Kate Greene explores it:
According to the contemporary Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, the concept of boredom as we understand it today is distinctly modern. In A Philosophy of Boredom (2005), Svendsen notes that while it’s ‘always possible to find earlier texts that seem to anticipate the later phenomenon… boredom is not thematised to any major extent before the Romantic era’. It was during that time, he writes, that the concept became democratised, and not solely ‘a marginal phenomenon reserved for monks and the nobility’. ‘Boredom is the “privilege” of modern man,’ he adds.
Greene goes on to note that some claim “there are generative benefits that come from spending time in a state of low arousal and monotony, as though boredom primes their minds to receive new ideas and connections.” She highlights a note that David Foster Wallace attached to his manuscript of The Pale King, a novel that explores the boredom of IRS employees:
Bliss – a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious – lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom… Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping back from black and white into colour. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
The Dish 