Psychologists also remind us that boredom is a more fertile mother of invention than necessity, and that it can stimulate very un-Nietzschean pro-social thoughts as well as a heightened sense of self-awareness, a perspective that is theologized in Zen Buddhism.

In this state all is noise and chaos and devoid of meaning. It is difficult to imagine: our lives are so much more made up of light and sound and thoughts and feelings that form meaningful patterns and which help us to make sense of our lives and may grant us pleasure. The patient experiencing a psychotic episode is robbed of these harmonies. We cannot know the mind of another, and certainly not the mind of a psychotic other, but we can imagine that such noise, such a dissolution of meaning, would be intolerable. In this context it becomes understandable that a person in such a state should urgently seek to find or construct meanings and, in this process, to employ themes that are culturally or spiritually familiar - albeit often in deeply strange ways, given the disorder of mind.

Boredom can be a useful tool for a psychoanalyst. It can be a sign that the patient is avoiding a particular subject; that he or she is unable to talk directly about something intimate or embarrassing. Or it can mean that patient and psychoanalyst are stuck; the patient is returning again and again to some desire or grievance that the psychoanalyst is failing to tackle. A boring person might be feeling envious, and might kill a conversation – disrupting it or paralysing it – because he cannot bear to hear a helpful or compelling idea coming from someone else. Or the boring patient may be playing possum – just as there are beasts in the jungle that survive by playing dead, some people, when frightened, simply shut down. It’s also true that psychoanalyst and patient will sometimes unconsciously collude to desiccate the atmosphere between them because they fear things becoming too emotionally disturbed, or too exciting.

A philosophy of life elevates and airs out what might otherwise be an emotional swamp. Feelings are wet and damp, inundating us and preventing us from thinking clearly. Ideas are drier and allow a vision to emerge from a sea of feelings.

Energy is also unique in that it can go negative—some activities can actually suck the life right out of us and send us drained into whatever comes next. Boredom is a big energy-suck, but it’s much easier to recover from boredom than from being de-energized, so it’s important to pay specific attention to your energy levels.