Let's get fucking bored

I want to eat the mundane for breakfast, unsalted

Photo by Michelle McEwen on Unsplash

I came out of the womb bored. I was airlifted out, which meant I didn’t get to do the normal squeezy slide I’d been excited about for months, and I found the whole thing tedious and uninspiring. Being the center of attention doesn’t make being manhandled in a chilly room any more appealing, to my surprise.

This was foreshadowing of what was to come, because as an only child, you get dragged to a lot of boring stuff with your parents. A normal weekend for me growing up included infuriatingly understimulating activities like standing in a phone shop for three hours, sitting in the pub while my dull civil servant overlords drank beer, and jumping on one of those little exercise trampolines alone for entire evenings. (I’ve always had showstopping calves.)

I once complained to my Grandad about how bored I was and he replied that he had never been bored in his life (????) because there was always something to do. “Things to read, tasks to perform, and what have you.” This was useless advice to me because I already read for six hours a day and did all of my homework the second I got home. And what was the “what have you?” Reading racist stuff about the EU, I think.

Now I have a smartphone and an Adderall prescription and I’m still bored. Our phones make our real lives feel less interesting, so we have to work harder to reengage with them. We overstuff our brains with excessive amounts of information we were never designed to process, and then we’re surprised when people aren’t capable of complex thinking or deep listening. Hello? The brain is obviously gonna have to take more shortcuts when we constantly overwhelm it, as I learned all too well after developing Neopets-induced anger issues at nine. (Dice-A-Roo was, surely, a neurologically identical experience to being in a casino. More Wotsits please, mother, and fetch me my sunglasses.)

We’re all victims of overstimulation and our pernicious fear of boredom, and society is paying the price. It’s way more interesting to believe in far-out conspiracy theories involving a strongman savior than it is to engage in the mundane work of healthy community-building. I love griping about the Democrats from the comfort of my couch while doing nothing to oppose whatever polluting monstrosity the Utah legislature is forcing upon its residents to line their own pockets this month. I would much rather believe that axing Red 40 from my diet will improve my ability to focus than stop using my phone for five hours a day.

In her extremely pretentious but good book, “How to Do Nothing,” author Jenny Odell writes that:

“Online censorship is applied through the excess of banal content that distracts people from serious or collective issues.”

(I made that a block quote to try and engage your weak little brains 0.5% more.)

Every time I glance over at the vertical content my boyfriend is watching, this is confirmed to me. Why is every video on my feed a therapist talking about how shame isn’t serving me but everything on his feed is stupid and bad and representative of a decaying male psyche that might benefit from shame?

To think well, we don’t just need to consume high-quality information—we need to moderate the quantity of it we’re exposing ourselves to. A mind without incubation space will not produce its best ideas or any good Substack posts, which is really unfortunate because I have always yearned for the content mines since I made my first terrible blog at 17. (Not counting my pro-ana LiveJournal before that because it was mostly about how many three-calorie M&Ms I ate that day.)

Oh, and our breathing is too shallow, which is something else we need to fix if we don’t want to continue declining, because it’s all related. We are embarrassingly terrible at just sitting down for five fucking minutes and letting our bodies process the horrors without Gabor Maté yapping in our ears. (Love him, but he’s still vying for my attention when all I need is silence.)

I’m sick of this plight! I want the sight of a tree to transport me to Nirvana, and if that’s unrealistic because I’m only willing to meditate for 10 minutes once a week, I just want to be able to go to the bathroom without opening an app. What kind of thoughts might I have?! What fresh poetic hell could I force my friends and family to experience because of my psychic toilet meanderings?!

Whatever we run from controls us, and I run from boredom more than anything else. Its impact on me is rampant and obvious, and it seems that nothing less than a fascist regime has what it takes to motivate me to get more serious about addressing the problem. I don’t want to be easily manipulated into feeling fear and panic and judgment anymore. I don’t want to feel pressure to form opinions rapidly, with minimal information. I don’t want to override my need to grieve with half-baked solutionism. I don’t want my reality to be defined (and confined) by whatever polarizing conceptualizations the media is digitally feeding me. I don’t want to tune out anything about real life, if I can help it. I know full well that everything I want can only exist here, in the tangible reality of this present moment, and that I can only contribute meaningfully to society in the ways I’m best suited for when I’m not some brain dead cocaine button rat.

I have found that even the most agonizing experiences can become at least interesting when we are fully present with them. I really do think Jesus was onto something with that “peace that passes all understanding” thing, because I’ve felt it. I think a lot of us are surprised by how well we actually do when the rubber meets the road. Anticipatory fear is usually far worse than the thing we’re afraid of, which I don’t say to minimize those things, only to remind us of our own strength. Strength that’s being mined for cents by tech companies.

In Shrinking, a show I have watched two seasons of despite my fury at how cheap and derivative its writing can be (what we hate in others we see in ourselves), there’s a scene where Harrison Ford’s character advises his traumatized therapy client to confront what he’s scared of:

“Say 'Bring it on. I love pain.' And then finally, the cloud will spit you out into the light, feeling like you've conquered something. Because you have."

So yeah, that’s what I’m gonna try and do with boredom moving forward. Maybe we should all commit to doing one boring thing a day, like going on a walk without headphones in. (Not actually boring, most of the time, it can just feel hard to get yourself to do, in the winter at least.)

I have to go catch up on my Reels now, but I’ll see you guys around. Watch my calves as I walk away—my treat.