It is by playing it safe
that I’ve been risking
my life
but now that I’m taking risks
I finally feel alive.
Tag: journal
Unstructured Reflections on Boredom: A Blurry Definition of Boredom
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 curse of 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.
Notes and Quotes from Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal
This morning, I spent some time reorganizing my bookshelves before the start of my workday. Reorganizing my books relaxes me. It’s like a mindfulness session, if you know what I mean. So, sometimes, I do it for that reason alone.
When I picked up Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, I began to flip through its pages and went on reading the sentences I had underlined years ago. I remember loving the book. I remember reading it back when I was “studying” death: What is the meaning of death? How does the awareness and the fear of death affect us? What is the death instinct? How does one prepare to die? Etc. Besides the classics like Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death and Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Gawande’s Being Mortal was one of the books I ended up reading.
Being Mortal talks about aging and the inevitable conclusion of life. More precisely, it talks about what medicine can do about these inescapable realities.
Here I am now, sharing, for no particular reason and after so many years, some of the sentences I had underlined, and they are not necessarily about death…
First Quote
Nothing that takes off becomes quite what the creator wants it to be. Like a child, it grows, not always in the expected direction.
– Atul Gawande, Being Mortal
I like this quote because it can live outside the book it was created for. Even when used out of context, it still delivers a philosophical insight. In a way, it does not need its surrounding words; on the contrary, its surrounding words become more meaningful when it is added to them… So, let us take this quote and walk out of the book for a moment. Doesn’t it make us want to ask the following: Can the creation transcend what it was created for? And is not the answer a resounding yes? Think about it.
Second Quote
The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don’t, mortality is only a horror. But if you do, it is not.
– Atul Gawande, Being Mortal
Aloneness will, sooner or later, swallow us whole if we don’t chain ourselves to an idea that is larger than life. One cannot live a fulfilling life without believing in something. As they say, a good reason to live for is simultaneously a good reason to die for.
Third Quote
All we ask it to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story. That story is ever changing. Over the course of our lives, we may encounter unimaginable difficulties. Our concerns and desires may shift. But whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties.
– Atul Gawande, Being Mortal
This is why the betrayals of body and mind that threaten to erase our character and memory remain among our most awful tortures.
Gawande repeats this idea in different parts of the book. I’d even say that he repeats it more poetically elsewhere. Don’t worry, however; the quote I chose delivers the message clearly. What Gawande keeps communicating throughout the book is that life becomes meaningful when it feels like a story. When you lose chapters of your story or when you’re no longer able to connect the dots of your self, life loses its meaning. Life doesn’t only end when one’s story ends. Life also (figuratively) ends when it ceases being a story.
Fourth Quote
Patients tend to be optimists, even if that makes them prefer doctors who are more likely to be wrong.
– Atul Gawande, Being Mortal
This is already observable with the naked eye: A person has the tendency to prefer the flatterer over the critic. But those who plan on becoming better, must eventually leave behind the former and listen to the latter.
Bored Absurdist 