—men rush to war to try to cure themselves—yet we can't even really identify its edges. This boredom is like a fog or a stale persistent odor that no amount of scrubbing can quite clean. Which kind of sucks: We can't identify its causes or find its boundaries. Sometimes it seems to be external, and other times it seems to be lodged right in our brains. But we can't seem to overcome it.
• Depression is not the same as boredom. "The depressed person feels himself or herself to be inadequate to the world, whereas the bored person finds the world itself to be inadequate..."
• It's hard not to be finicky in a supersize society that offers ever more choice. We get bored if things are too ordinary and routine. Strangely, we get bored with too much variety. Being alone bores us—surely, someone out there is having just the most fun!—and then we go out and go through the motions at a bar, restaurant, nightclub, and we think, "This is boring, and I should have stayed home." Too much activity bores us. Too much rest bores us. New music bores us because it's different from our favorites. Our favorites bore us because we've heard them too many times. Choice itself eventually wears us out.

I could continue, merrily providing epigrams from this worthwhile article. Notably, the author chooses to focus solely on the topic, whereas most authors would choose to write a self-help manual (and pray for a publication deal). Yes, there is that sidebar, but that is all it is, a sidebar.

Read the article (and the sidebar), and then let me know what you think... Is the writer full of hot air? Am I (too) easily swayed?