How is boredom still a thing?
On a recent work call to a web developer he described himself as bored. This is more understandable given the current lockdown situation affecting huge swathes of humanity, but I was considering how many million things I feel I could be getting on with in the free time that I just no longer have…
Here’s a fragment of my free time to-do list:
- Categorise my decades worth (2005 – 2015) of digital music found on old hard drive
- Sort out, digitally label and edit photos taken on my phone over the last couple of years
- Write copy for my brother’s Watch Collecting club’s website
- Learn Yoga
- Revisit my half written poems from the last few months
Is that all?
The list does go on but there’s no point in reproducing it here. I am only lamenting that in the age of infinite entertainment and communication, I don’t see how anyone can possibly be bored. In terms of gradations of consciousness (something else I’m trying to look into) I would say an easily bored mind is fairly low down.
Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, one of my favourite movies when I was an angst-filled and insecure young man, writes of the garden of Eden becoming boring. In the book Survivor the line reads: Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
There is something in this. While I think that the Biblical story in Genesis is metaphorical and didn’t involve biological humans and a talking snake, I do think it is an important allegorical tale. It was most likely passed down in spoken form by people of far different psychological make up to us for thousands of years before the written word, hence ending up so wacky and mythical.
Never ending bliss is not a healthy state for us mortal humans, we need the imperfections to motivate us. That was my point when I was rallying against David Pearce’s desire to end all human suffering,
There are no boring things
To take it down to the base level, boredom is a lack of motivation, and in a way a lack of observation, of interest. My meditative pick me up would be as follows; anything, absolutely anything, can be an object of intense observation. One can meditate on something as transiently intriguing as a candle flame but can just as easily use a coloured piece of card or even a blank sheet of paper.
What I am trying to say is that boredom is all about perception. Forget that the world is full of distractions and things we can involve ourselves with, it is more simple than that. If there are no uninteresting things, there is no reason to ever be bored. As G K Chesterton put it:
‘There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people’
