Sinking Into Boredom: A Method for Cultivating Agency
Your purpose does not come from endless choices, a plethora of distractions: you were born for less.
Welcome to The Vitruvian Protocol. Built for those who seek clarity, agency, and inner alignment.
Below, I explore individual agency and how boredom and learning to think gives you power over your thoughts, opinions, and your daily happiness.
Boredom creeps in at every turn; it is so unendurable that distractions are the only way out. The head hops over the walled garden of bliss1 and reports back that the future is filled with more misery and obstacles than one can handle. Even nature is uninteresting, and the sun is dim as ever. The only cope is either enhanced ontixification or a large bright screen to block out the world. The world responds by receding further into the shadows; the days no longer grant gifts of awe and wonder but fly by at exceptional speed. Every moment becomes duller and duller until finally, your new Amazon package arrives and you suddenly become optimistic and excitedly frantic; in your own ignorance, you feel honored and loved. This loses its sparkle; it is a bright blue ghost you continue to chase after.
Words cannot describe how you feel, so you instead become the words of popular magazines and politicians that tell you how you feel. Rational thought is not so common. The politician says you are an exploited class, and suddenly you feel a sense of righteous indignation. How could they do this to me and to you, we must be paid retributions through a guilt tax on the oppresor. You never thought this way before, you never knew how you felt, nor even who you are. Your morality is tied to the whims of the specific group that entices you in: whichever group inflates your ego and gives you purpose becomes your god. Anyone outside of this group is subhuman, born of the devil, and no longer deserving of life, liberty, or happiness.
Your days are still meaningless, only filled with the moments you stand up for those oppressed, though you do nothing about it yourself; no money comes out of your pocket to help; of course, it should come from the wallets of the oppressors. But let me return to the earlier point that illustrates how the distracted state leads to unformed thoughts, and thus an unformed life. Further, society cannot be built upon people who stand on un-solid ground. And how can a people stand on solid ground when the mind that moves them is feeble and the legs that carry them are turned in each direction.
Even the leaders are unfortified in the direction in which they mean to lead their people. Their only pursuit is power, and the philosophy that drives them is one of vexation and cultural upheaval. Even the conservative means to resuscitate that which once was and of which is no more. The people are lost, like sheep without a master; they are being led by wolves to be slaughtered. The gargantuan AI data centers are spoken of as if they are for the people, by the people, so that the people can be liberated from work and pursue a life of happiness. The people have been trained to pursue satisfaction, not in good work but in fleeting pleasures, and what they pursue is an unserious life; AI will not save them, it will only sedate them further, pulling them into a world of bits and illusion.
“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” David Foster Wallice
What about those brave spirits who pursue purpose in overcoming immense obstacles through the use of sheer willpower? Those who get up before it is time and grind the day away on improving themselves. Don’t these individuals deserve some kind of medal, and don’t they atleast have a callosed mind that is strong enough to choose its own path. No. These people are also lost; they have just chosen a more challenging existence and suffer all the more for it. Their hubruous is that they believe that they are their own master; the hubris of the sedated is the belief that the masters are their slaves.
Everyone deserves a good life. Wrong. Everyone deserves death and has already been granted life; the choice of a good life lives purely in the mind and bestows itself upon the wings of consciousness and morality. Forget order, order is boring, disorder is exciting, chaos is EXCITING. You can forget triumph as well; the great triumphs have already been experienced, your triumph will always be beneath it.
Back to boredom; if boredom is antithetical to a happy existence, then chaos is the cure, and sedation is the medicine. If bravado and “the grind” are the cure to sedation, then boredom is the medicine and order is the result.
Boredom does not last forever. There is a requirement of time that, once sustained, is followed by bliss. Distraction will never take you down a path of bliss; it will only sustain you for long enough time to continue fighting through each day. Bliss through sustained boredom is a choice: it can either be a living hell or become a state of absolute bliss. You can build the walled garden, reside strictly in the garden, or you can poke your head over and report back all the moments ahead until it builds up into an unendurable hell.
The choice is yours. A life of constant distraction. Hell on Earth. Or heaven on Earth obtained through sustained boredom.
You can learn to think or you can outsource your thoughts to a more convincing mind. Thinking takes time, growth in thought is not found on the screens, and it is not derived from group think. The individual must think, for a sustained period of time, enough for boredom to creep in and the bubbling up of the subconscious.
The choice is yours. Outsource your mental capacities and thus risk total incapacitation. Or sink into boredom, turn off the screens, and learn who you are, where your thoughts come from, and regain the power of individual thought.
“What unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen… He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.” David Foster Wallice (Infinite Jest)