Wrestling Boredom
Do you shop or lose your mind? Do you run or sit in restlessness? Do you die or lie unconscious?
A young man confessed that he “accidentally” lost 70 million VND (about 3,200 USD) in one night because he couldn’t sleep.
He flicked through social networks and installed an app to play games. The games kept inviting him to top-up more money to win more money. By 4 am, he realized he lost all the savings of several working months.
Boredom – a simple name to explain a complicated process – is genuinely the way how many people get trapped in anxiety and urge.
I remember my hand constantly checking through airlines’ websites when I was in lockdown by the Chilean government some years ago in the Covid-19 era. I knew nothing changed over hours (it turned out to be one or two years). The boredom ground my brain into pieces, forcing me to opt for stimulation from anywhere.
Boredom is like the quiet youngest brother in our family. He is small and insignificant, so we ignore him. Sometimes he tries to voice something, but we suppress him with louder voices. Boredom hints to us when it is there. Our mood is down for no reason. We have so much time, but our life situation doesn’t change. We have some issues, but we can’t fix them right away. All the empty time stays like stagnant water. At first, it is shallow. Then it gets deeper and smelly and drowns us slowly in unconscious. Just like one day, our little brother returns home with a huge debt out of nowhere, and the whole family struggles to see the family ties collapse.
We don’t realize boredom until too late. A grandfather sits in the house from year to year without doing anything, staring at the TV; he is consumed by boredom and imprisoned in that helplessness. A grandmother constantly asks her grandchild to get married so she can have great-grandchildren to care for. She has too much time and no “toys” to play with. A student spends his last stipend gambling on soccer games. A young professional purchases 200 pairs of shoes and still wants to buy more. You may all find reasons not to call these actions above boredom, but what is it if you can’t talk your way out of the misery of putting the burden elsewhere? – The burden of having so much free time without knowing what to do about yourself.
Why do we have so much time to get bored while we are still busy earning a living? – It is because we can’t separate working time and living time. We think we can’t get bored if we are busy enough. Or if we have to spend many hours working overtime, we don’t have space for boredom. It is not true. I have seen colleagues finish their job at 11 pm, walk straight to the pub, and stay there until 4 am. They do not want to return home. There is nothing at home to entertain. They have to borrow the exterior activities to fill the interior emptiness. Busy people spend the whole weekend in shopping malls. They don’t have anything in their minds to care about beyond buying new things. The excitement of stimulants or the short urge to acquire materials passes quickly after hours or days, leaving the person at its depth of mundanity, forcing them to continue grabbing more things to fill that hollowness.
Couples complain that after some first loving months, they get bored going to restaurants, watching movies, and going to coffee shops together. What are the new ideas for dating? Togetherness does not intriguing anymore if you have the burden of choosing WHAT to do together.
Why is boredom so overwhelming?
Last week I spent half a day hiking on the beach, climbing through some cliffs, and ended up on a bird rock. It was hot in the sun and cold in the shade. There were so many creatures to look at. I caught some snails for cooking and watched the sea slugs move slowly and change color. I walked down to the water and watched many kinds and types of seaweeds with different colors. I took a swim and lay on a rock for a while. The sun was warm enough. The rock was smooth. Then I hiked back to the top of the cliffs, with some flower bushes and strange cacti. I spent four hours at that beach.
To this line, many of you might calculate how much you can earn in that four useless hours I spent. I used to think the same. And if I didn’t make anything in that hour, I was upset and panicked about my uselessness. But I have learned to appreciate what nature offers me. That day, my eyes were treated with beautiful creatures I didn’t see elsewhere in clear water quality. My body was tended with seawater and the warm sun. My headspace was free from anxiety and anger, which might build quickly if I considered how much money I didn’t earn. Moreover, nature “spends” time fast. It was four hours in a glimpse.
If everyone has a chance to live in nature, they suddenly realize time is a relative definition to force you into the square fate of a screw in an endless chain of existence (and then when you earn enough to have a free breath, you start nagging around asking about your existence). I lived in Las Vegas and San Jose, a highly urban environment some years ago. I was surprised by how busy my housemates were. They couldn’t cook for themselves. They ordered in. They didn’t have time to read about which exercises were good for them at certain times. They hired coaches at the weekend to go out and run or jump with them. I didn’t know what they were busy with. One guy worked full-time just like me. Another girl worked just 12 hours per week. Where the hell did the time go? They were s strangely under too high pressure and stress for simple activities to improve their lives.
Another time, I stayed in a remote village in Panama for three months. I forgot to count time because nobody talked about time or appointment. Once bitten by a pack of dogs, I went to a doctor to check my rabies vaccine. She asked me to come back “in a while.” I returned home and had lunch and fell asleep. When I rushed back to the clinic with the anxiety that I might have missed her appointment, she leisurely asked me to wait for her to finish a patient and gave me the vaccine afterward. The doctor wanted to arrange and help all her patients in good care without nagging about appointments.
I witnessed the same attitude of living in less developed parts of the world, like islands, far-flung villages, remote hills, and mountains. People spend more time interacting with other forces of life, feeling, touching, walking, sitting, and sleeping in nature. Children talked to insects. Women conversed with high-divine superstitious forces. Men immerse themselves in the fields, river, and sea. You can’t ask a fisherman to fish faster. It is just the way nature is. The way the fish move. The way water flows. The man goes with the flow. You can’t ask a farmer woman to grow her papaya faster. Bearing fruits takes time. Time to experience living and dying.
In urban life, we are cut off from the connection with this exciting stimulation of the nature world. We don’t have a papaya tree to witness its growth. We don’t have time to watch the sunset, and fish shows up to feed. It is absurd to find an insect because they will all be killed before their feet touch your floor. Like killing insects, we have killed the glittering patterns of being to pave the way to the monotonous of a thriving urban life. The only thing we have left is endless boredom, endless cinemas, endless flows of alcohol, and endless colors of street lights. The things we created are too magnificent. We forgot we used to belong to the magical being of nature.
Can we escape this self-destructive path?
Last week I read an essay How to Practice in the New Yorker, about an author trying to rearrange her house and get rid of all the things she purchased without ever using them. She described in one paragraph, “I found a giant plastic bin of silver trays and silver vases and chafing dishes in a hidden cupboard under the kitchen bar. Serving utensils, bowls, a tea service, a chocolate pot. I won’t say that I had forgotten them, but the bin hadn’t been opened since I’d wrapped the pieces and stored them, maybe fifteen years before.” (1)
There are tonnes of other things in this essay that she listed down for readers to imagine her process of getting her life back from the cluster of things. One thought was floating in my mind when I read this essay: the urge to purchase and their justified reasons; what are they? The writer was one of many with this amount of things.
I knew some people had 50 bags, mostly expensive ones, but not expensive enough to become investments. Some people had 20 pairs of running shoes just because they needed to buy a new version every time it came out. In my industry, writing, people take pride in stocking their houses with 2,000 or 3,000 books. I would answer boredom if you asked me why I had so many books (I had over 1,000). I bought books that seemed to stimulate some thoughts in my head. I rarely read them. I piled them up and felt good. I had too much time to walk around bookstores and book exhibitions and had some money to spend for “good reasons.”
I would have died if I didn’t know how to entertain myself.
It is not an overstatement. It happened during the pandemic. I wanted to quit living several times at that point. Now I looked at it; the reason was sheer boredom. I didn’t have financial, health, or relationship problems back then. The problem was me, having too much time and nothing creative to spark the living desire. Some days I lay down in a park and wondered why I was there, for what reason, and what my future held. The burden was cumbersome.
Then one day, I decided to quit living. I wore swimwear and jumped into the freezing sea in Chile. The cold water would shut me down quickly, and I no longer needed to bother with useless questions. But I started swimming. I saw the green and reddish-brown seaweed fluttering like torches under the water. The kelp moved and touched my skin. Little fish swam hide-and-seek behind the giant leaves and floats. My mind was braided into these kelp branches and seaweed hairs. Why didn’t I see this innocent existence before? What did I pay attention to? Why didn’t I see there was life underwater? – My legs were tied by branches of seaweed. I took a breath, dove down, and untangled them. I saw shadows of small fish weaving behind the shades of dark green dancing kelps. I felt good and wanted to go back the next day. I forgot why I was there in the first place. Even the freezing wind felt lively.
My head returned to that dramatic and mundane scene often because I wondered why I wanted to die that urgently in Chile. I worked hard and loved working. I was curious about my surroundings. Why suddenly was I shut off from the desire to live?
I was bored. The boredom of lockdown was nothing like any misery I had experienced before. It was the foggy blankets covering my head and my senses, putting me in painful meaningless suffocation. I wanted to quit being bored. By the same token, I didn’t know anything to entertain myself beyond books, shopping, or traveling, all of which were shut down because of the curfew.
Sinking into the water gave me a new perspective. I had been working out by that beach for a month without thinking of what was underneath the surface. I lost my ability to admire nature (or I hadn’t developed any of it before that). The short dive forced me to see the world differently. Nothing was dull there. I could touch and play with the seaweed for a while. They change direction with the water flow. Creatures appeared and reappeared from the depth. Some behaved oddly when facing bigger beings chasing them. Some sat still like a rock or pretended to be dirt piles or corals. This world is playful. I just lost the ability to play.
The philosopher James Carse wrote in his book Finite and Infinite Games, “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” As he divides, I have played the finite games of careers, entertainment, achievement, and wealth. I lost the ability to play “for the purpose of continuing the play.” I couldn’t entertain myself without the facilities of the surrounding world, cinema, bookshops, gyms, theatres, and libraries. I was consumed in the prison cell of needs. I need, and the world offers as long as I play their finite games. When the games were disrupted by disease and death, I lost the ability to enjoy myself and play with the act of living.
My brain was framed into pretty and pretentious words like “motivation”, “inspiration”, or “aspiration”. You can find these words everywhere in this boring world, from toilet paper advertising to high-resolution TV screen technology. They became nonsensical jokes when I dove and watched the seaweed and seabed. There was nothing “motivation” in that vivid existence. Nature was brilliantly lively, each different from the other, unable to copy or imitate, unable to look exhaustive alike like mass products.
What comes next?
I am often asked what I would do next with my life. Next year. Next five years (a favorite time mark that human resources agents love to interview without the need to care what really happens to that person in the next five years). Next ten years (a favorite milestone for peer-pressure). I don’t really talk about it anymore. Did you know that the pandemic would have happened in 2020? – Why did you take so much effort to create a boring future you couldn’t contemplate? Why do you have to reveal your expected future to someone who doesn’t care? – Maybe because you can’t fight the boredom, the dark cloud moving towards your horizon and folding your existence into a monotonous color. Maybe because you are too bored with the present you created (Remember? – It used to be the future you were eager to move to)
Maybe you are just boring.
When it comes to this, it is so hard to accept. Imagining somebody tell you that “you are boring” when you suggest spending the weekend with them.
What did we do to make our weekend boring? Or us – boring – or this daily existence – into boredom.
Fight back. Go play.
Just don’t spend everything in boredom.
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** REFERENCE:
Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash
(1) How to Practice: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/08/how-to-practice
(2) Carse, James P.. Finite and Infinite Games (MM to TR Promotion). United States, Random House Publishing Group, 1997.
