The Insane and not-so-Insane Ways of Enjoying Monotony
Would you get bored if you lived for a thousand years? Surely not! There are simply far too many creative works of art being pumped out every single day by billions of people, way more than you could spend time consuming. Well, it is true that most of them aren’t really original work; in fact, they tend to start getting quite repetitive and this problem will only get worse as the years go by, but there’s still enough, right? Maybe… alright I’m getting worried now.
Perhaps this is what drove our thought-experiment astronaut friend of the future insane. The who now? Well, if you’re lucky you can see them floating around in outer space, somewhere between the Earth and the Moon. But they’re looking at neither, instead just staring into the dark abyss endlessly. Being so still and unresponsive, you could be convinced that that shiny life-support suit is empty inside. Are they contemplating life and its mysteries? Thinking about the secrets of the universe? Trying to comprehend our place and purpose?
Nope! That stuff is old news for our fella! I mean, the astronaut won’t speak to us, but apparently there are huge groups of people who seem to know a lot about this peculiar person. They say that in fact, our friend here is bored out of their mind! But why! — you may ask — Why would you stay there doing nothing for thousands of years after literally figuring out the meaning of life and the mysteries of consciousness? Well you answered your own question there buddy. Perhaps being bored is the ultimate meaning of life. It isn’t… but our mysterious astronaut and all their followers are convinced that it is, and that’s all it takes. Like I said, insane. But is it so insane?
It is worrying that the vast majority of creative pieces people come up with make you feel like you’ve seen them before. It is hard enough already to come up with anything original, so inevitably most of these things just blend into each other and don’t offer anything new. We spend hours consuming these things but none of them leave an impact… the hours are just forgotten. Time flies when you’re having fun, but the memories stay with you. Do they though? I don’t really remember any of the thirty five Youtube videos I just watched. Where did all those hours go? I’m telling you, this stuff is so horrifying to think about for over a few minutes, it is inevitable that you subconsciously distract yourself… with just one more video.
I didn’t feel those hours! I don’t remember them either! Where in the world did they go? Our hypothetical friend just asked one more question to add to this terrifying thought. Was I even alive? Yes but… perhaps less conscious maybe? I mean, time flew past, I barely had any thoughts, and I don’t even remember any of it. Like a featureless dream.
What is the meaning of being conscious? Is it feeling the time flow? Our astronaut’s confusing hobby forced all those people into this conclusion — The meaning of living is to feel time flow past you. Every single second of it. If you miss any, you might as well have not lived in it. Extreme stuff, isn’t it? But it spread like a religion, starting in the thirty fifth century, until on every one of the twelve million colonised exoplanets, there were billions of people giving up their heart and soul just to force this monotony upon themselves. Just to stare at nothingness and think about every tick of the clock, every beat of the heart and every blink of the eye. Doing anything they can to not let the time fly.
But there is a missing piece in this puzzle. And it’s got to do with the fact that time did fly when I visited the shore of an ocean for the first time and somehow spent all day there, shaken by the vastness of it. It went by so fast… and I didn’t want to leave. But I remember all of that; every minute of it. In fact, it got boring — I was just sitting there fiddling with the sand, the same homogenous sand that was everywhere, but that only made me ponder it all even more. What was so different about this place that I enjoyed getting bored? And not in the way those idiots from the last paragraph. This was a kind of boredom that was actually… beautiful.
Our astronaut might have had the same revelation when they were trapped in a multi-century voyage to another star. Their cryo-sleep chamber had stopped working. They were the only one awake, having nobody to speak to and nothing to entertain themselves with. That realisation hit… we were talking about hours, but for them, it was millennia. They couldn’t remember any day of it — not a single one. We can’t even imagine coping with such horror. It took years, but our friend managed to step away from the terror and focus on surviving the journey.
They’d look outside the window and stare at the unmoving scene. They’d walk through the hallways and listen to the hums and blips of all the machines inside the walls. They’d cook the same meals from the same frozen rations, twice every day, and eat it while staring at the darkness of the kilometer-wide empty room that was the nuclear reactor, waiting for the engine to light up, which it only did every few years. The days got monotonous. They blended into each other much like the days in those lost millenia. But something was different this time. The uneventful days may not have been memorable, but their thoughts were. Their own thoughts. Entire trains of thoughts. Complex webs of thoughts interconnecting creative ideas. Original ideas? No, but that didn’t matter. Unoriginal ideas are still original if the true original is far away enough, and when you are trapped in your own mind, every single one is far away enough. These were thoughts that the astronaut built, putting their own effort, emotions, and memories into it. It was satisfying.
All the other astronauts skipped those eight centuries through their cryo-sleep, unable to imagine facing that level of torturing boredom. This was the millennia that was supposed to be lost. But it was by far the most memorable one for our friend, who was satisfied every single day of it. Perhaps you or I wouldn’t be, but the astronaut had lost enough, more than we could imagine. So much that they couldn’t step back from it, wanting the monotony to never end.
And that is why the hypothetical astronaut is floating in space. Not counting blinks or feeling heartbeats, but lost in thought, having discovered the true beauty of monotony.
