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Popular Culture Review
Heidegger’s mind with the illumination that one’s life is without that sense of
order and meaning that, spiritually and psychologically, sustained one in
previous centuries. Heidegger’s observations about boredom may not seem
immediately relevant to this discussion, and, as he points out, they certainly do
not apply to “stupid people.” But a reading of Heidegger does raise the notion,
one that current researchers have picked up on and, most importantly, one that
Reinhard Kuhn focuses on in his classic The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in
Western Literature, that it is this dread, a by-product of ennui, that underlies the
craving for spectacle and sensation that seems to characterize a modem age
shaped by industrialization, rationalism, and scientism. Kuhn reinforces
Mansikka and Heidegger’s observations when he points out that
“ennui...presupposes an encounter with nothingness, [and] the affirmation of
being is the attitude most inimical to it” (67).
In a recent article, Shelly Fahlman, Professor of Psychology at York
University in Toronto, reinforces Heidegger’s theories concerning the
emergence in our own culture of something akin to existential boredom; that is,
without being fully aware of it, many today live in an “existential vacuum”
(308-309). Fahlman comments, “Although diverse in their thinking, many
existential theorists posit that lacking a sense of life meaning is at the forefront
of human suffering, and that experiences of boredom and negative affect are
central components of this lack of purpose or meaning” (309). She refers to the
work of Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl to reinforce
her position: “Frankl...emphasizes the fundamental importance of having of a
sense of meaning in one’s life. Indeed, for him, the quest to find and fulfill a
sense of meaning is the essence of man’s motivation, a basic striving that he
calls the ‘will to meaning’” (309). Fahlman goes on to explain: “According to
Frankl...the conditions of modem society have left many individuals with a
feeling of meaninglessness—an affliction he refers to as an existential vacuum”
(309). The existentialism Frankl and Fahlman have in mind is not necessarily
one bom of a conscious decision. Rather, it occurs when “individuals are said to
Tack the awareness of a meaning worth living for.’ They are haunted by the
experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves” (Fahlman 309).
In short, this existentialism is as culturally-induced as the constant need for
thrills that fill up the empty spaces in the mind and soul and that draw viewers to
films like Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes.
This void, this “existential vacuum,” may very well be the unacknowledged
spiritual condition of our own popular culture, which has been shaped and
reshaped by the industrial and technological revolutions, one consequence of
which has been to provide the individual with the means by which to satisfy,
immediately, the need for boredom-relieving adventures. Whether those
adventures come in the form of climbing a mountain, going on cruises, playing
wildly and wickedly imaginative video games, attending cage-fighting matches,
or watching movies that move from incredible spectacle to incredible spectacle
does not really seem to matter. What matters is being lifted out of this profound