Ros Velasco is a postdoctoral researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid and founder of the world’s first Institute of Boredom Studies. This everyday phenomenon is so complex, in fact, that Ros Velasco employs a chart and four levels of classification to grapple with it. The next level, “individual-dependent and chronic boredom,” is closer to my mother’s definition, and it stems from character and temperament. Was the medieval idea of excess spleen just a way of speaking about individual-dependent and chronic boredom? represented something bordering on a social vice,” Ros Velasco theorizes.