Bored, Flawed, And Imperfect Human’s Guide To Manifest True Love
Love is the one thing that can be both mind-blowingly unbelievable and incredibly ordinary at the same time
What era do we live in anyway?
My dorm room window looks down over the grassy part of the campus. Three floors below me, sleepy students stumble past their way to early morning classes. Girls in elaborate outfits and makeup darting eyes to see who noticed them. Misguided business students in badly cut suits, having internalized some inaccurate blogs about dressing for success.
Life is a romance in itself.
The era we live in consists of people who cheerfully admit the internet has ruined their ability to pay attention, but it has truly taken away the ability to think. The cloud of cold blue light has taken over our unconscious stream of boredom.
The nostalgia of uncurated boredom
When I was younger, I would spend hours doing nothing. I was oblivious and engaged in the perpetual interruption of thoughts warbling in the back of my mind while I did something else, like doodle gift cards or stroll across the street.
However, the vacant space has been entirely replaced. The mind does not stray when we lazily pass time online. The predators in our phones are so good at spreading the sweetest humour and war crimes in a single recreated goo. The sky turns dark and then light again as we scroll through the slideshow of dancing humans.
Everything good in our lives is replaced by low resolution simulation.
What would happen if we let them take control of our boredom?
The evil villain in the romance of life
This is a corny way to look at life, but it’s true. Most people just want someone to go through life with. Someone to get up in the middle of the night and close the windows with you when it pours. Someone to dry the dishes after you wash them. That’s it. We intrinsically desire something so basic.
All we want is to be bored with someone instead of being bored alone.
We also desire honesty and genuine connections. A guy in our MFA class wrote an essay about love. It says that we should all have a complex worldview to experience love. A complex worldview is characterized by increased psychological richness where “you are not just submitting to the parts you enjoy, but also the parts you don’t.”
We don’t necessarily “enjoy” ordinary moments and feelings (that’s why it’s so easy to replace them with mobile phones) — but in a sense, these moments are the gateway to universal experiences. They present us with differences, novelty, and even confusion. It underlines the idea that this world (as an extension of our minds) is a radically complex place.
That’s all to say that boredom, when shadowed by the cold blue gaze of your mobile phone, is unspeakably blocking you from love. It’s the evil villain in your romance with life.
The internet is taking over your boring nothingness and making you addicted to your own boredom. It’s alienating us from intimacy, human closeness, love, and passion from its originating roots.
How do we fight that?
Modern culture is soaked in narcissistic ways of thinking
Our culture rewards an individualistic way of thinking. The logistics of romantic relationships are often something that “happens” to us; we “fall in love” at random, but we should instead strive for autonomy, pragmatism, and personal success.
In his book, The Art of Living, Erich Fromm mentions that “our (contemporary) culture is based on the appetite for buying” and the world has become “one great object of our appetite”. Modern man’s contentment “consists of the thrill of looking at shop windows and buying all that he can afford,” and as a result, they view people similarly. Attractive men for women — -and for women, attractive men — -are one conquest to be acquired to fulfil whatever they are lacking.
This explains why any kind of relationship abstains from being strong or deeply powerful in any shape or form. The power that others might have on us — or that we have on them — is considered to be terrifying. It invades our daily lives, shatters our stability and disrupts everything that makes us normal in the contemporary world.
We are taught that feeling incomplete without another person is a sign of weakness, that we are supposed to be “like everyone else”.
The solution here is not to replace our biological drive to wither under the cold gaze of our cell phones. It doesn’t work anyway.
If we want to survive, we have to nourish our ability to love.
But how?
Orient your character towards love
True love is scary. It’s a dynamic interaction of immense, intense power over one another. It can feel weird, disorienting, and almost impossible to navigate at a young age, at a time when we are simultaneously caught up in the web of other powerful influences like ideologies, parents, friends, and society.
But one cannot be completely independent of other people. Our culture attempts to direct us in the opposite direction, to be independent. But this worldview crumbles when we face even the slightest crisis, we realize how much we need others and how strongly we are influenced by them.
Fromm argues that love “is an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not towards one ‘object’ of love.”Real, unconditional love cannot be confined to one person and be indifferent to the rest of the world. In that case, it would be just an individualistic, symbiotic attachment or egotism. Love is in fact the antidote to narcissism.
Love will save you from meaninglessness.
Can you feel it?
The world is flawed. Our only self-protection mechanism is to readily dismiss anything sincere and true as simplistic or naïve — even if, or precisely because, we know that all real truth is simple by virtue of being true and sincere.
But what more can a bored, flawed, and imperfect human possibly do for one another, if not unselfishly, love?
Love is the one thing that can be both mind-blowingly unbelievable and incredibly ordinary at the same time.
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