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Key points
- The character of Ennui in the "Inside Out 2" movie is sarcastic and lazy.
- People tend to dislike being bored and are motivated to try to avoid boredom.
- People often disengage when they are bored.
If you are the parent of a teenager, you can connect with the character of Ennui in the most recent "Inside Out" movie. Ennui (“what you call the boredom”) lazes around in the control area while the other emotions are actively monitoring what is happening to Riley. Occasionally Ennui offers input for Riley through a phone app without moving from the couch. Ennui prompts Riley to use eye rolls and sarcasm and to avoid questions from her parents with short uninformative answers (“How was camp?” “It was good.”). Although parents connect with the character, does Ennui capture how teenagers experience the emotion of boredom?
Not really.
Ennui is unmotivated and without much expression or feeling. This is not how people feel when they are bored. Boredom feels bad; it is highly aversive and motivating because it is so aversive. When people are bored, they want to do something, anything, that will end the boredom. In psychology studies, people would rather give themselves painful electric shocks than be left alone with their thoughts or watch disgusting images rather than feel bored. People try hard to avoid boredom and to find ways to fill their time when they experience it. Some of the origins of the term "ennui" actually link the emotion to a sense of disconnection from God and people feeling a spiritual withering or apathy. People who experience ennui were thought to surrender to a lack of purpose and accept feeling empty.
Research suggests that boredom does represent an emotional signal that there is nothing happening that is important. Boredom can occur because there is literally nothing happening or because the things happening are not important. This means that someone can be sitting in a quiet room and not feel bored if their goal is to relax. It also means someone can be intensely bored even in the middle of an active party if nothing that’s happening is important to them. When nothing happening is important, boredom signals the need to find something more important to do, and it can prompt people to be creative or explore new activities.
But boredom does not signal, as far as science has currently shown, just pretending to not care about things. The character Ennui comes forward in the movie when Riley feels anxious or embarrassed and provides a cover of keeping cool in front of others. In one scene that shows this interaction, Riley is rambling to a hockey player she admires, and Ennui steps in to make her pretend to be “cool” and appear like she doesn’t care. That’s a good emotion regulation, but it’s not the emotion of boredom.
The character Ennui does capture the way the term was used in some writings that expressed concern about how the rise of industrialization was creating an unmotivated and disengaged youth. But Ennui got boredom wrong.
References
Rosemary Counter. The Real Science Behind the Animated Emotions of Inside Out 2. Time. June 14, 2024.
