my life got a whole lot better when I realised that boredom was a huge factor in all my personal problems.
anxiety in social situations? often grounded in being bored, and then in consequence feeling like there was something wrong with me that I wasn’t having fun at that awesome party with those awesome people.
slow self-destruction and seeming inability to stop doing really stupid shit to my body and mind? nothing in my life about which I felt passionately enough to bother being functional.
relationship problems? struggling at school? b o r e d
incomplete list of things that I have made myself miserable trying not to find boring: the art world, the university queer scene, heterosexuality, geek culture, mainstream feminist pop culture criticism (possibly the whole idea of “pop culture”; not sure yet), the anarchist scene, various other social circles, the majority of white dude social theory, the literary canon, film, punk.
I’m not saying that everything I find boring is worthless, or objectively dull, or politically fucked. I believe in slogging through dull shit from time to time, anyway. and I would hate to give the impression that I think it’s acceptable to be rude or not challenge yourself because you are initially bored. but I think it’s hard to feel like total shit when you’re truly entertained and engaged. and I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to have certain goals or lifestyles without considering whether the thing we think we want is actually the thing that is interesting to us, challenging, makes us feel good. and when our goals fail to make us feel good we think that we’re the failures, or we think that the shitty emotions they provoke come only from within us and our crazy brains. but it is very possible that you are not the problem. maybe the thing you thought seemed cool is actually not that interesting to you.
this is probably one of those incredibly banal pieces of ~life wisdom that you just have to live through before you can crack your cynicism and make use of it.
