“Just like acedia in early Christianity was thought to only afflict monks, ennui in early America was thought to only afflict the wealthy,” Feifer says. “The working people, it was believed, had plenty to keep them busy, so ennui was what people felt when they had too much leisure and not enough to do. It was a very real boredom, but also a kind of guilt or shame for all their excess time, which made ennui a complex experience.”

Luke Fernandez, also a professor at Weber State University and the other author of Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid, explained that working people certainly experienced what we might call boredom, but they were more likely to use words like wearisome or dull. And they didn’t ascribe a moral function to it — it was just a product of their work.

“When you’re out there on your farm or on your homestead and trying to plow the land or harvest a crop, there’s a lot of tedium and monotony involved in that activity, but you don’t attach much import to that because you see so much virtue in the actual work you’re doing,” Fernandez says. “And so, people from the middle classes, the yeoman farmers, the people out in the homesteads, they felt tedium, they felt monotony, but they didn’t worry about it the way upper classes did.”