To start, probably by not reading this blog entry. Video or computer games tend to be the solutions of choice.
What makes a person qualified to speak on the matter of ennui? We have all experienced the listlessness of life at some juncture, the uneventful nothingness that nibbles away at the hours, the quiet lull in the middle of the mundane.
For some people, ennui comes a lot easier than others. Modern society tends to look down upon those who suffer from chronic boredom and shelve them away as unproductive members that will never amount to much. If you identify as one such person, all is not lost! Shun the guilt and justify it in your own mind – that should help to curb some of the boredom, at the least.
But of course boredom plays a role in our lives!
It’s a form of rest, a calming of the mind, especially since we’re a lot poorer at detecting mental fatigue in ourselves compared to the other forms of fatigue.
And if you suffer from chronic boredom, then perhaps you can start exploring and trying things, as I’m sure many have already not-so-politely suggested to you, calling you a useless leech of society, a pathetic loser of epic proportions and such generic slurs.
Things to Curb the Boredom
- Get out of bed
- Drink some water
- Make a list of things you might not hate doing
- Go back to bed
- Success!
This is by no means a definitive list, or a particularly proper one for that matter. However, one thing you might take away from this is to not take life so seriously.
Another thing you might take away from this is I have found that sometimes if it is tricky picking a specific thing then it helps to try the opposite method of elimination. Determine the things that you most certainly do NOT want to do, and gravitate outwards from there.
Recently it seems that much of humanity is pondering the endless void that surrounds our humble little planet, thanks in large part to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that showed us just how many things are out there that we will never be able to reach or see with our own eyes, which is great for the morale I am sure.
They say knowledge is power, but in truth it is also a curse. Cursed with this knowledge, we are trapped like rats at the bottom of a rancid rubbish bin, like frantic fish in a barrel at the bottom of a blue hole; we know so much of what is out there, and unfortunately also that we will likely never reach it in many generations to come, if ever.
So why do we continue to ponder the great expanse of blackness beyond our reach? Because it curbs our boredom down here in this drama-filled, information-overloaded cesspool of a club?
Let’s colour in these funky looking pearly puddles of galaxies to pass the time!
Much of human progress stems from our drive to survive, our drive to overcome our adversities and adversaries, our drive to conquer the chaos and quell the tremors of entropy beneath our feet, so we can laze around without having to walk on our own two feet.
Our species has spent millennia refining and evolving into the awkward bipedal blights that we are today, honing our genes and clades to best take advantage of our harsh environment, learning the best things to do in order to stay alive and thrive and grow the hive. All so we can vegetate on our plush sofas all day getting high and blasting our eardrums with endless tunes at any hour of the day or night? So we can complain about how bored we are?
What a terrible, horrible existence we are in today! Is that what our ancestors slaved and fought for, this doldrums lot in life?
Freedom – they fought for freedom! Freedom to do absolutely nothing!
How did our ancestors avoid suffering the boredom of life? Probably too busy trying to not die to think much about boredom.
At what point does it become ennui? Rest and recuperation is important, but prolonged relaxation treads the thin line of hedonism and boring nothingness. And thus our quest to combat boredom commences!
Perhaps the next question is should be: do we need to combat boredom?
Presumably boredom is largely the limbo state in between the things that we occupy our time with, the gap between working and creating and doing meaningless things, like moving chopsticks back and forth between mansions on each continent.
Boredom is the buffer that bears us between worlds and realms and phases of our lives. It indicates that we are done or tired of our current condition and require new stimuli or impetus, to come up with new ways of not being unalive.
With that in mind, the assumption is that boredom will naturally go away? We just shift focus to some other thing for a while, until the boredom returns and we slouch back into the warm, pleasant entropy of existing.
How do you stave off the blackening breaches of boredom?
Do I have some sort of magical solution to this problem?
Of course not – magic is but an illusion, my friend. Just like choice. Life is one big illusion, a fugue dream that our mind convinces us is more real than those wacky cartoons we see when we go to sleep.
But if you would like to fill the illusion with non-blanks, then might I suggest trying something that you do not find absolutely abhorrent for a brief moment?
I have determined that I don’t hate writing in English, so that is what I have done.
Have I wasted your time, or have I curbed your boredom?
You’re welcome.
