Was the Ancient World Boring?

Was life in the ancient world boring? This video digs into what people actually did with all their empty time, from a bored Egyptian pharaoh and paid courtroom clappers in Rome to the Viking who carved his name in Hagia Sophia and a Roman town that literally thanked a man for ending its boredom. We start with an Egyptian king named Sneferu, so bored his priest sent him out on a lake rowed by twenty young women in nets. But what about regular people? For most of them, daylight was wall-to-wall chores, and we have the proof: a Roman farming manual by Cato that fills every rainy day and holiday with more work, and a 3,200-year-old Egyptian attendance list where workers skipped a day for reasons like a scorpion sting or brewing beer. Then the sun went down, and in a Roman winter that meant up to fifteen hours of darkness with nothing to do but sleep, unless you were rich enough to burn oil like Pliny the Elder, who got up at midnight to study. We look at the games scratched into a Roman courthouse floor by men paid to sit and clap, the runes a Viking bodyguard carved into Hagia Sophia, the chariot races that shut the city down for over a hundred days a year, and the Pompeii graffiti complaining about all the boring graffiti. One Roman town even put up a monument thanking a man for easing its long boredom. So yes, ancient life had huge boring stretches, but a different kind than yours, and to understand why, we end on a famous 2014 study where people chose to shock themselves rather than sit alone with their thoughts. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📚 SOURCES ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ World History Encyclopedia, Stories from the Westcar Papyrus The ancient Egyptian tale in which a bored King Sneferu is sent out on the palace lake rowed by twenty young women, told centuries later as a story within a story. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1039/stories-from-the-westcar-papyrus/ Cato the Elder, On Agriculture (via LacusCurtius) The 2nd-century BC Roman farming manu