Kierkegaard Thought Variety Was the Wrong Cure for Boredom

Picture a man who drives the same road to work for six years, and one Thursday he decides the road is the problem. He takes a different route, finds a bakery, feels a jolt of interest for about nine days, and then the new road is just a road. So he changes jobs. The same arc plays out, only slower.

Søren Kierkegaard had a name for this man’s strategy and thought it was a mistake. In 1843 he published Either/Or, and one chapter, “The Rotation of Crops,” is a manual for escaping boredom. Its answer to “how do I make life more exciting?” is short: stop changing what you do and start changing how you do it. The cure for a flat life is a different relationship to the same life, with only small outside changes, not a bigger menu.

What did Kierkegaard mean by rotating crops?

The essay is spoken by “A,” a young aesthete, not by Kierkegaard in his own voice. A sorts boredom remedies into two kinds. The ordinary one is to keep changing your surroundings and activities: new city, new people, new hobby. A compares this to a mistaken idea of crop rotation, as if the farmer believed the field itself had to be swapped for a fresh one.

Real rotation, he points out, leaves the field where it is. The farmer changes the method of cultivation and the kind of crop. The artistic version of escaping boredom works the same way, by altering the way you take things in. A is also fond of limitation: the more narrowly you confine yourself, the more inventive you become. His examples are a prisoner who gets absorbed in a spider and schoolchildren who find a game in almost any object.

That is the whole claim. Boredom is not stored in your circumstances. It is produced by the way you meet them.

Why is “try new things” only half an answer?

Because novelty has a short half-life and it asks for a fresh supply. If every dull stretch is met with a new input, the stakes of each input keep rising, and you end up as the man on the road, always one switch away from the next switch. The blog has covered the brain-chemistry version of this in the novelty formula, and it is a fair account of why surprises fade.

The other problem is more practical. Plenty of people cannot change their circumstances much. A person with a fixed shift, small children, or a mortgage has no spare month in Lisbon. Advice that depends on variety quietly assumes a budget of time and money. Kierkegaard’s version costs neither, which may be why it has outlived most of the self-help written since.

What does it look like in practice?

The experiments below are my translation of the idea, not Kierkegaard’s own instructions. He gives no list, and A is half joking much of the time.

Experiment 1: change the method, keep the task. Pick something you do every week, such as cooking dinner or answering email. For seven days, alter only the method. Cook with one pan and no phone. Answer email in a single twenty-minute block with a written rule: no reply longer than three sentences. The task stays; the way you approach it changes.

Experiment 2: impose a limit. This is the prisoner-and-spider move. Take a hobby or a commute and restrict it hard. Walk the same half mile every day for a week and note one thing you have not seen before. Photograph only one subject, such as doors. The flâneur walk is a close cousin, and the awe walk is another way to point attention at a short, familiar loop.

Experiment 3: rotate your attention, not your plans. Choose a person you see daily and spend a week trying to learn one thing about them you do not know. The scenery is identical; the crop is different. Ellen Langer’s research on mindfulness gets at the same instinct, and the counterclockwise study is a good place to see how far a change in framing can go.

Experiment 4: a morning one. Most people treat the first twenty minutes of the day as the part to optimize into sameness. Try varying the approach instead. Keep the wake-up time fixed, because a fixed time is what makes the rest of the experiment readable, and then change one small thing each day on a rota: Monday you make coffee in silence, Tuesday you step outside before looking at a screen, Wednesday you eat standing at a window. If the wake-up time is the part you cannot hold, an app like DontSnooze asks for a short video to prove you are up, and a miss sends a random camera-roll photo to the friends you chose. After that, the only thing left to rotate is what you do with the first twenty minutes. For more on what the first stretch of the day can hold, see the first hour after waking.

Where does the rotation method fall short?

In three places, and the third matters most.

First, it is easy to do badly. “Be present with the dishes” can become a way of telling yourself that an unhappy job is fine. Reframing a dull task is different from tolerating a bad situation, and the essay offers no test for telling them apart.

Second, the evidence is a book from 1843 and not a trial. I know of no study that tests Kierkegaard’s rotation method as such. What you can say is that it resembles later ideas about attention and constraint, which is a weaker claim than saying it works.

Third, the essay’s speaker is a self-described pleasure-seeker, and readers argue about whether Kierkegaard meant the advice sincerely. Some take it as a forerunner of mindfulness. Others think he stages it so that it will fail, and that the real answer in Either/Or lies in the second half, the “or.” If you read the whole book, A’s cleverness looks less like a solution and more like a symptom. Take the experiments as something to test, and drop any that do not make a Tuesday feel different.

Is there a quick way to know if it is working?

Use a plain log. Each night, write one line: flat, mixed, or interesting. After a week, compare the experiment days with the ordinary ones. If nothing moved, change the experiment, not the philosophy. Plateaus in any skill feel like boredom from the inside, and Joshua Foer’s OK plateau is a useful reminder that deliberate variation in how you practice is what restarts progress.

The hard part is the first few days, when a rule feels silly and the old routine is tempting. The ten-minute rule helps there: agree to try the new method for ten minutes before deciding it is pointless. If you have been drifting toward a bigger change because the small ones feel useless, the earlier post on ritual versus routine covers why the same action can feel dead or alive depending on how you hold it.

Kierkegaard’s farmer keeps the field and changes the farming. Most of the time, that is also the cheaper thing to try first.