girl, so boring
this post was written for the february bearblog carnival on boredom, hosted by winther. prompt: Are you ever bored, what do you do when you are feeling bored or are we even capable of feeling bored in this age of limitless digital entertainment?
The sun is coming through my window and I am sitting at my dining table looking out at a city skyline. If you were standing behind me and looking over my shoulder right now there's a lot to see.
For one - my laptop is open, this document is being written in a browser tab in Firefox. There are sixty-three other tabs open, everything from my unread email folder, blogs by cool people who I would like to work up the courage to reach out to, a recipe to make limoncello, this quote, and a Costco tab with a cart that only contains a blender. There's also about 15 tabs with job postings, and looking at them reminds me what exactly I should in theory be doing instead of writing a blog post. I am listening to friend by james k in a desktop spotify tab I keep switching back to in order to take a voyeuristic glance at what my friends are listening to right now. I've just seen AJ is listening to Cameron Winter so now I've swapped over and I'm listening to Love Takes Miles for maybe the fortieth time this week. Laid against my cartoonish desktop background there's an epub open on basic theory for bass guitar. A standalone browser window with one tab open beside the book, with the results for the google search: "where to rent bass guitar near me."
Beyond the screen, I am sitting beside books I am in various degrees of finishing, Stag Dance by Torrey Peters, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. The cat is being playful and clearly wants to engage in the never-ending game where I poke her paws and she tries to grab my fingers. AV is out on the balcony reading and I am tempted to open the door and interrupt their calm reading time with any number of possible conversation topics. Part of my mind is occupied with the Atlantic salmon that is sitting in the fridge that I know I need to cook for dinner before it goes off.
This is a vignette of my life, most days. Where could boredom ever slip in between my constant motion, my flipping between tabs, my leaving the house for bizarre tasks? There is no dead time now (despite my employment situation), but maybe there should be? I keep hearing that boredom is good for the brain. Can you burn out from having too much life?
In writing this, I'm trying to figure out how everything switched around. Despite the best efforts of the people around me, I spent so much of my childhood desperately bored. Usually, the boredom was triggered by being forced to sit still in formal education. All I ever wanted to do was read my books instead of focusing on whatever was happening at the front of the classroom. Teachers would notice my eyes wandering under my desk too frequently and they'd end up ripping away my reading material and then suddenly I would be twiddling my thumbs for hours on end, watching the clock and trying not to cry from frustration.
As a young teenager, I found that my innate boredom didn't subside despite my newfound access to the entirety of human knowledge and innovation from the palm of my hand. Scrolling for hours a day was exactly the same thing for me mentally as staring at the clock. When I turned my phone off I didn't feel rested or satisfied. I couldn't often remember a single thing that I had seen or read while using my devices, I was just stuck recalling some sort of trendy inane looping audio, haunting me like there was still a tab open somewhere in the recesses of my brain. It wasn't until I left the infinite scrolling world that I finally felt like the boredom could be defeated.
My tentative thesis is that my boredom really comes from prescribed consumption, or being told explicitly what I should be paying attention to. An example: on social media, my algorithm overlords would present me with content that they considered likely for me to engage with on the basis of my geographic location, my gender, my age, my political views, and the people I followed. I was forced to view elements of a culture becoming increasingly more homogeneous, as everyone who was like me, as defined by algorithmic metrics, was training the feed to show us only certain types of content. The culture I saw become one sort of thing. It was Sabrina Carpenter, it was the Call Her Daddy podcast, it was alternative influencers promoting over-consumption, with occasional rage-bait content that was trying to get me to dislike particular groups of people. On the niche end, it was the same substack writers over and over again, it was r/indieheads discourse, it was girls who listen to the Red Scare podcast. One culture content machine, boring me out of my mind. There was nothing else beyond this wall of content that I had essentially no role in curating. My diet was assigned to me.
Once I left that social media world I finally understood what it was like to not experience boredom to the brink of tears as I once used to. Most of my internet time is now spent reading the thoughts of people who I genuinely find to be very interesting, who often do not have a following of thousands or millions. I have had good books recommended to me, I have made online friends who do a wide variety of exciting things. I go on the internet and I remember the things I have written and seen. If I'm trying to find things to consume I need to go out and look for them myself. There is no algorithm that has analyzed millions of other Women Like Me to help determine what type of culture we should all be reacting to and forming our personalities off of. The boredom has subsided because now I am creating my own world, both online and off.
I note that not for a second do I wish to knock any of the people who consume popular things derived from algorithms and who feel a sense of a belonging to a community from them. I am simply suggesting that the world could be much less boring if we all choose to reveal the very weird little freaks that we truly are instead of trying to hide behind prescribed culture. The boredom goes away when we pursue the threads of our curiosity and read about the things we truly care about. Who do we all become when we embrace the bizarre, the ambitious, the confusing, the perverted, the upsetting, the difficult to find? I am curious to know. I am also happy to think that all of this is relative. Perhaps the idea of having to hunt for your own content would be very boring for a certain person. I imagine if that's the case for you though, you stopped reading this blog post a while ago.
In my free-from-boredom life, I read lots of indieblogs and putter around the outskirts of the web. Bearblog has a small algorithm-based blog discovery feed which has already been written about at length (and perhaps best by Veronique in this post). Bloggers love to write and read about blogging and new tech developments and AI - and so these topics dominate to create the idea that that's all there is on people's personal blogs. It's a good reminder that even the indieweb is not immune to a prescribed content and limited development of culture, and so in order to remain inspired by bloggers I must go out into the depths of the internet (or just sort posts by recent, lol) so I can find all the weird little freaks who shock the boredom right out of me. They don't know it, but they've rewired my brain, for the better.
What are you waiting for…you should email me and then we can escape boredom as a pair <3
email me from here
love n hugs,
sam