Post #78: Boredom and Excitement

22 Nov. 2023

Strange as it may sound, boredom is probably a by-product of prosperity. The distressed are too miserable to feel it; those beset on all sides by the ancestral enemies of mankind, the four horsemen of hunger, disease, warfare, and death, are too preoccupied with the demands of survival to be much concerned with how to fill their days; and those still living in line with the primordial rhythms of life—brief bursts of activity followed by long periods of indolence—can spend almost any amount of time doing practically nothing, and enjoy it too (see Bhutan, or traditional village life almost anywhere in the less industrious parts of the globe).

To get bored one needs at least a little free time on one’s hands and enough mental space to ask oneself whether one is having enough fun. Over-refined aristocrats along ancien-regime lines have always been prone to the affliction (Post #72), but as a mass phenomenon it is a great anomaly, since the expectation that life be interesting, exciting, or at least entertaining, is a luxury not often enjoyed by the masses in their poor and huddled default condition. Implied in these origins are two congenitally immune types: those whose temperament allows them to be intrigued and delighted by almost anything under the sun (think Walt Whitman), and those so hard-boiled or thick-skinned that they will sneer at the very idea that life should be delightful, rather than a call to duty, toil, and raw endurance.

Meditators typically find themselves in an oddly conflicted position vis-à-vis their own pangs of ennui. On the one hand, boredom raises suspicions of spiritual underdevelopment on a path that is meant to bring joy throughout life’s ups and downs, its thrilling tides as well as its dull ebbs. If an hour of meditation seems boring to you, try ten, goes the meditator’s mantra; and if that still doesn’t do the trick, try a hundred more. Alas, there is probably not a long-term meditator alive who has never had misgivings about his practice because his own curiosity in small things would not awaken as reliably as he might wish.

Getting bored is certainly no badge of honor on the Path, then, and will not often be admitted openly; but it remains a fact of life, on the Path or off, and thus serious meditators will also admit that it must be accepted along with everything else one might encounter, whether one likes it or not. The Buddhist way may advertise itself with ready smiles, but it does not guarantee anyone happiness (Post #10); it is about learning to live a little more equanimously and lovingly with whatever happens to come your way—learning to make friends, one might say, with life’s boring as well as its blessed moments, its uneventful cloudy days as well as its sunny and sparkling ones.

“Look to your zest, see to your gusto,” Ray Bradbury urges writers, and make a habit of reporting your hatreds and despairs with a kind of love!* “The first thing a writer should be is—excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.” Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, Bradbury notes with approval, “the great ones are busy loving and hating.” And he is probably right about that, think what one may of the man’s own place in the pantheon.

No doubt the overreactive mode has indeed been responsible for much impressive literature. But at what a price in misery and dysfunction! Name me one great writer whose melancholy (or outright depression, see Post #32 on how I make the distinction) does not match his gift for word-smithing. And how many of them prove, upon closer inspection, to be as incompetent in the greater business of life as they are wondrously adept within the narrow confines of their dens and their typewriters…

In tandem with the mental habits that Bradbury lionizes so—“the fun of anger and disillusion, of moving and being moved by this masked ball that dances us from cradle to churchyard”—what personal agonies, what nightmares never kept to oneself alone, but foist upon others at every turn! It may all be fine and dandy to read about at a distance, or even to write about from a position of intimacy, but to live with it day-in day-out? Kyrie eleison.

Is all this feverish agitation, this blowing forever hot one moment then cold the next, really so much fun for anyone—or is it not rather the writerly temperament preening itself before the mirror, justifying its ways to the world by glorifying what would be revealed, in a more sober and somber light, as little more than a chronically unbalanced state of mind exhausting itself in an endless succession of one overreaction after another? Not that I exempt myself here, not at all. On the contrary, I recognize and enjoy such marks of kinship with likeminded spirits who see the world more or less as I do; it makes me feel less intolerably alone in the world. Only I would feel obliged to add that what Bradbury presents as the “primary business” (liking and disliking to the point of passionate infatuations and hatreds) still looks to me (however prone I may be to it myself) like nothing more than the most ordinary mechanism of life taken to extraordinary lengths—and what is so grand about that?

Would a little more facility with boredom not serve us better, whether we be writers or not, than our endless gyrations? What is there to celebrate, as if it were a great virtue and accomplishment, in chasing our sensations (those passing winds across the inner landscape of the mind) with even greater hunger than others do? For that is what the agitated life comes down to in the end, if one only looks closely enough.

Yes, there is an element of truth in the life-as-passion litany. If it weren’t possible to raise the temperature a little above the intolerable tediousness of a protracted Tupperware party, I would see no point in sticking around either. So by all means find something to care about, to be vulnerable over, to bleed for (Posts #14 and #33); but recognize that alongside any excitements to be had in that direction, a corresponding capacity for equanimity and bearing up with good cheer is indispensable if you don’t want to drown in the gall of your own enthusiasm turned sour.

Life is not Sesame Street; it is not fun that is fundamentally at issue. Make that mistake, keep cultivating it, and you will get not only a generation of Ernies, but one cohort after another of Elmos, and the world you thought you knew will come to an end not with a bang but a whimper.

* “The Joy of Writing” (1973), the first chapter in his Zen in the Art of Writing.