A surreal journey through mundane realities
By the end of this page you will most likely feel bored, so bored you might write to the people responsible for this publication and complain about how boring this piece of writing is. No, I am being optimistic, in fact I believe you might not even make it to the end of the next paragraph without boring yourself to death, might you? Well, in case you decide to complain, here’s the email of a person you can talk to: camaco.carlos@gmail.com. Make sure you take the time to describe why you felt so desperately bored and which sentence in particular has triggered that feeling the most.
If you’ve managed to make it to this paragraph, we should move on with my non-scientific observations about the world and its current state of sheer monotony. The instant access to information has turned us into constant stimulus-seeking creatures. We want to scroll and swipe and click and tik and tok and post and tweet and vlog and blog and more. Still, everything seems so painfully boring all the time, right? Nowadays, everyone is a film-critic, a musician, artist, pottery master, Uber driver, Olympic swimmer, actor, dancer, influencer (I really don’t like that word), astrophysicist, archeologist, ufologist, cult leader – the list goes on. It is all so immediate and easy – we date and order food and play video games and track aeroplanes and buy cars and books and look up fermented food recipes and new diets and learn how to play the piano – all of it instantly.
If your washing machine breaks down, you might even be able to fix it yourself – there’s always a good old tutorial on Youtube, what a disgrace. Everything you need (and you certainly need it all) seems to be out there floating around the internet, within bits and bytes across all invisible dark corners of the web.
Are you bored yet?
Take the billionaires and their fantastic hobbies for instance: some of them free-falling from the Earth’s stratosphere in their hi-tech suits, others sending electric automobiles into Earth’s orbit – just because they can do it (and it is fun, isn’t it?) – a few paying a quarter of a million dollars to dive 4,000 metres below the ocean’s surface, inside a metal submersible smaller than a van, so they can see the Titanic shipwreck up-close (from a tiny glass window). Tragedies apart, these dull activities are simply the byproduct of pure boredom fuelled by the power of money. Nowadays, it seems that interest in mundane activities – such as people-watching at the train station or grocery shopping in a real supermarket or even real relationships with real humans – is becoming obsolete. Bored now ?
Take a break, Google (it’s a verb now, ugh) the word boredom and see what results come up, that might help you out – smart articles and scientific papers containing brilliant ideas from the world’s most accomplished writers, they will break boredom down to you in the most sophisticated and articulated manners, and it will make you yawn like a well-fed baby in a cosy little crib. Are you still there?
In some belief systems the final spiritual goal is to become one with The Creator as we transcend the material world. Our species, however, is headed toward a future in which we become One with the internet and Information. No need to worry about artificial intelligence or the future of mankind or boredom itself. Soon enough we will free ourselves from all earthly emotions as we slowly absorb all the information there is to absorb. Like machines, we will acquire and store all the knowledge that exists, and then we won’t remember who or what we are and boredom itself will be a distant human state-of-mind, a mere cold word on a dictionary or web page. So please, enjoy boredom while you can. Before long, you will know what it means, but you won’t be able to explain or feel it anymore.
*Note: the author was incredibly bored by the end of this article, so he counted how many times he used the words boredom, boring and bored – 18 times (including the ones in this footnote).
Fauze Hassen is a bored artist, poet and filmmaker based in Auckland.
To check his art, please visit www.fauzehassen.com
