In Part Two of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes: “The proverb, ‘The Hungarian is far too lazy to feel bored,’ gives food for thought. Only the highest and most active animals are capable of being bored. The boredom of God on the seventh day of Creation would be a subject for a great poet.”1 Nietzsche isn’t talking about simple boredom here, which Peter Toohey, who has written one of the most boring books on boredom, defines as “a social emotion of mild disgust produced by a temporarily unavoidable and predictable circumstance.”2 What Nietzsche is talking about is existential boredom, which Toohey cannot fathom.3 (Existential) (but also situational) boredom isn’t laziness, but an excess of energy yearning to be spent elsewhere. It crawls out of your spirit’s deepest and darkest cave when one kind of energy is exhausted and another kind begins to stir. It comes to inform you that something unwelcome is gnawing at your being, chomping on your vitality, eating your time. But only the truly blessed are blessed with the curseof boredom. To be bored by something means that the reciprocity between you and the object has been severed: you no longer have anything worthy to give it, it has nothing worthy to give you, and your attention to it is now forced rather than voluntary. (The bored man is the prisoner of the now that he needs to escape from. The present situation is unwanted, unpleasant, intolerable, et cetera. Note: The “present situation” can be a two-hour workshop and it can also be a whole lifetime.) Boredom is your spirit’s way of transcending the current situation. It is a striving toward a higher or more meaningful mode of being. It is not emptiness but unspent possibility, the tension between what is and what could be, potentialities activated (but pending), a body without organs… When boredom crawls out of your spirit’s cave, it does not know what it wants. All it knows is that it does not want what it has right now. Eventually, it finds a new direction (or an object it desires), and so it crawls towards it. Boredom is a transitional state. It is a movement or, rather, an initiator of movement… But note: Simply moving from one activity to another does not solve boredom. One can pay attention and still be bored. One can be entertained and still be bored. Entertainment is often merely a stimulation without inner engagement or meaning; therefore, not a solution to boredom, but an escape from it. The movement must be from the boring activity to a meaningful activity. “Boredom,” Lars Svendsen writes, “is not a question of work or freedom but of meaning.”4 Boredom, therefore, is a good thing, as Nietzsche implies, and it can be the fertile ground for something meaningful…
Notes and References
[1] Naturally, I do not mean to offend Hungarians. I do not even know where the stereotype comes from. I’m only quoting Nietzsche here. (Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2014.)
[2] Toohey, Peter. Boredom, A Lively History. Yale University Press, 2012.
[3] A quote from Peter Toohey’s Boredom: “Might not this existential form of boredom, this philosophical or even religious sickness, be best characterized as depression?”
[4] Svendsen, Lars. A Philosophy of Boredom. Reaktion Books, 2011.
Here are five great quotes from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling:
One became great through expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became greater than all.
– Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Whatever one generation learns from another, it can never learn from the predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh, has no task other than that of any previous generation, and comes no further, provided the latter didn’t shirk its task and deceive itself.
– Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Fools and young people talk about everything being possible for a human being. But that is a great mistake. Everything is possible spiritually speaking, but in the finite world there is much that is not possible.
– Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
All that can save him is the absurd; and this he grasps by faith.
– Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
No person who has learned that to exist as the individual is the most terrifying thing of all will be afraid of saying it is the greatest.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus writes that “all great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.” This is what I have in mind when I read A Happy Death, which I consider to be the ridiculous beginning of his later works, especially The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus.
Summary of Albert Camus’s A Happy Death
A Happy Death is a short novel by Camus that was published posthumously in 1971, 11 years after the author’s death. It is about a man actively chasing happiness. His name is Patrice Mersault. He is driven by his will to happiness, and he is prepared to do anything to attain his goal, even kill. He believes that once he has time and money, he can finally be happy. The day-to-day stuff, like his work, is keeping him from actualizing his happiness. He wants to be free. Mersault says vehemently, “I have my life to earn. My work — those eight hours a day other people can stand — my work keeps me from doing it.” (And isn’t this, at least subconsciously, the hypothesis of Everyman? Everyone I’ve ever met who works a traditional nine-to-five job has a plan or a dream to become a free man one day. These men can (or will) only be happy when they have enough money to finally own themselves, when they become free to spend their time and energy the way they desire. But the majority of these men are money worshippers who lack faith. They pray but don’t believe. They are not willing to do everything to be free; they can stand the “eight hours a day” and, therefore, will never be free.) Mersault’s “will to happiness” leads him to kill a rich man and take his money, which enables him to live a happy life. “Like warm dough being squeezed and kneaded, all he wanted was to hold his life between his hands.” And he gets what he wants.
(Patrice Mersault is a go-getter who can be gently compared to Daniel Lugo from Pain & Gain, the 2013 movie directed by Michael Bay, in which a gang of bodybuilders spoil themselves with the riches of a man (they think) they killed.)
We can summarize A Happy Death as follows: the protagonist wants to be happy but doesn’t have the means (time and money), so he kills a rich man, takes his money, and basically opts for an early retirement. He takes regular swims and long walks along the beach and spends a lot of time with women. He builds a happiness routine and, at one point, talking to one of his girlfriends, he says, “Yes, I’m happy, in human terms.” And, of course, the book ends with Mersault’s death, which is — the title of the book — a happy death.
The Working Class Man’s Fantasy
What is A Happy Death? It is the working-class man’s fantasy: you’re suddenly rich (because you won the lottery or robbed a bank or whatever), and now you can do whatever the hell you want. You don’t have to sell your time anymore. You don’t have to work. You can now exit the matrix. You are finally free.
One character called Celeste, although he is a restaurant owner and not technically a working-class man, when he is asked what he would do if he suddenly got a lot of money, says, “I’d buy myself a hut out in the country, I’d put some glue in my navel and I’d stick a flag in there. Then I’d wait to see which way the wind was blowing.” Although he is being funny, isn’t what he is saying the big dream a lot of us share? Being (financially) independent, being (absolutely) free, et cetera.
Yes, it is the dream, but it’s also a mistake.
For the mistake is thinking that that quantity of experiences depends on the circumstances of our life when it depends solely on us. Here we have to be over simple. To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Sisyphus Brings Happiness to the Working-Class Man
Patrice Mersault has “become aware of the essential and immoral truth that money is one of the surest and swiftest means of acquiring one’s dignity.” Money is the means by which one actualizes his inner self, i.e., externalizes it to make it part of the physical world.
In his book on identity called Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition, Francis Fukuyama writes:
The foundations of identity were laid with the perception of a disjunction between one’s inside and one’s outside. Individuals come to believe that they have a true or authentic identity hiding within themselves that is somehow at odds with the role they are assigned by their surrounding society.
And to clarify it further, Fukuyama adds: “Oftentimes an individual may not understand who that inner self really is, but has only the vague feeling that he or she is being forced to live a lie.”
Mersault felt like he was being forced to live a lie. “My work keeps me from doing it,” he says. His work keeps him from earning his life, and the only way to actualize his inner self, to unchain his “will to happiness,” is by acquiring money.
In the first part of the book, in a conversation with Zagreus (the rich man Mersault ends up killing), we observe how lost Mersault is. Like many of us who nurse pints of beer in bars after working hours, he feels trapped and doesn’t know what to do. He says, “I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or else subscribing to L’Illustration. Something desperate, you know.” Zagreus smiles and blames it on Mersault’s poverty. Then Zagreus compares himself to Mersault. Zagreus has all the resources, but he is crippled and cannot enjoy life. Mersault, on the other hand, is his opposite: he has the body to enjoy life but not the resources. “Your one duty is to live and be happy,” Zagreus tells Mersault, and the latter laughs. He says he cannot do that because of his eight-hour shifts and that it would be different if he were free. And here, it becomes crystal clear for us readers why Mersault ends up killing Zagreus to take his money and why it is “okay” to kill Zagreus (because he cannot live anyway).
But is being financially free a prerequisite to happiness? That is the question we need to ask after reading A Happy Death. Can the man who sells his time for money — the employee — never be happy? If so, then happiness is not accessible to the working-class man, not even to the middle-class man. Only the millionaire or the billionaire who chooses to abandon the business world can be free and, therefore, happy. That’s what we conclude from reading A Happy Death. In The Myth of Sisyphus, however, Camus changes everything. He writes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” This is the sentence that undermines A Happy Death. When we are allowed to imagine Sisyphus — “the futile laborer of the underworld” — happy, we can finally also see that the working-class man can eventually attain happiness.
Of course, this does not mean that we must cease rebelling. It does not mean we must stupidly embrace (fake) stoicism. It does not mean that we must surrender our freedom. But maybe we’ll talk about this another time… I will give you the quotes now and go crack open a cold one.
Quotes from A Happy Death by Albert Camus
In this flowering of air, this fertility of the heavens, it seemed as if a man’s one duty was to live and be happy.
— Albert Camus, A Happy Death
‘Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time.’
— Albert Camus, A Happy Death
‘Don’t think I’m saying that money makes happiness. I only mean that for a certain class of beings happiness is possible, provided they have time, and that having money is a way of being free of money.’
— Albert Camus, A Happy Death
He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if it was to do so, he realized that he must submit to time, that to come to terms with time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
— Albert Camus, A Happy Death
There must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life in happiness. Those who lack such a thing must set about acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned.
Bored Absurdist 