During my time at college, I spent a lot of time half-sleeping in the seating area behind my campus building. Northern Bandung breeze and the noise of busy Setiabudi road was a lullaby to the bored ears. I met my friends there as well — a group of bored people seeking a place to take a nap between classes.
There was a guy who wrote, “boredom drives creativity”. I bet it wasn’t about Sisyphus, although it sounds as philosophical as it is. Therefore, my bored mind tried to drive that creativity.
I saw a squirrel running down a cable.
Squirrels can’t really sit down and be still. They always jump here and there, picking this and that, and chewing things all the time. Whenever they do sit down, I believe, they will be bored as us all. That is why they run and jump a lot. However, when they are eventually bored jumping up and down, do they have a hard time escaping it as we do, or not?
“What would squirrels be if they are bored?” I asked myself.
In humans, boredom could be of many forms. Some are bored because of their hopeless job. Others are bored by their meaningless tasks. We are bored because we don’t find meaning in life, in daily routine, and in seemingly unimportant tasks.
Our mind also plays a major role in experiencing boredom, particularly when we don’t actively engage in the work. Remember our brain nearly exploded while trying to learn Math in class, ultimately giving up due to exhaustion? Boredom is what happened after the explosion.
Boredom is giving up on processing information, that everything we see is indifferent: numbers and formulas are as interesting as poetry written by politicians.
Another factor is the feeling of powerlessness. In a corporate job, where everyone is assigned to ‘turn a tiny cog’ for a much bigger ‘corporate machine’, a worker would feel like whatever they are doing is useless and meaningless, thus being overly self-conscious that they themselves are useless and meaningless. Boredom is when we feel like we’re unable to do anything with our lives and our work.
Squirrels perhaps don’t have to worry about all those things. Squirrels won’t experience being distracted and putting effort into engaging in a job. Squirrels don’t feel anxious when they can’t control things like their lives and their activity. Imagine a self-conscious squirrel thinking “ugh, I hate my job!”
However, animals have an instinct to avoid predators. If they hang and stay too long in their favorite branch, for example, there will be a high risk of being chewed by predators. For animals, boredom is a signal that said “Hey, you’re getting too comfortable in this. Move, or you’ll get killed”. Boredom for them is a sign of change and a chance for survival.
During my time in college, I always think about Sisyphus: doing the same thing over and over again with no result. I always wonder if he was stupid, or just being too comfortable with doing whatever he’s doing. I knew that there was a philosophical backstory to that lore. From another angle, however, I think Sisyphus is a man unable to escape from the boredom that eats his soul. He succumbs to that discomfort and says “This is me, I am this!” until, I don’t know when, the big boulder he’s lifting bites back on him and kills him.
Boredom, now I understood, is a predator I need to escape from, and also a sign of change.
