The aesthete is afraid of being bored, tries fervently to occupy his oversaturated mind with all kinds of distractions, but inevitably ends up being bored. This is what we might call the double nature of boredom: it encompasses both the individual's basic, languid state of apathy, as well as the frenetic attempts that he might make, out of boredom, to distract himself from that state. Kierkegaard thus concludes: 'Boredom is the only continuity the ironist has. boredom, this eternity devoid of content, this salvation devoid of joy, this superficial profundity, this hungry glut'. The ironic inability to commit to something causes an absolute emptiness. Try as the aesthete might, all his attempts at distraction, at 'poetic' variation, lead back to boredom [...]

[...] Boredom is the confrontation with the nothingness of aesthetic existence, and, as such, is connected to what Kierkegaard famously calls anxiety. While fear is always directed at a (supposedly) specific aspect of the world (snakes, heights, the monster under the bed), the object of anxiety is nothingness: it is directed at the undetermined situation of the individual, his freedom to form himself. Anxiety is the realization of the groundlessness of the individual, the realization that he is not automatically himself, but has to become a self, as the product of choices for which he is solely responsible. Boredom has the same nothingness as its source, only the bored individual does not yet seem fully pervaded (or 'anxiety-struck') by the existential task that this nothingness represents.