This week's stuff (click images to enlarge):
A picture of me and my girlfriend (look very closely and you can see the neighbor's house, too).
They call me pacman.
The weekly Le Débardeur Comic:
#241.
Another week has passed and more nonsense has been added to the Internet.
Last week I promised to write something about boredom, so I don't think I'll have the choice of not doing it (this is the kind of social pressure I was talking about in
my first post on this site). It might get a little confusing as I write like I think.
I kind of forgot the reason why I wanted to talk to you about this in the first place. It probably has been bugging me as people don't stop asking/telling me that I'm bored (and that, consequently, I should do something "productive", usually for
them). Fact is, I do not get bored. On the contrary, I would be in favor of slowing down the earth's rotation to gain a few more hours per day (Which I could use until getting lynched by the farmville community).
I don't really understand how you can get bored in the first place when you are free to do whatever the hell you want to do. Especially in times of the Internet available everywhere and portable
anythings. Even if you are only looking for passive (visual) stimulation of your senses, you can pass several lifetimes before getting through all the content which is currently on video streaming sites.
72 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube alone every
minute (multiply this by a factor of twelve for all those porn streaming sites out there). When you are done with this, there are still millions of books (billions of web pages!) about any subject you could possibly imagine. If you are more of an interactive type, you can go talk to someone who's bored, too. Or play a game. Or invent something new. Something like a game you could play when you are bored perhaps. Or learn a new skill. If you are alone and really don't know what to do, there's always masturbation. If you are not alone, there's always secret masturbation (also called stealth masturbation). Long story short, the possibilities are endless.
Don't get me wrong. I understand the concept of boredom. I probably lost months of my life while waiting until something is over. I was bored almost all of the time I was in school, a little less in university and a lot more in the few jobs I have worked until now, which mostly consisted of looking busy in front of a computer screen, even though there was really nothing to do and I could have used my time in a more useful way.
But this kind of boredom doesn't end when you are at home. You put yourself in front of the TV "to relax" and remain incapable of getting up, turning it off and doing something actually relaxing (like light sports, which are a better method to relax in the long run. Pun intended) until you get hungry/have to go to the toilet/fall asleep.
Anyways, out of curiosity, I went on Wikipedia to see if we are talking about the same thing when I say boredom. The first sentence goes like this:
Boredom is an emotional state experienced when an individual is left without anything in particular to do, and not interested in their surroundings. (source)
I don't know if the writer(s) of this article were using the passive voice on purpose, but it illustrates the problem perfectly. The "individual" is depicted as someone without a mind of their own. Like they need someone to tell them what to do all the time. This is the case in school or at your working place. You are not supposed to play your guitar or
read a great book in those places, even if your work's already done/you already know the stuff the teacher's trying to explain. It's not about you or your work, it's about consuming your precious time.
As you are conditioned to this kind of behavior most of your waking hours, it translates into your private life. Nobody's there to tell you what to do, so you get bored and turn on the TV and lose the remaining few moments of your precious time to something you probably don't really care about.
I might be a little too cynical about this. There surely are people who don't get bored neither at their job nor at home. But I really can't conceive the thought that doing the same thing for 40 hours a week for more than a few months will not leave you in a state of mind of general boredom.
There's more to the subject than I initially thought, but I have to end this here for the moment and reserve the rest for future subjects in future posts.
Feel free to leave a comment and continue the discussion. Especially if you think what I'm writing is complete and utter bullshit. I love overheated debates as much as anybody.
