Boredom is Marvelous
Nobody escapes boredom.
Few look forward to it. Fewer, still, are enamoured of it. Dostoyevsky called it “a bestial and indefinable affliction”. The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky described it as a “psychological Sahara” — a mental state where the mind wanders aimlessly unable to find an anchor, to come to terms with the infiniteness of time.
How Unhappy Are You?
I feel that boredom is very similar to Freud’s notion of melancholy. Boredom, like melancholy, evokes deep, unpleasant feelings that nonetheless lack a specific object or focal point. Whereas grief, for instance, fixates on a specific loss (usually personal), boredom is nauseatingly existential. It is like a blank label that is applied to everything that fails to grasp one’s interest.
Sometimes, I find myself unsure of whether I’m just bored or being “emo”.
Boredom is not an emotion that can be ignored at will. It’s easy to become pessimistic if you don’t learn to enjoy the times when you’re bored.
Many people work hard during the day and only get to live at night. In the end, this resulted in most people ended up staying up late to savour and enjoy this little bit of time at their disposal.
How do you spend your time? I used to give them to variety shows, short videos and games in order to seek a little bit of false fun in a mechanical life. It wasn't fulfilling at all; that little bit of happiness isn’t there. There was a period where I swiped Tik Tok for hours, this made it worse as social media apps are made to make people envious about others.
For Leo Tolstoy, boredom suggested an aching, empty absence, “the desire for desires.”
Don’t be Afraid of Boredom
Despite the sense of emptiness and disequilibrium that shadows boredom, I choose to celebrate boredom, to appreciate it as one might a to a an Audemars, a Ferrari, a 25 year Yamazaki, or a Van Gogh.
Kumagai Moriichi is a Japanese painter. For the last 30 years of his life, he never stepped out of his yard. Kumagai Moriichi lived an almost isolated life, with only his wife and a nanny as company.
His daily life is to say hello to passing birds; observe butterflies on leaves; lie on the ground to catch frogs that jump; sit on rocks and watch goldfish swim under lotus leaves; chase cats that run away;
In order to observe the situation of the ants moving, Kumagai Moriichi even spent the whole afternoon staring at the opposite side, which was really fascinating. For such an ordinary life, Kumagai Moriichi had a good time.
Compared with the hustle and bustle outside the yard, the ant’s movement, the stones that were found in his yard, and making friends with his fishes, were more interesting to him. Kumagai Moriichi got lost in the beauty of his small yard, which was actually just a small corner in a secluded neighbourhood in Japan.
Don’t be afraid of boredom and keep trying to fill it with interesting things from the outside. Learning to get along with yourself is just as important as learning how to interact with people. People who don’t know how to enjoy boring time will never have real fun.
When I was young, I always wondered how to live the perfect life, whether I need to travel the world, and get to know as many people as possible.
Only later did I realize that there is no need to envy others. I learnt to feel a little happiness every day in the ordinary life, enjoy the sunset, the bustling traffic, the clouds, the people around you.
Often, we end up doing so many things just because we are truly bored. Had we not been so awfully bored, we would have just gone about our daily lives — waking up every morning, going about our business, learning to love our work…As Brodsky said: “Boredom is your window…Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.”
I’m Glad Boredom is Easily Available to Me
It is like a menu option in a fast food restaurant. I can choose it or not. Not only do I have the option of feeling bored, I also am privileged to lead a relatively boring life.
If you sat next to me for days on end, watching me type away at work, eat many of the same foods and wear the same outfits over and over, barely speaking for hours on end, you might well end up bored to tears.
Isn’t that marvelous?
Feeling bored is not simply one note on the human scale of emotions. It is a certain type of privilege, for in order to experience boredom, you must have the time and “space” to reflect on your mental status.
It is a luxury, considering we have wars going on.
In Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mexico, Ukraine and Yemen, the right to fall into a mope of boredom is nonexistent for the civilians caught up in military conflicts and poverty, where the thought of survival consumes their every waking moment.
In an ideal world, all wars would end, peace would prevail, food and shelter would be plentiful, and every person on earth could settle into a nice, long bout of utterly unproductive, languorous boredom. Or not.
I hope my post has not bored you to death.
