In many ways, utopia was the humanists’ replacement for Paradise—Christian utopia of eternal life (Manuel, Manuel 1979). Arthur Schopenhauer was among the first in a long line of Western thinkers to suggest the powerful agency of the experience or the state of boredom in jeopardising the sustainability of utopian states of being:“after man had transferred all pain and torments to hell, there then remained nothing over for heaven but ennui”(Schopenhauer 2011: 401). Schopenhauer’s statement could be interpreted as rhetorical or humorous. However, its central thesis that an “ideal” world might eventuate in an unbearably stressful state of boredom has been corroborated by many other writers and observers of human condition. In the twenty-first century a body of research findings and conceptualizations of boredom suggest that Schopenhauer’s “hell” might be conceived as stressfully “boring” as well.

Casual observation of twentieth-century events has provided convincing support for the idea that even in the worst and most horrifying situations the experience/state of boredom wields enormous power over human life—myriad diaries and testimonials have noted excruciating boredom in wartime trenches, in Jewish ghettos, and in war-torn occupied countries. Alberto Moravia (2010) posited that boredom compromised the efforts of people who were fighting for utopias, thus actually creating dystopias. Many writers suggest that capitalism, which according to some