Be more boring.
Bore me good.
ML Issue 48 - A weekly takeaway for creatives 🥡
Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men,
while envy is base and belongs to the base,
for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy,
while the other does not allow his neighbour to have them through envy.
— Aristotle
Mona’s notes
I’m a child of the 80’s. My peak summer holiday years were the 90’s…I was so blessed.
Summer holidays meant six weeks of no school. Long enough that you slightly forget how to write, catching cartoons at 11am, cousins staying over, windows and doors left open to let the heat out and the bees in, and life in jelly sandals and shorts - birthing a new trauma in September when I had to wear school shoes again.
Summer was also a time of delicious boredom.
I’d lie on the grass talking to myself. Draw endlessly, aimlessly. Ride my bike in circles. Throw a tennis ball against the garage wall. Watch fractal screen savers for hours. Organise my stickers. Help my grandma peel vegetables. Books. Books. Books. Later, computer games and cable. Gel pens. Sticky summer night air.
This was time being passed with no aim other than to pass time.
In hindsight, I realise how formative that patch of sustained boredom was.
Boredom creates a kind of formlessness. Things feel very loose, undefined, objective-less and free. That sensation can be terrifying. It can create feelings of insufficiency or an anxiety that I am not doing enough, often because it’s so connected with the passage of time. It can make me feel like I am failing.
I think this anxiety is now intensified by the relentless visibility of everyone else’s lives, all the time, everywhere. It’s an extraordinary privilege, and a psychological overload, distorting our sense of what it means to exist outside of productivity.
Today, boredom is rarely due to an absence of content, and instead because of a feeling that the content itself is insufficient. How often do you scroll thinking, This isn’t the vibe, hoping the next thing will be the thing? It’s an illusion of excessive choice where choice isn’t the problem.
What we actually need is nothingness, but instead we reject silence in favour of, well, anything at all.
Have you tried working out without music or a podcast? Or worse, commuting?
When were you last truly bored?
Not bored of your phone. Not bored by a lecture, playlist or a film. Not tired.
I mean staring-into-space bored. Structureless and contentless.
Boredom is a rewarding state if you stay with it long enough. Eventually, something arrives, because you noticed it, and not because you fanatically searched and scrolled for it. I feel more, taste deeper, think clearer, hear more. Most importantly, I notice things.
I love the phrase primordial soup - the rich, shapeless, organic compounds from which life is thought to have emerged. Like a fallow field.
It’s no wonder then that creation emerges from a state of formlessness.
So go on - be more boring. It’s necessary.🙃
— Love Mona x
Q: Can you remember the most boring experience you ever had?