Overcoming boredom

[Skip]

N-N-W, about 200 klicks. It had better be a big fan.

I only ever saw TRHPS once at the 99 Cent Roxy on Danforth, and that was a blast. As you say, herbs do enhance the experience, as does convivial company. I watched it years later on tv and wished I hadn't.

[Greta]

Do you think the longer a person lives, the more likely that person can get bored at some point? Would the only solution then be to erase some memories to make life more interesting?

The latter question answers itself - when you get older your memory goes.

The answer to the first question is an unequivocal YES. Obviously so. The law of averages - the more time you spend alive, the more chance you have to experience all things, including boredom.

As you age your activities are increasingly limited by increasing frailty. People shy away from you more because you're no longer attractive. The body keeps playing up, limiting activities. Meanwhile living standards generally are dropping due to increased crowding and congestion. It seems to take longer to go everywhere, and the travel more taxing. The media, barring the net, is increasingly vacuous as is the popular music scene. Meanwhile, the world seems to have an increasingly large share of sock puppets regurgitating abstractions without understanding. And all the while your chance of spending time in hospitals increases and there is truly no more damnably boring place than a hospital.

Ideally we would be engaged every moment, appreciating that everything down to our atoms is a miracle worthy of a lifetime's contemplation. However, as we lose some of our youthful energy, staying "switched on" like that is exhausting. At times all organisms need to spend some time recuperating from being useful and just let themselves be blobs for a while.

Before retirement I noticed that if I did not at some point feel bored during my holidays I would not feel properly rested on my return to work. Boredom is good for you but, as always, it's possible to have too much of a good thing.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2014121 ... od-for-you

[Philosophy Explorer]

Greta said:

"People shy away from you more because you're no longer attractive."

Not from my experience.

PhilX

[Dalek Prime]

N-N-W, about 200 klicks. It had better be a big fan.

I only ever saw TRHPS once at the 99 Cent Roxy on Danforth, and that was a blast. As you say, herbs do enhance the experience, as does convivial company. I watched it years later on tv and wished I hadn't.

Hey, that was my preferred venue. It was a staple there near Greenwood subway station lol! Yeah, I have the DVD, and quit smoking weed decades ago. With that and age, it's no longer the same, though I still like the music well enough. Thanks for the memory Skip.

Did you ever see the sequel?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_Treatment

It sucked, as did the music.

[Greta]

Greta said:

"People shy away from you more because you're no longer attractive."

Not from my experience.

How do you mean?

[Philosophy Explorer]

Greta said:

"People shy away from you more because you're no longer attractive."

Not from my experience.

How do you mean?

I mean the older I got, the more women got turned onto my physical appearance. I think maturity is a part of it.

PhilX

[Hobbes' Choice]

Do you think the longer a person lives, the more likely that person can get bored at some point? Would the only solution then be to erase some memories to make life more interesting?

PhilX

No, the more you live the more you have to draw on. Time dilates and with each passing year there seems more to do and less time to do it. And I'm not even working!
Add to that the increase year by year in entertainment technologies, there is a diminishing excuse to get bored.
It is true that the stuff that gave you a wow when you were younger no longer does it for you; Starwars (eg).
But that means looking harder.
Have you read Dostoyevsky yet?
Have you painted in oils? Been to S America?
There is more in the world than you can see in a lifetime. There is more on the Internet than you could uncover in a life time.
Boredom is for the stupid.

[Skip]

Did you ever see the sequel?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_Treatment

It sucked, as did the music.

No, I didn't and I'll take your assessment as gospel. When we were poor and living out Woodbine way, the Roxy was a mecca. Oddly, the only other movie I recall seeing there is Who is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying those Terrible Things About Me? Why that should stay in my head for 40 years, I have no idea.

Sometimes I feel that things - ideas, places, names, sounds, numbers, pictures, flotsam, fears, tools, soot, fabric, words, hands, fur, rubble - have stuck to me as I slithered through the world, more or less at random. A sparrow in the outdoor café at the Vienna airport. The uniformly pruned conifer shrubs and little black dogs of Vancouver. The noise level in the Pilot tavern on Friday night - but not whom we went there to hear. Secretly hating Ingmar Bergman movies. A blowfish. Searching for a contact lens (not mine) in shag carpeting (not mine). How to get to the pottery supply place in Kitchener, c 1985 - not the name of the store or the street, mind you, just the directions. Sunrise over a horse pasture, don't know which state or province. Tokai and Captain Morgan. Toothpaste for polishing brass. A tiny Dali print in the stairwell of an art gallery, priced at $185, which I could probably have managed, only just - and decided not to. The moving walkway in St. George station. Which reminds me of George's mediocre manicotti. A skeleton leapfrog poster next to a serenity prayer one, but I don't know on whose wall. A chainsaw juggler on Fisherman's Wharf. A sepia photograph of an unknown family, very solemn. There is nothing to be done with this stuff: you just wear it like caddis-fly armour; pretend it forms some coherent architecture.

We carry it for no reason and are terrified of losing any of it. I suppose because, when we are immobilized by illness, prison, weather or phobia, we can take out any memory at will and try to reconstruct a world around it - our own world, as we experienced it then. They're tiny peepholes for the very bored. Sometimes very frustrating ones. I had a flash, when I started this list, of the rather frightening entryway - steps, curving upward between high walls that closed in - of a psychiatric facility to which one of my friends went regularly and needed support, so we were all very familiar with the place, and I've been racking my poor old brain for ten minutes now and I can't recall its name.

[Dalek Prime]

Skip, the memory I hold closest, that I often think about, is being at the homestead in Oakville. It was a summer's evening and I was watching Louis Jourdan's version of Dracula, by myself, as a get together was happening on the property. It was just a perfect mix of atmosphere, peace, security, and happiness. Completely mundane, but absolutely perfect in it's totality, and I hold it dear. Such a funny thing to carry all these years. Ah, what a strange bittersweet thing life is, and completely astounding. But we don't appreciate that til later.

[Skip]

There isn't very much 'later' left, so I'd better appreciate the hell out of it now.

Clarke Institute - that's where we took escorting that friend. Nothing's exactly lost, but everything gets harder to find, the more of it you accumulate. And then, too, when you recall a scene or incident, you can have brand new thoughts about it, from a different perspective, with more information than was available at the time. So it's never boring.

[thedoc]

I mean the older I got, the more women got turned onto my physical appearance. I think maturity is a part of it.

PhilX

More likely the older you get the more women feel sorry for you, and want to nurse you back to health.

[Philosophy Explorer]

I mean the older I got, the more women got turned onto my physical appearance. I think maturity is a part of it.

PhilX

More likely the older you get the more women feel sorry for you, and want to nurse you back to health.

This is one of a number of reasons I'll never get bored.

PhilX

[Obvious Leo]

What exactly is boredom? I was about to say that I've never been bored in my life but then I had a rethink. I've read boring books, seen boring movies, heard boring music, and listened to countless boring people. Is that what it means to "be bored" or does being bored mean something like what it means for children? When a kid says "I'm bored" he really means that he can't think of anything interesting to do and in this usage of the word I've never been bored in my life. There's always more stuff to do than time to do it in.

[Skip]

I've never been bored by myself, or by the freedom to do things. (I don't think my kids were, either. I think, when they complained of being bored, what they really wanted was some adult to spend money and time on taking them out for an adventure... and to get out of doing mundane chores and assignments.)
If a movie or book that I've chosen for entertainment bores me, I can stop watching or reading and find something else.

However, I have been bored lost* of times by meeting I had to attend, tasks I had to perform, company I've had to tolerate and material I've had to learn. For various reasons, mostly in relation to earning a wage, but sometimes the enforcer is common courtesy. I have to listen to an old friend's seventy-third recitation of his various ailments - simply because he needs someone to listen. I have to put up with boring conversation from fellow guests at a dinner party. I have to sit through a dull play, because my host has shelled out for the tickets. I have to look interested in the children and grandchildren of people who don't deserve to be insulted.
(*Freudian typo?)

There is also boredom caused by one's own limitations. When I've been ill or injured and unable to do things I very much wanted to do or go where I very much wanted to be, I found almost everything that I was able to do boring - just because they were poor substitutes.

And then, there is a kind of lassitude that comes from doing too much of one thing. Burn-out, mental exhaustion, the capacity wall. That feels like boredom, because whatever you might think of to be interested in is just too much effort.

[Greta]

Boredom is a trigger for creativity. "What will I do now?" is the question of one whose every move for the day hasn't been prescribed by exigency. A person with nothing to do has the choice to create a future rather than fulfilling schedules.

We live in societies influenced by the eastern and/or Protestant work ethic, and just being a no good bum doing not much is frowned upon. But it can be glorious for a while.