Sum-ol: Not Your Ordinary Word for Boredom

I couldn’t fully remember what sparked the conversation on being fed up and/or feeling disgusted with the monotony of things, when my boyfriend and I discovered the uniqueness of the Cebuano word sum-ol and its lack of an exact English word equivalent.

On a few random occasions, I have expressed my feelings of sum-ol from eating the same food for a couple of days straight, my thoughts on some Cebuanos or Filipinos questioning why two people who are always together, like an inseparable pair of slippers, don’t feel tired of each other, and how we enjoy variety. I was dumbfounded, despite how prevalent a feeling and experience sum-ol is among Filipinos, that there isn’t an English word for it. This elicited some insights into my culture, history, sensibilities and idiosyncrasies, and human diet and psychology. At what point in our history did we discover this unpleasant feeling and experience of the sameness and blandness of things?

When Filipinos consume the same meal or dish for multiple days, or even the same dish twice in a day, we sometimes feel disgusted and fed up with the same meal consecutively and want another dish to satisfy our palate. In the psychology of eating, sum-ol is one of those gastrophysical experiences. Perhaps we abhor blandness, and so we easily get sum-ol. Between a strikingly salty food and a bland one, we would choose the highly salty one. Between a Western spaghetti and a Filipino sweet spaghetti, Filipinos would choose the sweet spaghetti. We will pick anything savory, salty, sweet, or even sour. We even love our sour sinigang more than our other Filipino soups. All these imply our propensity to something strong and remarkable. But once we consume the same thing in a row–no variety– our palatal world is shaken. We feel sum-ol.

Because of our inclination toward food assortments, we have a wide array of dishes that we can mix and match to provide our three to five meals a day. Longsilog for breakfast, a salty adobo for lunch, and a hot sour sinigang for dinner, plus the sweet and salty morning and afternoon snacks. The next day would be a different set of meal combos. However, if we look more closely at this, this setup is reasonable. In the past, refrigeration for food was not available in every Filipino household. So, how did Filipinos store food to last for a week or more? There were definitely many proven cultural practices, such as drying food (dried fish and fruit), fermentation (ginamus or bagoong), pickling (adobo), and more. Still, food refrigeration was once a privilege. This made me think that our socioeconomic conditions may have shaped our predisposition toward the concept of variety because our resources and tools didn’t allow us to. This scarcity prompted our ancestors to prepare a diverse range of dishes every single day, since there was no point in saving them for the next day. However, since some/most Filipino households are also at the poverty level, having to eat the same meal every single day would have been a survival plan — that could have definitely made Filipinos feel tired and disgusted with the scarcity of food and the lack of variety in it. These conditions might have morphed our cultural gastronomy and temperaments with food.

In Philippine history, Filipinos endured multiple and various forms of colonization. First, the Spaniards, then the Japanese, and lastly the Americans, as the most popular and biggest colonizers of the Philippines, not mentioning some short-lived colonizations in the past. These colonizations unarguably shaped our culture and mentality, but I’m also thinking, did the successive colonizations also impact our sense of novelty and search for it? Colonial mentality has been a kind of illness that we often struggle to cure from the way we perceive our culture to others, to how we see ourselves on the global stage. Does this translate to how we easily get fed up with things we create and promote, to being disgusted by the monotony and blandness of our own creation and constancy? Or did our pre-Hispanic ancestors already have predilections for variety through their semi-nomadic lifestyle, living in an archipelagic nation?

When I researched the experience of boredom, monotony, and disgust, there was not enough information and studies online to relate to the feeling and experience of sum-ol. They mainly focused on food fatigue or meal monotony, and, if not, on boredom as a symptom of a mental health concern. Some sources explained that the causes of food fatigue include the body’s way of signaling us to aim for a balanced, varied, and nutrient-dense diet to support our gut microbiome, emotional associations with food, and the human innate tendency to seek variety (Bledsoe; Brown; Pedersen). This internal experience and feeling is indeed already interwoven into our genetic make-up when we talk about food. Thus, this feeling or experience is not an entirely new thing. However, sum-ol among Filipinos is more than this experience of boredom, monotony, and physiological needs — even beyond food fatigue.

Sum-ol is boredom and/or disgust and/or feeling tired because of the absence of a variety and/or the sameness of things, people, or experiences. Sum-ol is feeling revolted by wearing the same dress for some very important family or school occasion or event. Sum-ol is feeling sickened by seeing the same face of your annoying brother for the entire school break. Sum-ol is feeling disgusted by finishing the remaining Christmas macaroni salad before the New Year arrives. Sum-ol is feeling irked by seeing the same actor being cast for every evening telenovela produced.

Sum-ol made me wonder about Filipinos’ sensitivity to sensorial experiences, tolerance to monotony and sameness, contentment and satisfaction, and to creativity and novelty. Filipinos, for sure, are very alive and keen human beings on the planet. Whatever this feeling and experience entails, I will not feel bored exploring more about it.

Works Cited:

Bledsoe, Alaric. “Why Do We Get Tired of Eating the Same Thing? Understanding the Psychology and Physiology of Food Fatigue.” Pan Flavor, 31 Aug. 2025, panflavor.com/why-do-we-get-tired-of-eating-the-same-thing/.

Brown, Jason. “Why Am I Bored of Food? Understanding Culinary Fatigue.” Easy Healthy Foods, easyhealthyfoods.com/why-am-i-bored-of-food/.

Pedersen, Traci. “What’s the Connection Between Boredom and Eating?” Medically reviewed by Marie Lorraine Johnson, Healthline, 29 Aug. 2024, www.healthline.com/health/nutrition/boredom-and-eating.