Consider the experience of being bored. What is it like to be bored, and how does it affect our daily experiences? Anyone who has been bored is fully aware of the qualities embedded within our experiences while we are in such a frustrating mood. Leaving nothing untouched by its light-extinguishing pall, boredom is like an immense shadow cast by a slowly passing cloud. You are caught in its lackluster shadow; the trees are snarled within it; your meals are tainted by it; your music is muffled by it; your senses themselves are dulled by it. It's everywhere you sense and think. As a result, boredom is strangely an external and internal experience. We will elaborate on this in more detail throughout the essay. Yet, we can briefly mention here that this incorporeal shadow blurs the distinction between the external and internal. Does the coffee actually taste that bland, or is it just an odd collateral effect of being bored? Does the weather seem to be cold or is it actually that way? Here we find the greatest blurring, to the point we may not be able to sensibly answer some of the questions. While you could easily make a new pot of coffee and check the temperature outside, there is no guarantee that these steps will dispel the shadow's effects. In other words, we cannot easily disentangle the subjective and objective while we are in such a mood. In fact, this entanglement is often a necessary part of certain qualities within some our experiences. For the most part, you need to drink real coffee if you are to have its vivid subjective qualities presented to you. This entanglement seemingly gives the mood's character phenomenally striking qualities, in that any given mood is experienced "as a whole."

An important thing to notice about moods is that they are total-state experiences. In less difficult and more personal words, moods are greedy and selfish; they like to have us all to themselves. Some of them are like metaphysical cloaks of lead or sentient shadows. For instance, when we are bored, nothing seems to shine as bright as it once did, and we no longer feel a certain lightness of being. The child riding his bike, for example, does not find it to be an enjoyable past-time, now that he is caught within the broad shadow of boredom. In a sense, it may feel more like work than play, having to pump the pedals and maneuver the handlebars around various obstacles. Some things no longer have the lively character they formerly had, as this child is now fully aware of the fact. Boredom, as personified, wants us to itself, and it will not share us with any other mood. While it has us, it forces us to look closer. Subsequently, bad moods, like any other mood, have a distinguishing trait of modifying whatever is at the center of our attention. Good moods make almost everything that we experience enjoyable: remember the rich smell of a warm summer evening when we feel content, the laziness in our muscles after spending a lively day working or playing, or the sight of that mellow sunset. There are few things that remain completely outside our good moods, if that is even possible. Nothing, it seems, transcends a mood. Even our biological functions, such as breathing, are entangled in a given mood. When we are in a good mood, we "breathe easily" and carelessly. When we are very bored, we struggle for simple breaths of air, often sighing aloud. Sometimes the tension is so bad it's like our lungs are filled with cotton balls. Our bodies may feel fatigued, as expressed by the child working the bike to move. These are just some of the elements that are located within the mood. Of all those things that fall under the mood's heaviest shadow, they have their qualities highly altered, transformed, or amplified so that one cannot miss noticing them as they are experienced. They are sensed far more easily as they are blackened out by the terrible mood. It's like a paradoxical light source that falls upon them: as the elements darken under the mood, they are further revealed to us. Even the emotions light up negatively. An emotional reaction becomes more volatile than usual when influenced by a mood, especially, in some dispositions, anger. Anger, as experienced in a bad mood, is like an unsatisfying eruption of energy; it does not have the emotionally gratifying effects of catharsis. Even when we are projecting calmness onto the world, we give the world this character only when we are subjected to an encompassing good mood filled with satisfaction. Whichever way we choose to look at the world and its elements, our outlook will always be illuminated by some mood or other. Any given mood is a total experience; its influence is seemingly boundless in our experiences. This influence never goes away. It's unobtrusive to us for most of the time. Notice, however, that moods never fully leave us. Important to our study is the idea that a mood is always replaced by another mood, even if the newly replacing one is nameless: our default mood, as it were. However, for this change or alteration to come about, there is usually some event that makes this process possible.