Good evening ladies and gentleman.

I like to think I have started to get the hang of writing headings and titles for when i write, but for this, especially recently, the point itself seemed the best way of going about it. Through mood swings and the ignorance of ourselves, to disappearing into your imagination, the deepest corner of your mind that just seems infinitely more… interesting. It has always seemed these behaviors are linked, the ignorance of our selves in an age where it seems like everyone and everything is ahead of us, the mood swings that result of this ignorance, of hoping to just disappear into the background and watch things happen,  when often all we want to is just to be heard.

The point is that this all seems linked. Recently i have discovered something that can make you wander why you still try to be heard, why bother swinging back to a more positive way of thinking, or paying attention to yourself, because “its not worth the effort- it wont produce anything interesting.” What i’m driving at here people is the problem of boredom. More recently, i have found myself in the in the tight grip of quite a bad boredom spell, so it seemed like a good idea to turn my attentions as to what happens and why it exists. Along with this, why it seems like such an unbelievably “first world problem.”

I suppose because it is really…

Its really difficult to not hate being bored, to the point where you almost feel guilty about it for some reason. I hate being bored, so very much. I am yet to find the words how to describe being bored feels, just that is a horribly draining, deflating experience. When bored, you lack the drive to do anything, to get out of bed, brush your teeth, make your breakfast or even care about doing what has become the “dreary, mundane bullshit”that is starting to get to you more and more, because its all you’re thinking about. Sit there in the morning, morning television blaring away and nobody paying attention, just this sitting in your mind, circling round and round.

When we are bored, it seems that all we concentrate on is what doesn’t excite us in any way, to the point where it can feel like this is all there is to fill the days of our existence. We can have a bad day on a Thursday, vast swathes of errands and jobs to deal with we don’t want to deal with, yet Friday you can have the most elaborately wonderful things planned with people that mean so much to you. Yet Thursday morning all you can see is how bored you feel, to the point where you will daydream to how much you are looking forward to Friday,

What you forgot about though are spectacles tinted with the haze of boredom of boredom you are wearing, which make it difficult to want to do anything, because all you want is to be left alone. To live in your little “happy place” away from dreary stuff, pointless errands and jobs that mean you can have money to do stuff that still “probably wont be that interesting anyway.”

I have recently found that I am amazingly good at being bored, regardless of how much i hate it. Its just so..boring. I don’t really understand why boredom is such a relevant thing in my life, but the low mood it creates is remarkable, because after a while you almost start to like it. The best way i can think of to describe this issue is a pay off- you are either bored, which is fairly terrible, so you start to wonder why you try, wonder exactly why you “need” to do anything that we are so convinced would never be worth the effort. Then the alternative of the low mood that often results of a boredom spell, the irritation of “letting yourself” get so utterly bored in the first place.

I like to think everyone hates being bored as much as I do, or at least i hope so. It seems like its a very destructive phenomenon in it can make you question everything you hold dear and perhaps more worryingly, everything you have ever believed in, those morals and ideals that at one point you would have almost been happy to die for in order to uphold them.

The power imagination is an unbelievable force throughout all aspects of our personality in modern society, however i find it to be especially powerful when it comes to boredom. I feel we imagine things very powerfully, down to minor details, the things that make us feel good, the moments we dream for, ideologies we strive towards and people we run towards. We like imagining these moments, for they give us hope, in particular when we feel like things are going nowhere, for we have hit the next “opponent,” the next “brick wall” are unable to find a way through.

As much as imagination can make us feel so much better, it can also have the opposite, much more negative effect. You see, when we are bored, I feel like we concentrate on things we don’t want to do that don’t interest us, that make us actually feel very little. So of course it makes total sense that we wouldn’t want to do them. Yet they have been deemed necessary, for the fact it will “help” life (I’ve had this thought a number of times and still don’t really understand what it means.)

These necessary tasks the majority of the time seem fairly menial and they are, arguably, just a stepping stone to go and do something more interesting. Yet, something that under different circumstances would have little effect on you, with the addition of imagination can create a problem that feels 100,000 times worse. You think of this, that and how many other tasks you are nowhere near completing, birthdays and Christmas you’re far from prepared for, the worrying part of your job, all the parts you feel your business may be lacking, plus the car has been making a strange noise too. Its often not always thing we are convinced “should” be happening, often we can also delve into the issues and situations that “might” happen. It seems as a result of all this, we can all lose quite a lot of time worrying, “living” in your own head,  contemplating things that might happen, might not happen. Often feels like a virus you can’t quite shake off.

When bored, in a way almost blankly drifting, almost like in a vacuum between thoughts, everything can come surging at you all at the same time, which while admittedly leaves you no longer bored, but it can make you feel like your stuck, standing still in a world that relentlessly spins, regardless whether we keep up or not.

What is boredom to you? How do you feel when it happens? Why does imagination have such a part to play in the feelings we all at some point experience?

Yours, with love as always,
DR

Random motivational picture. (especially for me this time)