Boredom

Isn’t boredom the strangest human trait? When there is nothing going on and we have nothing to do, boredom inevitably sinks in and we find ourselves watching reruns of sitcoms we’ve seen 3 dozen times or playing video games that we should of grown out of years ago yet still cannot quite let go off. We are bored, so therefore we do pointless things that aren’t fully entertaining, but are slightly more entertaining than the nothing we were doing beforehand. Rather than curing the boredom by working for fulfilment and achievement, we work to stay in the ruts that gave birth to the boredom in the first place. Boredom is a vicious circle it seems.

We spend money we don’t have on alcohol/cigarettes/drugs we don’t want to try and kill this anthropomorphic emotion that sits on our chest. We meet with people we don’t particularly want too and piss away our time to fight it off for a few moments longer. At the time its natural, almost as natural as sleep or hunger, yet if you stop and actually think about, why do we do it?

If you watch any Attenborough documentary you never see a predator staying asleep for a few hours extra because ‘they have nowhere to be,’ so this emotion isn’t natural. It is born out of societies focalised around an abundance of everything; out of lack of necessity and fear, a lack of reason to make us stand and work for something, a lack of purpose.

Yet boredom is not only a hindrance. After feeling the sting of boredom for too long, it can be this very emotion that drives us to work for something, to make something of ourselves. The same way it can send us down the wrong path to try avoid it (you only need to look so far as the Jeremy Kyle Show to see what boredom can do to some people,) it can also spur us on to ultimately better ourselves, to drive away the pangs of boredom with success and purpose.

This being said, that is not what I do. When the work for the day is finished, I find it far easier to sign into Netflix than to continue trying to write. The lure of American drama’s is stronger than that of the sirens in the ancient stories. Wasting time doing nothing feels far more fulfilling than busting my brain trying to think any more than I have too. Yet one day, when I exhaust Netflix’s seduction and simply run out of money for Friday night drinks, I might too drive away the pangs of boredom with success and purpose. Unless the breaking bad sequel comes out before that, obviously.