Mixed Signals: Boredom

Most people have no idea how to interpret boredom as a symptom.

I’m quite sure the audience most in need of reading this will not read it. For most people, boredom is a constant complaint. That’s because they are so empty of intellect, and their ability to accept artistic and intellectual stimulation is atrophied to the point of uselessness. The solution to that is based on a very fundamental principle.

Boredom is not a problem in itself; it is a symptom. It is your subconscious mind’s way of telling you to change the type of activity which engages you at the time. Not just those short few moments, but the larger scope of your activity patterns.

Most people do have some instinctive idea of this, but tend to change the wrong things. For example, too many people will disrupt the most important things in their lives, the things which contribute what little sanity they may have in the context, such as stable family relations. This is a primary example of misreading the signal coming from the subconscious. If you are capable of being bored with relationships, you have surely built them wrong in the first place, typically choosing the wrong people for all the wrong reasons. You don’t have to change such things by direct intent. Simply change the right things and the relationships will change themselves.

The problem, as hinted at earlier, is the utter lack of intellectual depth. People who are easily bored are themselves boring, lacking anything which they could offer the rest of the world. They don’t participate in reality in any meaningful way. For the rest of us, boredom is simply a signal to do something constructive. It’s a warning we have backed off the things which matter most, and need to reassess how our pattern of behavior matches our true commitments. The nature of such a commitment prohibits stasis; it demands you keep stretching the boundaries of discovery.

It’s not hard to write a simple story of some kids bored by their suburban existence, then being inspired by someone quirky and interesting outsider to go perform some act of kindness or simply picking up trash from the local park. That’s because this sort of thing happens just often enough to become a part of our social consciousness. It’s the way things actually work. It’s what church youth leaders discover if they are the least bit conscious as they build their ministry. Teens in our world are bored because that’s they way our society is structured, but by intentionally breaking the structure in a positive way, the excitement of being alive is restored.

The alternative is encouraging destructive attempts to relieve boredom. This doesn’t really fix anything, because it leaves them emptier than before. This is what the oligarchs ruling our world hope for, because it means those kids will demand and spend more money on things which simply create an even bigger appetite for the empty, flashy crap those oligarchs love to sell.

Boredom means you aren’t answering the call from your own inner soul to explore.