Paul Griffiths on overcoming boredom:

As you learn to cultivate attention over time, you’ll find that your first-personal sense of being the one who is attending will become attenuated. You’ll become filled with and conformed to what you’re attending to, and for one so filled, there’s little room for self-awareness, much less self-congratulation. This conformity to what you’re attending to is boredom’s principal cure, for boredom’s principal characteristic is exactly an excessive self-presence. Close and repeated attention to one or another aspect of the world, which is what an intellectual does, is its cure.