The Beauty of Boredom
First: A Formula
There is something our modern civilization despises the most: boredom. We have entire industries to remove ourselves from this so-called disease, namely the entertainment industry. Movies, television shows, games, pornography—it is clear the human does not like being bored. We even refer to things we don't like and think are bad as boring. Is your physics professor bad? Well, you might call him boring. Was the film you just watched terrible? Well, you'd call it boring, wouldn't you? Our modern civilization follows this very simple formula:
Time(Boredom) = Bad
This translates to: Time spent in boredom is recognized as bad and awful in all characteristics. I'd have written the formula in Latex to look fancy, you know, but I don't know Latex. I must remind my future self to learn it, so I can write stupid formulae.
Killing Boredom?
Boredom has been called a crime. The modern human cannot handle boredom. There must always be something to do. A new task at work, groceries to buy, people to talk to, and topics to write about. Humans have found many ways to relieve themselves from boredom. Some find it in their job, others in their hobbies, and many find it in not-so-nice-to-do things, like drugs/adultery/crime. As you can see, so many things have been created to kill boredom, and yet, it persists like a mosquito in your mosquito net late at night you can't kill (trust me, when this happens you feel like dying; mosquitoes are horrible creatures).
Why is it that, no matter how much we have tried to kill boredom it still lives? I have a hypothesis: Boredom is essential to the human condition, like what happiness is to one's life. Getting rid of boredom can't be done because it is an integral part of living. Like how removing the motherboard of a laptop would destroy it (besides, who would do such a terrible thing—better to just sell your laptop instead)
So What Now? (ʘ ʖ̯ ʘ)
To truly live in boredom, what ever shall I do? Should I stop listening to those French podcasts I love? Should I stop reading my beloved science fiction stories? Shall I disconnect from all entertainment altogether? Do I even have any idea? ƪ(˘⌣˘)ʃ
It's best to keep entertainment on a leash. Without entertainment, we humans would quite quickly realize the fact life is damn boring. Seriously, life is really boring. You do the same things everyday: get up for work/school, talk to your parents/spouse, get a cup of tea (or coffee if you're that American). Sure, we do some interesting things from time to time like a nine-day trip to Rome or someone's wedding day, but overall, life are the same small things we neglect to see. That is why, for most of us, entertainment is necessary to function. To get away from boredom, we watch interesting things in other people's lives. Perhaps an action film where the protagonist is essentially a superhuman, or a cheesy romance to brush off our own loneliness. But entertainment makes us forget to improve your own life. Instead, we watch others live our dreams and self-insert ourselves.
Most of entertainment is just trash. Very trash. I recommend not sacrificing the quality of the things you consume over the quantity of your consumables. Films are nice, but only a few of them. Books are very nice, but, then again, only a few of them (I do have a book addiction, however—I'm working on that (～￣▽￣)～. Please help me.)
Entertainment is like salt. Too much and your dish is uneatable (I once had to eat very salted sunny-side eggs, and trust me, too much salt is bad). Too little salt makes your dish hard to eat (although not uneatable; ha!). You'd need a proper level of salt to make the dish perfect. Like entertainment, you should only use it sparingly, although if you ask me if you can do it, it's better to get rid of the entire thing. However, we're humans aren't we? We can't do everything and sometimes we do things bad for us, yet we enjoy them.
If you're wondering what I mean by entertainment, here are the things I consider such: films, YouTube videos, fiction books, video games, anime (a friend once got me in a quite bad anime addiction; I had to force my way out), and anything else that takes your free time. There's such a long list of entertainment options; I couldn't even try to list them all.
If you're like me, you possibly can't just quit entertainment from your life. If you can, that's great! There'd be no way for you to fall into entertainment addictions. You can go on chasing hobbies, travelling, enjoying your time with your loved ones, and whatever happy people do in their free time.
However, for most of us normal people, we can't quit entertainment for the rest of our lives. If that's the case (which likely is), you need to limit your entertainment options. Balance, my friend, is necessary in life. Remove all the low-satisfying entertainment options from your life and replace them with very satisfying ones, like books! I couldn't even tell you how much more satisfying it is to finish a book than to finish a movie (unless if I binge-read; that nearly always gives me a headache in the end).
I say this because having boredom in one's life allows creativity to flourish and originality to flow. However, keep in mind to balance boredom with the other beautiful things in life. Everything in life requires a balance. Introducing boredom to my daily life, I've seen some great changes in my mental health. I'm becoming more mindful of my life and am daydreaming less ヾ(≧▽≦*)o. Daydreaming has ruined so much of my life. I can't even properly remember my early teenage years because I was busy keeping track of all the fictional worlds in my head, forgetting the real world outside.
Sure, Dhaka isn't a nice outside world, but at least it is so much realer than my daydreaming. Alongside this, I've become more grateful with my life and more social with others—most/all my social energy was wasted in imaginary conversations that'd never happen. I found more satisfaction in the things I did. I discovered who I was and what I wanted in life. Essentially, I became a better human than I was before.
Boredom imbued in my daily routine also gave me peace from all the complexity of the real world. Is that what boredom is? Peace? Perhaps peace is boring, but it's a thousand times better than its alternative: war (talking about war needs its own post).
Like everything else in life, however, boredom should never be out-of-balance. There are enough things to do and discoveries in life to keep boredom in balance.