And what can we do about it?
I had to try really hard to not do the whole RE: RE: RE: No, Seriously, Why Does Everything Suck Now type of subject line…
You know me better than that.
I may or may not have also had a shower beer while thinking up and typing this on my phone.
I hear you though. I feel you in my bones like a low grade fever that won’t commit to being a real illness or whatever.
And my favourite topic is boredom…
…and I need you to lean in close for this because I’m only going to say it once before I get distracted by a thumbnail of a man reacting to something.
Boredom isn’t the absence of stimulation. That’s the lie they sold you. Boredom right now, in this particular historical moment, is the overflow of it.
People play it off as if we’re starving. But we’re actually drowning in high fructose content slurry pumped directly into our face by ones and zeros that were specifically, surgically, engineered to make you feel like you almost had a good time.
Almost. Always almost.
It’s like going to vegas and It’s basically a dopamine slot machine that only pays out in IOUs.
But there’s always a sinister undertone.
This is also where my kind of cold, clear eyed narrator voice kicks in and says pay attention, this part matters. The machine doesn’t want you satisfied.
Satisfied people close their laptops. Satisfied people go for walks and call their friends and cook something that smells good. The machine needs you hovering. Twitching. Scrolling past the thing you actually wanted to find, because if you find it, you stop.
So what do we actually do? Because “just log off, man” is advice that lands with all the practical utility of telling someone to simply not be sad or can you not just stop being depressed?
Here’s what you gotta do. You go coarse grain when everything is fine grain. You pick the long thing, the book with the heft to it, the film that takes its time like it owns the place, the conversation that has no agenda and no endpoint. You make your brain work for its dinner instead of letting it snack on content pellets all day like a lab rat with a PhD in self destruction. (Did I just reference the Universe 25 Experiment? Yes I did. Enjoy that rabbit hole)
You have to make something. Anything. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be shared. The act of making… Of putting your hands on something and pushing it into a shape that didn’t exist before is the single best middle finger you can raise at the boredom machine, because the machine cannot make.
It can only remix and repackage and serve it back to you with a little notification bell.
Final thing… The uncomfortable, bracing thing that tastes bad going down but works, you have to tolerate the gap. The gap between wanting something and having it. The gap where you sit in the slightly uncomfortable silence and don’t immediately reach for the phone. That gap is not the enemy. That gap is where your actual brain lives. It’s dusty in there. It smells like an old library and a little bit like anxiety.
But it’s yours.
The boredom was never the problem, it was more of a light symptom. The problem is you’ve been taught to be afraid of your own mind at rest.
Stop being afraid of it. Feed it something real. See what it does.
You’d be surprised what you brain meat can push out into the world.
Stephen Walker.