The opposite of boredom is not FUN

My experience has been that the opposite of boredom is not fun. Fun itself becomes boring after a while, which is one reason kids get in such a hurry to grow up. They’re bored of fun, and want more out of life. The real opposite of boredom is feeling truly alive — something that I think needs to be consciously cultivated, or it easily drowns in a sea of routine tedium.

There are three things I have found that are essential to cultivating the exhilaration of feeling alive:

1. Surround yourself with interesting people, especially people who are different from yourself. If all of the best, most intellectually exciting conversations you’ve ever had were in college in your twenties (mine were), realize that what made those conversations and that decade of life so exciting was that you were surrounded by an eclectic mix of people, who were on fire about ideas. One sure solution to 30+ tedium: seek out interesting people on fire with ideas. Be an interesting person on fire with ideas (I follow you, Jamie, for exactly this reason. You are one of these people).
2. Prioritize creativity. Make stuff, and talk about it incessantly with your interesting friends. Become a sincere and enthusiastic fan of the stuff they make. One of my favorite quotes (I’m not sure who said it. I used to think it was Abbie Hoffman, but I’ve Googled many combos and have not been able to track it to its source. I read it in a book as a teenager, though, it’s not my original thought) goes something like this: “The world doesn’t need more artists. What the world needs is more art appreciators.” Becoming an enthusiastic appreciator of other people’s art not only opens a wide array of things in the world to be excited about, it makes you more appealing to creative people, and draws more of them into your life. Boredom solved. The quote implies an either/or thing that I think is not necessary, though. Be both an artist and an art appreciator. Don’t pick one, choose both.
3. Learn new stuff, all the time. Be ravenous for knowledge. The sum total of all the knowledge stored in any of our brains amounts to jack shit compared to all the things there are to know. I think a big part of adult tedium results from settling into the small world described by this tiny little bit we know about life by the age of 30, and sighing, “is this all there is?” Of course it’s not. Every new thing we learn makes our worlds bigger. Growth is one sure sign of being alive. When we experience ourselves growing as people in relation to knew (to us) knowledge, it’s hard to feel dead.

I think Nature has hardwired us to experience our aliveness most through interaction with other people. People are exciting. Relationships remind us we’re alive. But there are a lot of things built into the “adulthood meme” that isolate us from relationship, and especially from bringing new people into our lives. We settle into routine relationships with our coworkers, and bounce off each other like robots for thirty years then retire. Our marriages become routine as we prioritize the “have to’s” (gotta get to work, gotta pay the bills, gotta buy the groceries, gotta cook the meals, gotta get the kids to their games, lessons, meetings, etc) over “want to’s” (sex, romance, conversation, vacations, learning together, etc.). We maintain one or two friendships because that’s all we feel we “have time for.” It’s no wonder we get bored. But maybe if we recognize we are locked inside a meme (the world’s definition of “adult”), we can start to break free. Other people are the key.

This was going to be a short “Great Post, Jamie!” comment, but it got out of hand. Sorry!