33 - It’s like, you know... Whatever

Life is thousand times too brief for us to manage to bore ourselves?

- Friedrich Nietzsche

It’s a commonly enough held opinion, by those who like to hold such things, that if you're not really bored by life then you've either taken too many happy pills or you've the IQ of a desk lamp. But like some goofy second cousin that been dropped on its head a few times too many, boredom is right up there in the soul sucking hierarchy. It's nothing more than a felt absence of interesting stimulation aligned with an equally powerful felt need for more interesting stimulation. It’s a fairly consistent human failing to find our centre of attention posited in the objects and stimuli we findcompelling. This is a natural extension of human activity. However, if I place all my eggs in that particular basket, (an action the world seems to strongly suggests I do), then it can lead to a state of ennui, where everything appears tedious and I experience a persistent deadening of interest andattention. Boredom.

Boredom serves no end other than the perpetuation of more boredom. It’s both a precursor and a partner to depression. And it's so common as to be assumed to be natural and right. But really, being bored is a pretty insane state of affairs when you think about it. It might be a rationalresponse for a person who lives in a box and has no external source of stimulation. But in actuality, it arises more from an excess than from lack. The more things become easily available, the more bored we become. At this point in my culture, there is ample opportunity to experience a vast plethoraof sensory and mental stimulation. We can watch any movie or TV show, read any book or article, listen to any music we want, when and where we want, and from any number of diverse delivery systems. But we're not very excited by any of it. It’s old news.

The only way we can manage to achieve the considerable feat of psychological gymnastics of being bored in the face of this information overwhelm, is if we unconsciously buy into the notion that what we need to keep ourselves interested lives only outside of ourselves, in the mental objects we create and the friction we experience between what we expect and what is made actual. In fact, it’s difficult to see how boredom is evenpossible when you consider the vast array of sensory stimuli we are constantly being bombarded with. The fact that we normalise it all into a nicely manageable and recognisable set of patterns, that ultimately leads to a deadening of experience is simultaneously beside the point and the point itself.

Human biology has a great many ways of keeping us optimally functioning according to the determinants that natural selection has inspired and moulded. But these particular internal biochemical conditions can tend to easily become habitual states which we assume, through familiarity, to benecessary aspects of reality as opposed to biological imperatives that we can learn to pretty much switch off when no longer necessary. It is thestructures that humans create and engage with to make use of experience, and to translate it into a set of symbols that we find culturally useful, thatcan be bored. These structures have been inspired by and evolved from the friction between our sensory equipment and the external environment, and are so familiar to us that we often consider them the same thing as our sensory equipment itself. It takes a moment of profound critical engagement to realise for the first time that these things that seem so intimate to us and indivisible from our experience, are just representative fabrications constantly seeking input.

Of course, there is nothing “just” about such complex phenomena. But however impressive they are as phenomena and as instruments to engage with phenomena, they are not the thing itself. But if adequate stimulation to keep these mental structures satisfied is not forthcoming, without me examining, parsing, contextualising and deconstructing my awareness of these structures, then I’ll find myself in a state of stimuli readiness,primed with my interpretive equipment at the ready but there is... nothing of interest. What I believe is stimulating, what my particular structures findenjoyable to engage with, are now failing to provide sufficient enjoyment, stimulation or engagement. And I’m just so, so bored with everything.

The key thing here is the expectation I have of experiencing that stimulation. I am primed to expect a certain quality of experience and themore stimulation I receive the higher my subsequent expectation becomes. So anything that falls short of this expectation of increasing intensity isboring. And I persistently believe that the answer to that particular dilemma is to seek out more of the same stimulation. I know for a fact that it’s just around the next Smartphone. If I get this widget or that service or watch these movies or listen to this gramophone recording then I won’t be bored anymore. If I get enough of these things, then I’m sure I will never be bored again.

Psychologically, if I achieve a specific effect with something, then it seems I imagine I will be able to replicate this experience over and again despite the evidence of experience and the diminishing returns common to all such experiences. It may well be because I want to experience the pleasant thing again, or that I need to believe the things in the world are dependable, but at some level I seem to expect exterior objects to enable the same experience with the same intensity as before. But novelty often plays a more important part in my initial experience than I am allowing for. And novelty in each particular, arrives just the once. And when it departs, it’s usually clutching a one way ticket. Novelty depends on unfamiliarity. It depends on the freshness of experience. And since I am a machine that maximises efficiency by creating shortcuts to known experience, then it follows that each time I repeat an experience, I interact more with the shortcut than the experience. Novelty becomes less and less possible with each iteration. The more access I have to objects that supposedly will solve this problem of diminishing novelty, the more acutely I experience their failureto do so.

A person engaged in direct experience cannot be bored, given they have access to a sufficient base line stimulation. I suspect general and widespread boredom is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon. It’s hard to be bored if you're persistently hungry. Most of humanity for most of its existence has been hungry to some extent or other. Boredom used to be confined primarily to the elites. They were the only people with enough time and resources at hand to feel it. And, prior to the new world order we’ve been experiencing for the last sixty odd years, it usually required a fairly unusual kind of mind to manage it. Boredom is a result of expectation. The higher the expectation for stimulation, the higher the potential for being underwhelmed and thereby bored.

Boredom is tiresome. It’s is a kind of low grade depression. A kind of defeated feeling. And feeling defeated, while it may lend your posture a certain louche quality, is anything but relaxing. It is very unrelaxed, though it is easy to mislabel the physical torpor displayed by the bored, as relaxation. Boredom is highly stressful, Energetically divisive and profoundly mistaken in emphasis. The statement, “I'm bored”, can also be interpreted as meaning, “I'm not getting what I want now”. It might look like indifference, but it is the very opposite. Boredom is antithetical to patience. It is a kind of defeated impatience. Patience is the ability to take the long view, to wait it out. Not with indifference but with a clear eyed awareness of what’s at stake and the reason for waiting. And I speak as a very impatient person. Patience is hard for me sometimes. But while it’s certainly not a ray of sunshine in my life, at least my impatience is pretty far from defeated. And you know, it’s not like, you know, so... whatever.