Why boredom is so last century

My childhood summers are singed in my memory by week long episodes of excruciating boredom. The kind of boredom that can only be described to have mythical, curse-like proportions.

That shit was some unrelenting and merciless brand of boredom.

I was saved by being so violently bored that I found books. And by coincidentally having the most versatile tool in the world at my disposal: the english language.

I quietly outgrew my chronic lethargy, and came to form one bomb-proof axiom:

Being bored is an attitude, not a statement of fact.

The more acquire the right tools, the harder it becomes to feel bored. And that’s because the world has grown so undeniably fascinating in all its complexity, and because the wealth of knowledge only keeps growing exponentially. One can try to find out everything about field mice, sedimentary rock or saprophytic fungi for an entire lifetime, and not see the end of it.

Curiosity offers instant relief from the burden of a corrosive attitude. There simply is not enough time to waste being bored. The simple fact that in a modern economy, most people have 24h access to the virtual entirety of the world’s knowledge is a miraculous advantage over any generation before us.

We haven’t even begun scratching the surface of what this easy dissemination of knowledge will mean to our future, but in the meantime, being bored is simply an insult to possibility.

The spectrum of our curiosity is potentially infinite. There is nobody to say what we should be curious about. There are some indications that our culture provides, and there are predefined rails we can latch on to. Though they are rarely the most fulfilling. The rails provided by our culture are usually firmly attached to other people, the obsessions of fame, status, society and current affairs. None of these themes go to the heart of the matter of living a satisfying human life. On the contrary, they stoke fires that already burn too bright for our own good. They take our natural social inclinations and whip them into a numbing frenzy: Reality TV, Gossip, Conspiracy theories, seizure-inducingly vibrant tabloids where the only thing more enticing than abs is flab. I have found that this is the wrong way to go.
Curiosity is our basic drive to find things out.

For example, when looking at a wristwatch, a question could be: who made it? It’s a good enough question, and can lead to us find some information about the object. But this question relates only to the first layer of knowledge associated with the watch. This first layer contains all of the physically descriptive, economical and mechanical properties of the watch. We can find out about the company, the brand, the individual watchmaker, the techniques involved, the materials, the work it took and many other details.

But if we dive a little deeper, there is a second layer, and a third, and a fourth, and so on, of questions concerning the watch.

These layers handle everything else: issues of chemical composition: What reactions led to the creation of the basic materials? Issues of physical phenomena relating to the watch : How do the atoms stick together, where do they come from, and what are they in turn, made of? And, weirdly enough, issues of consciousness: Is there any state which is ‘like’ being this watch?

In the end, the whole recipe for the universe is condensed in that single watch. Or in the potato, or the dress, or the amoeba. There are many levels on which we can begin to know the world around us, and if we start treating every aspect of our lives like the mystery it is, then there won’t be a second left in the day to wallow in the sadness or despair that often comes with this new world of possibility.

Because possibility is first a challenge before it is a burden.