Boredom

It’s Thanksgiving week, and I’m in Texas with my family. I’m so bored.

I don’t often get bored at home. There, I keep pretty busy. I think that boredom is the feeling that I can’t take actions that matter. When I’m home, there’s always something I can do. I can spend time with a friend, or improve my space, or cook, or work out, or walk around my neighborhood and maybe discover something cool. I don’t always have the energy to do another meaningful thing, but lacking energy doesn’t feel like boredom. When I lack energy, I sleep or I unwind with a videogame or book, aware that I have other options but choosing to engage in something more passive.

Here, isolated from my regular context, I have far fewer meaningful options available to me. I don’t have knowledge of the environment around me, and any efforts I spent improving things would be ephemeral, my results washed away by distance and time. I follow along from one meal with my family to the next, idly filling the time in between. I’m much more driven to quick dopamine sources like videogames, TV, and drugs (and not even the cool ones; man, I miss Berkeley). I pester my brother and his girlfriend for scraps of lively socialization. I remember feeling bored like this before, visiting a friend in another city. As my world narrows, I narrow with it. I become dependent on the attention of the people I feel trapped with.

I’m not literally trapped of course. As always, I have lots of options. It’s just that most of what I do here feels pointless. Abstractly, I’m bonding with my family. Minute-to-minute, that mostly means politely listening to conversation, occasionally answering a question or making a quip. The quips sometimes get laughs, and sometimes go over heads. I mostly choose peace over expression, quelling my frustrations. Sometimes I vent the frustrations through dry mockery. Sometimes my mockery is answered with offence, sometimes it passes unchallenged. It makes no difference. We are all family here, resolved to love each other. So long as I don’t do anything terribly egregious, which I won’t, it doesn’t matter what I do.

Boredom is an opposite of agency. It’s corrosive. It’s not actually true that I can’t do anything meaningful here; I am writing now, after all. However, because so much of my action feels meaningless, I become habituated to boredom. I readily reach for easy ways to idle away downtime, even when the time-passing activity doesn’t feel all that engaging. It’s like the difference between having Doritos as a flavor-packed treat among a varied diet, and having Doritos as my only source of sustenance. It begins to feel empty and unsatisfying, but for lack of real nutrition, I keep munching. In a vicious cycle, my lack of meaningful action saps my energy, and then even when I have unconstrained time, I usually don’t have the energy to take meaningful action. I’m in waiting mode, just trying to skip ahead to when I can return to my life at home.

It’s said that only boring people get bored. I suppose I am boring, in my current context. I’m muted, compressed. A nourishing environment is so important to the well-being of a human mind. We need to feel that the world responds to our choices, that our actions will have a persistent impact. We need to feel that we understand our environment and can make meaningful choices to begin with, rather than being shuffled around by forces beyond our control. I’m tolerating this boredom because I know that it’s temporary and it won’t be long before I return to my usual interesting life. If you find yourself bored routinely, change your context! Boredom is an emotional signal to take action. Discover something new around you, or take an action you usually wouldn’t, or move to a place that seems more fun. Always remember, you’re more free than you imagine, and you only get one life, so make it fun and meaningful!