more on boredom
<snip>Man, perhaps it’s my attention span but I’m extremely suspcious of anything that doesn’t instantly make me say “boring! next!”, cause if it’s easy to focus my mind on it, it’s probably a bit of fluff and not worth it.
But that’s a different kind of boredom from boring social situations or from feminist pop culture criticism. That’s more an eye-rolling sickness than just boredom. Boredom’s like “I want to get out of here and do something else”. With pop culture criticism, I’m drawn to it precisely so I can eviscerate it over and over, like tearing up your house looking for something very precise that you’re not sure even exists. I’m sick of it, I might say I’m “bored” by it, in fact it’s profoundly tedious, but… it’s not the trapped, restless feeling of being locked in a room with Word and Object by Willard Quine and having no choice but to read it, which is ultimately a good thing and something to learn to live with.
I guess with the feminist pop culture criticism, it’s surplus, it’s too much of a good thing, it’s like eating the chocolate and fluffy bits of a milky way bar separately, you kind of sit in it drooling and start to attract flies. Whereas the other kind of boredom is the boredom of important yet mundane shit and hard work.
there is definitely good boredom and bad boredom — “initially unengaging” vs. “there is little of interest to me here at all ever”
the thing with bad boredom is that if you avoid everything that is challenging then you will always, always be bored or ten seconds away from boredom, because you are utterly dependent on constant external stimulation. whereas if you develop the capacity to focus on hard weird things you are making an investment in being less bored. THEREFORE I think being pro-challenging-tedium is, ultimately, an important component of an anti-boredom position.
