Thinking About: Being Bored

I don’t know what it is exactly but several people have been asking me lately if I was bored. I answered them honestly as said yes. But, I explained myself, that’s pretty much my default position. I’m normally bored – it’s just a matter of degree. It’s actually something I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember. In the early part of my life I don’t think I noticed it so much because back then, before I ‘woke up’ in effect, I didn’t really take much notice of anything. It was as if I spent my days sleep walking through my life. Whether I could have sustained that somnolent state for my entire life I’m not sure but in my early teens I began to realise that the world passed me by largely unobserved and unremarked. It’s probably at that point that my mind realised that it needed far more input than I’d been giving it up to that point – hence the feeling, sometimes crushing so, of boredom.

Luckily for me at around that time I was introduced to books. Imagine if that same person had introduced me to drugs so I could make the world – and hence boredom – go away rather than inviting the whole universe to take up residence inside my skull? Boredom turned out to be less of a curse (or I turned it around to be that way) and more of a motivation – along with several other pressures of my teenage years – to make me into a hoover of as much of the world’s knowledge that I could get my hands on. Again luckily I had access to a pretty good local library and some very helpful librarians who were more than happy to encourage me to order books on whatever subject I had become fascinated with that week. They even smiled indulgently when I regularly had to be asked to please bring back some of the books I’d ordered over and above the 12 I was allowed at any one time. I guess that they were just happy that someone in that town had a passion for books and wanted to feed it before it burnt itself out. Of course it’s still burning. Maybe not as strongly as it did 40 years ago but still with a deep sustained heat.

Reading anything and everything was only one of my strategies, even if probably the most useful, I developed in the early years to stave off boredom. In the 70’s and 80’s I watched a lot of television, and I mean a lot! It certainly helped to pass the time and numb the ache but only to an extent. It was in the early 80’s that my second most powerful anti-boredom weapon really came into my life – computer games. Not only did they manage to distract me they also managed to engage me more than anything else with the exception of the written word. Gaming has, from time to time, completely eliminated boredom so much so that I loose myself entirely and have entered into something I can only call a Zen-like state where the ‘I’ no longer exists and I become part of the game itself. This has lasted sometimes for tens of minutes where conscious thought and control over the gaming experience seems to become totally automatic where things happen far too fast for mere thought to get in the way. It is only at times like this and when I am completely engrossed in a written narrative that I am not bored in any way shape or form. Such times are, as you can imagine, few and far between but are treasured all the more so because of that.

The third major weapon in my fight against boredom is cinema. Most films I see are at the very least entertaining. At a bare minimum they pass the time in a reasonably enjoyable way. At best they take me out of myself and put me within the story where again I loose myself for moments or tens of minutes at a time. The weirdest feeling in a cinema – thankfully rare – is when you are completely disengaged from a film and see yourself watching moving images on a flat screen while around you other people are engaged with what is going on in front of them. It almost feels like having a gods-eye view of things, of being outside of reality looking in. It’s bizarre and not something I like to repeat – not least of which I feel it’s a complete waste of entry money!

You could almost define my life as a continual, if rather idiosyncratic, fight against boredom. I do so hate it but I’ve also learnt to use it as a great motivator to get off my ass and do something. OK, that something isn’t often what could be considered useful (or even interesting or fun by people looking in) but I’ve found that, by and large, it works for me. At least most of the time I’m only slightly bored and my years of schooling taught me how to deal with such trivialities, meanwhile my reading has taught me and given me the resources to live inside my own head when necessary. Am I bored? Yes, but only slightly and not for long….