On Boredom

I'm reflecting on how my life is simultaneously boring and full of frightening loose ends. I rediscovered the concept of 'boring' hanging around with some French people who used it freely in conversation as just another fact of life, not the lapse in personal engagement I always thought it was. Somehow in that I found some usefulness to it. So now I feel free to be bored by my surroundings, and, coincidentally, I find I am.

The usefulness of that is that now I can see myself in more reflective existential terms--being bored obligates one to have tried and exhausted at least a sampling of the creative possible interpretations I once though should be enough to obliterate boredom from the consideration of anyone with the insight to approach life creatively.

(Somewhere just after this I realized I wanted to write through the entire idea, beyond the constraints of the immediate e-mail)

If the starting point is creativity then one is already started, and boredom is a far-off threat. However this requires being free from obligations and entanglements to pursue one's creative ends. There is no such life available to most people, although it is possible with some cautious judgment and good luck to put aside most of the major tie-downs other people suffer: work, family, credit, destructive personal habits, to name a few. At some point though the obligation to sustain one's existence by normal means intervenes in the creative life, creative solutions to everything become too much work when held up against ordinary means, and the only creative answer is to deny the importance of making a living, to frame those needs as feeding the muse in their own mundane way.

Consider, for example, the day job. Holding one of these down is certainly advantageous in material ways, making possible the good-running car, the pleasant household, studio equipment, and avoidance of burdening others. The day job's insidious side is the time and mental attention it extracts from the job-holder. The secret to creative survival inside the world of the day job, of course, is to subsume one's creative interests in favor of maintaining order in one's surroundings, contributing positively to the surroundings and in some small and well-defined way to the success of the enterprise. This can often be done with a minimum of personal sacrifice during the time spent there, but the fact of spending 8 hours a day there most of the time is hard to deny after a few years. This is where boredom is a welcome frame of reference.

Adjusting from work to life requires for many of us a rite of passage: a transition during which one leaves the workday existence behind and takes up the physical and mental attributes for the places and activities that engage the mind. The anthropologist Victor Turner described this in his turn of the phrase 'rites of passage'--to Turner the weekend was a kind of a rite of passage for modern industrial society, a temporary departure from the norm into ritualized meaningful existence, the heartbeats in the otherwise flat line of social equilibrium.

The more important rites occur going between where the creative being is welcome and where it is not. Following Turner we can see the weekend as the enjoyable, meaningful ritual present with family and friends, creative expression sufficient for those satisfied by it, that makes whole the life in service of the power and purposes of others or of society as a whole.

For the bored participant society's weekend rituals are no more satisfying those suffered through to earn money at a job. The trick is ordinarily to employ the creative where it is needed, to control its attendant excesses and to push it harder or further where the situation finds it deficient. Much of this work is spent marking time--which is also creating time--in anticipation of opportunities for better work. The frequency of these opportunities is encouraging that one is on the right track, their infrequency or unpredictability lead to frustration or the fear that one is doing something wrong. The activity may be watching sports, waiting for the competition to break open and reward the time and hopes of participants and spectators, or it may be collecting and shaping information, adding numbers, measuring and reporting to others who stand to gain or lose from the results.

A share in control over one's situation is another factor in whether experiences are meaningful and fulfilling, or fear-ridden and life-force-draining. The illusion of self-determination is one of the most powerful ideas that can be sold now, as the course of life in the world is more and more uncertain. What can we be sure of nowadays conceptually? Materially we know that batteries will continue to run out. We can believe that most probably someone will be out there to sell us more batteries. Will living in our nation or our physical location bring us choices, economic opportunity, prosperity, or will it obligate us to suffer in the control of negligent hands, or expose us to bloodshed in our communities. Our lives are a mixture of self-determination and obligation of course, and there are no guarantees we are headed toward a more or less pleasant life here on earth. Our ability for control does not extend so far. What it gives us it the means to travel.

So developing the means one has to travel is one of the more purposeful functions of the creative mind. Travel comes in many forms, of course, besides physical travel there is the social ability to be a welcome guest and the related ability when one is not traveling to be a gracious host, different but similar traits, both of which are learned and improved through practice.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man

(George Bernard Shaw).

Being a valued participant in shared group activities is likewise important, as a means of ensuring future invitation to participate. Part of this value comes from one's ability to contribute something unique to one's self and part from the ability to contribute in a standardized and mutually recognizeable way. Because the tendency of groups is to generate equilibrium, they are often sources of great boredom that one cannot live without. Work, family and friends all provide both opportunities for comfort and for tension, to take control or to mark time, waiting for opportunity. In this one has the keys to survival and the terms by which one ultimately will perish.

Imagine a circle of participants in some unnamed ritual. Time intervals are indicated by some means recognized by the people in the group. At first observation the group appears to be doing something uncertain to you as an outsider. As you watch further, however, you become aware that a member of the circle is speaking to the rest, and they are watching. After some time passes the group breaks into more smaller conversations. Then another person receives the simultaneous attention of the group and begins to address them. What have you seen so far?

Does the group recognize your presence? If so, do you include yourself as one of the group, or are you an outsider? Do you know how they regard you? How do they regard you?

If you are invisible to the group, how did you get that way? By virtue of the fact you are the imaginer and they the imagined? Observing the imagined group thus as an outsider, do you recognize them? Are they normal, safe to observe? Would they be safe to be around? Or are they strange, threatening, dangerous? Do you want to be part of the group?

What is the group doing? Are they watching something? Preparing for something? Are they in one place or are they moving? Could they be a circle without standing in the same physical space?

You can't be thinking that way at your day job, at least until you have built a trust relationship with those in your surrounding area and your branch-mates on the tree-view. You need to stay focused on your work and not be engaged in externalities. While occupying the physical space defined for work, control of your time is not your own. So to mark time requires one to produce signs of presence and participation at regular intervals. Presence is signified by any kind of ping or hello signal; participation is the more significant valued subject of expression. Presence is important in its signification, participation not so.

Both signals of presence and of participation can be learned from others in the group. Participation being the basis for one's group membership it is also the most easily taken for granted. Most times participation is shown and done by an ordinary amount of effort. The ease or difficulty of participation is self-regulating; that is, you expect not to be able to determine how easy or difficult will be the tasks you undertake--it's part of the job. Presence in many ways appears more trivial than participation but presence is more noticeable. It is easier to see in terms of individual behavior; personal rituals through which one passes from some other outer life into the fold of the group are signals to oneself of this passage, and signals to others that you are present, at work, online. Greetings, good morning, trip to the coffee machine, cigarette break, chemical experiences signifying presence. Presence is signified in between participation times.

To think of participation as needing to be signified (which it does) can be contentious as it crosses over the two frames. Work after all is action, not mere existence, and to get paid simply to exist is anathema for those devoted to their actions. Despite the equilibrium created by the group, part of its self-awareness is that it has a purpose to be achieved by deliberate action. Agreement about the purposeful existence of the group is part of its equilibrium. So being present in a group is appropriate to signify. To be a participant is ordinarily to be taken for granted but undertaken with seriousness and significance of its own. So there may be highly individualized ways to signal presence, but participation is signaled in ways beyond the individualized choices of the participants.


So presence is relatively easy to establish and getting a handle on the signals of participation take more time and focus. I've pretty much learned to mark time at my job and they want me to participate in some significant enough ways. In spite of this I don't feel the different parts of my life supporting one another like I once did. Welcome new possibilities still appear. I have time to relax, somewhat, not enough.

The present situation promises no end to the unease and sadness I sense coming with time ahead. I have people around and I have work to take my mind off the inevitable conditions of existence, not enough of my work is my own, too much of it marking time for others that I cannot use. Therein the usefulness of boredom.

Bored, I would want to be entertained. Boredom needs no desire for participation, in something or in anything. Boredom can come with a high degree of engagement in something, or detachment from things in general. The bored person approximates the role of a spectator, but a disinterested one; participation implies engagement, boredom disengagement. Sitting back watching is the natural reaction to realizing one's sense of purpose or direction is not one with the group-imposed consciousness.

The luxury of consent to depart from the group and to return is earned by participation over time. When the individual is allowed to abstain from participation, that person gains a large measure of control over their own life and over the course and direction of the group. A person may not make whole decisions for the group as a consequence of this freedom, but by choosing which projects one is interested in and passing the rest by allows one to direct time and focus to one priority at the expense of another. So a trust relationship is what is characterized by the ability of an individual to choose the times and terms of one's participation. And those relationships are always unequal.

What constitutes the trust relationship for members of a group in terms of presence, participation, semantic object-oriented thinking, and power dynamics is at best a subject for future consideration.

Boredom with presence comes naturally, and the easy answer is greater participation. This problem is not always best resolved, as it can be the natural state of unwillingness to participate that attends the exercise of control over one's situation. This boredom anticipates boredom with any possible action one might participate in, thereby precluding such danger by destroying foolish motivation or sense of obligation for engagement.

Boredom with activity, like other forms of dissatisfaction, does not generally arise when the individual is thoroughly engaged in the activity, but requires some thought otherwise. Group activity always offers participation at the risk of dissatisfaction: when initially motivated by obligation to further the purposes of the group, activity is never completely consistent with the individual's purposes. Being shared, group activities never offer the individual control over the situation. Besides that, because group membership is rarely absolute; other group purposes interfere, as when family responsibilities cause one to leave work early, or work responsibilities similarly break up family times. Without a promise of satisfaction or enjoyment in the activities offered by a group, there is a natural inclination toward steering the day job toward simple signification of presence, to mark time and never to make a greater contribution.

So boredom with activity could be as much a defense against overcommitment and dissatisfaction as boredom with inactivity can.

So maybe I'll go over this again for thought-checking purposes. In case anyone reads it yknow.