Boredom ‘In life you must choose between boredom and everything else.’ Buddhism lectures its followers on many things. It tells us to forego the materialistic side of things in favour of the simple life. It tells us to stop hunting happiness and instead to just be happy. One other thing that it strives to teach is that man must become tolerant of his boredom to become free.
Our lives are a constant battle against boredom. Man lives to evade boredom and thus is a slave to avoiding it. We go out and meet people, we watch a film and we read a book or listen to the news to negate boredom. All man’s problems arise from his inability to sit quietly by himself and tolerate his existence. So a man feels bored and then does something that he may regret to neutralize that boredom.
All our struggles can be rewound back towards the quest to avoid boredom. If we could just be cheerful with ourselves and more accepting of ourselves we would live a richer life bereft of pain. But no, we become servants to addictions because we seek to avoid boredom. It is said that man is the only animal that cannot tolerate himself.
Man, unlike a dog cannot sit and remain passive for hours at a time. He must be entertained. He must be passing the time with some activity. The pursuit of happiness becomes an addiction. People say when they have achieved X, Y and Z they will be happy. But like all addictions it is only provisional and the mind reboots itself and demands more.
There is happiness one hunts which is an addiction and there is happiness one possesses which is freedom from addiction. We escape one addiction to another. We leap from one tyranny to another. We are indoctrinated to not be self-aware. We are conditioned to escape unto others. We are martyrs to our own incapacity to enjoy ourselves. We must lose ourselves in the world in order to pass the time. But this sometimes means we go too far and we make mistakes. We stare into the abyss for too long and eventually we fall in.
All life’s problems arise from our poor tolerance of boredom. We are addicted to feeling good. We want others to make us feel good. It’s a game. We say to ourselves we won’t value that other person unless they emotionally subsidize us. The problem is we become inured on other folks to make us feel comforted and reject our own existence. Education when young has us drip fed on others. So much that we cannot tolerate our own naked self. If you can indulge your boredom then you will become free.
If you can sit by yourself and be content, then you will become free. If you can gaze and gaze into the stars at night and find solace in such an activity you will become free. A relationship and a film are both means to escape. We pour ourselves into them to escape boredom. But they are dangerous because what happens if they fail to assist someone escape. To escape oneself is to tolerate ones boredom and is the best means of escape. People need to learn to be happy to just be. Become more self-aware of what you are doing and why you do it.
The common man is no different from the drug addict whose life is centred on heroin, except the common man’s addictions are conversation and entertainment. Time is so precious and yet we are pressed to kill it at every given moment. We are compelled to do so because we cannot handle the boredom. To become free, one must revel in their ennui. They must become accepting of life.
They must find warmth in the frigid monotony. We are schooled to look for happiness or to look for love but they can only be found deep within. Our salvation lies within us, not around us. We are emotionally dependent on external aspects for our happiness and when one stakes their joy on others they most certainly play with dice.
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