Befriending Boredom

In this talk, Virabhava speaks of society’s pathological aversion to boredom. He offers no advice, seeks not to comfort or console, and makes no attempt to inspire. He suggests that boredom is a bridge spanning the chasm between knowledge and wisdom and concludes with a paradoxical hypothesis about the fullness of boredom.

Transcript

Befriending Boredom The Dialectic of Distraction and Contemplation Society's Aversion to Boredom The prevailing cultural narrative suggests that boredom is an enemy to be defeated,

Or at least an intolerable experience to be avoided at all times.

And yet,

Avoiding boredom perpetuates it.

In the same way a child hides under the cover from imagined monsters,

We,

No longer children,

Hide from an imaginary monster called boredom.

Not under duvets,

But behind the distraction of screens.

Distraction then only postpones the inevitable confrontation with boredom.

Eventually,

Constant distraction becomes a form of boredom itself.

In our endeavour to say yes to every distraction,

We say no to life as it is.

Certain suffering ensues.

Is being bored better or worse than resisting it?

Various psychological theories suggest that we are more motivated to avoid pain than to gain pleasure.

So what pain are we avoiding?

In boredom there is nothing to fear.

Or rather,

It is precisely this nothingness that we fear.

Thus,

What we truly fear is not boredom,

But the void itself.

Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran captures this existential dimension of boredom by stating The essence of boredom consists in the awareness of a void,

In the anguished feeling of being suspended in a void time.

And in this void time we find ourselves Alone with the void,

Delivered to a pure,

Undifferentiated time,

A time without content or focus,

A time that itself is a void.

Danish existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard describes the void of boredom as a despairing refusal to be oneself,

Which suggests an aversion to being with our own being.

These insights reveal an existential dread looming beneath our aversion to boredom.

In the current zeitgeist of the secular west,

Such narratives have become the diseased beating heart of modernity itself,

A pervasive condition of meaninglessness that defines our age.

Our mechanical attempt to keep meaning alive is busyness,

A pacemaker for the diseased heart of modernity.

Busyness as usual.

Busyness has become a cultural imperative,

The fool's gold of a modernity in crisis.

The prize for striking this gold is society's approval.

The real price we pay is an ever-increasing poverty of attention.

This brings to mind a sentiment often attributed to Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher,

Jiddu Krishnamurti.

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Here,

The well-adjusted are both a victim of a system that rewards busyness,

And also a perpetrator reinforcing the values that undermine genuine freedom.

Both trapped and complicit in our progress-obsessed world,

We are time and energy poor,

All the while paradoxically affirming,

I am free.

Freedom is the promise of individualism,

A neoliberal religion that worships at the altar of choice.

Priests of this £31 billion self-help industry preach,

More choice equals more freedom.

We pray before a corporate god pleading,

Almighty God of choice,

Grant us the freedom to be,

Do and have anything we want.

For surely the universe exists for our demands alone.

We are the chosen consumers,

And all of creation bends to our individual wants.

We are inundated with content that both explicitly and implicitly reinforces this belief.

We might believe ourselves to be omnipotent architects of manifestation,

Yet the truth remains.

This excess of choice available at our fingertips,

What we call freedom,

Does not liberate us,

It paralyzes us.

In this state of unconscious paralysis,

We mistake our conditioned reactions for free will.

Oblivious,

We spin on the hamster wheel of a culture that equates worth with endless doing.

Like hungry ghosts feasting on a buffet of possibility,

Overfed with choices,

Yet our appetite for fulfilment remains insatiable.

As psychologist Barry Schwartz observes in his critique on consumer society,

As the number of choices but deliberates,

It might even be said to tyrannise.

The true nature of freedom then is not found in endless choices.

As Krishnamurti articulated,

Freedom is not a reaction.

Freedom is not a choice.

Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity.

His insights suggest that freedom lies in navigating each moment with clarity and integrity unaccumbent by the noise of choice.

I would add that one who is free has cultivated the wisdom and courage to meet each situation with an open heart and clear seeing.

Herein lies a modern problem.

Our abundance of information casts a long shadow in which wisdom wanes.

The Knowledge-Wisdom Paradox Our modern predicament is one of insatiable consumption,

Not just of choices,

But of information.

We gorge on information,

Yet in this excessive feast of facts,

We starve for meaning.

In this gluttony,

We mistake the accumulation of information for the cultivation of wisdom.

But wisdom languishes.

It withers in the spaces between the facts.

Desiccated,

We mistake its nature.

Wisdom isn't the ability to recite,

But to perceive.

To perceive the deeper patterns,

Principles and truths that underlie the facts.

Wisdom's desiccation isn't an abstract concern,

But a recognised phenomenon,

Shaping our collective psyche,

Namely the knowledge-wisdom gap.

As critical theorist Byung-Chul Han observes,

Today we chase everything without gaining insight.

This predicament has far-reaching consequences.

As the knowledge-wisdom gap yawns wider,

We stumble blind to our own blindness.

In this myopic view of the world,

Things appear as isolated events,

Disconnected from the whole.

As complexity theorist Edgar Morin articulates,

There is an ever-increasing compartmentalised,

Disjointed knowledge and realities of problems which are ever more global,

Transnational,

Multidimensional,

Transversal,

Polydisciplinary and planetary.

We have eyes to see,

Yet we are blind.

We move too fast to see.

What if stillness were our evolution?

A silent uprising against the tyranny of constant stimulation?

Where we befriend society's feared enemy,

Boredom?

Echoing Pascal,

All of humanity's problems stem from Malone.

This friendship with boredom might kindle a spacious stillness,

Opening up unstructured spaces for contemplation.

Boredom then becomes the fertile void,

The womb of creativity from which contemplation is born.

In embracing boredom we rediscover contemplation,

A bridge spanning the chasm between knowledge and wisdom.

Eastern wisdom traditions have long recognised the paradoxical nature of emptiness.

A voiding.

The void terrifies us,

We flee from its emptiness.

Much of modern western thought has developed a perspective parallel to Emil Chonan's insight that I noted earlier,

Where the void is experienced as an anguished feeling,

A source of existential dread.

Yet in many eastern traditions the void was understood to be paradoxically full.

From the Heart Sutra.

This line expresses the concept of shunyata,

Emptiness,

Central to these teachings.

It suggests a void that is not inert,

But births all phenomena.

Majjhimaka,

One of the two principal schools of Mahayana Buddhism,

Further develops this understanding,

Positing shunyata,

Emptiness,

As a central tenet.

The concept asserts that all phenomena lack inherent existence and arise through dependent origination.

The Daoist concept is considered the source of all existence.

The Tao Te Ching states,

All things are born of a being.

From the school of philosophy and Kashmir Shaivism,

Shemaraja speaks of fullness and emptiness in the early 11th century recognition sutras,

Expounding It is simultaneous simultaneity.

The West,

With its devotion to logic and reductionism,

Is sceptical of paradox.

And yet even Bertrand Russell,

The quintessential logical philosopher,

Understood that Uncertainty is painful if you wish to live without comforting fairy tales.

Despite this aversion to the void,

Hints of the void's paradoxical nature emerge even in western thought.

For instance,

In quantum field theory,

The vacuum state is empty space,

But with a dynamic entity filled with fluctuating energy fields,

Where particles flicker in and out of existence.

In the words of physicist Paul Davis,

The vacuum is not inert,

But alive with throbbing energy and vitality.

Creatio Ex Nio,

Creation out of nothing,

Has been discussed in various philosophical and theological contexts for centuries too,

Most prominently associated with Judeo-Christian thought.

The empty set,

Denoted by a zero with a slash through it,

Reveals mathematics own relationship with nothingness.

It is a set containing no elements,

And yet exists as a subset of every set.

From this apparent emptiness,

Mathematics builds its entire edifice.

The void does not paralyse mathematical thought,

It enables it.

The paradox of a pregnant void then,

While deeply rooted in eastern thought,

Also intrigues the western mind.

Bernardo Kastrup,

Known for his scientific analytical approach,

Bravely articulates this,

Aware that his rhetoric here mirrors that of a mystic rather than a scientist.

He prefaces the following by wryly noting,

I'm going to lose most of you here.

He says,

And the past and the future are in it.

Therefore,

Everything is in it.

Everything is in nothing.

There is nothing there.

Nothing has ever happened.

Nothing will ever happen.

Nothing exists.

Nothing is going on.

And out of that nothing,

Everything exists.

The entire richness of the drama of life,

Your regrets,

Your disappointments,

Your successes,

Your loves and your heartbreaks,

Everything of every living creature in this universe exists in this nothing.

Paradox shatters our comfortable certainties.

How can everything come from nothing?

In the modern world I have discussed thus far,

It is hardly productive to slowly ponder how the richness and drama of life emerge from an infinitesimal void.

Perhaps then,

Only in boredom's stillness,

In time and with grace,

Can the type of experience unfold that reveals a void pregnant with eternity and imbued with the palpable presence of the infinite.

Facts may or may not support this.

Yet it is through direct experience that these paradoxes dissipate,

Where a reality that transcends intellectual comprehension is revealed.

Contemporary spirituality,

The crisis,

It cannot cure.

The language in the subsequent paragraph belongs to the domain of spirituality,

A word I employ with caution.

Yet our inability to be bored is,

At its core,

A spiritual crisis.

One might expect such a crisis to demand a spiritual solution.

However,

Today even the sacred has been transformed into a commodity.

Whereas the language of profound spirituality hovers at the edge of what can't be said,

Today's spiritual influences flood social media with clickable content that drowns in its own availability.

These two approaches reveal distinct relationships to the void.

The former explores it,

And the latter seeks to fill it.

The hunger for spirituality grows precisely as the materialist paradigm exhausts itself.

When the last purchase fails to satisfy,

The spiritual marketplace awaits.

The crisis that drives us towards spirituality is the very crisis that corrupts it.

Contemporary spirituality cannot cure what it perpetuates.

It remains trapped within the logic of the achievement society that produced it.

As Hahn observes,

Capital is pure activity,

And today's spirituality has become merely another form of this restless doing.

So when I speak of spirituality hereafter,

I refer not to the marketplace of new age spiritual materialism,

But to those traditions that have cultivated a profound friendship with emptiness.

As German cultural critic Walter Benjamin understood,

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.

This is a spirituality that neither flees from nor fills the void,

But realizes its sacred presence.

It teaches us how to befriend boredom rather than escape it,

How to sit with absence rather than compulsively fill it.

The question is not whether spirituality can address our society's pathological aversion to boredom,

But which spirituality?

The relativist position that all approaches are equally valid collapses into its own contradiction.

If all truth is relative,

Then this very claim defeats itself.

As we have just explored,

What passes for spirituality can either perpetuate our aversion to boredom or unveil its intrinsic sacredness.

The difference lies not in the label,

But in our relationship to emptiness itself.

Does our spiritual practice intensify our compulsion to achieve,

Or does it teach us the art of letting be?

Discernment becomes vital.

The Paradoxical Hypothesis – The Fullness of Boredom I propose we are entangled in a modern paradox parallel to the fullness of the void we have explored.

The more we fill our lives with noise,

The emptier we become.

Yet,

In the silence of boredom,

We encounter a fullness.

In our lives full of noise,

Images,

Tasks and distractions,

We paradoxically experience a void of meaning that no amount of external stimuli can fill.

We consume an endless breadth of content,

But we are left with a gnawing hunger for depth.

In the pregnant pause of boredom,

We confront ourselves.

Will we turn away from the void,

Hiding in the endless distractions around every corner,

Or will we have the courage to face it,

To let the silence speak?

In the space between stimulus and response,

A whole universe awaits.

A universe not of facts or figures,

But of felt experience,

Of presence,

Of aliveness.

This is the territory of the slow gaze.

A gaze that pierces through the veil of busyness,

That sees the sacred in the ordinary,

That is not in a hurry to arrive anywhere,

But is content to rest in the mystery of each moment.

In our consumer-driven society,

We have been conditioned to view everything as a potential commodity,

Including our well-being.

Even the practices meant to liberate us from the tyranny of productivity have been co-opted.

Mindfulness,

Rooted in Buddhism,

Is often repackaged as a tool for enhancing performance.

As Buddhist scholar Ronald Purser argues,

Rather than applying mindfulness as a means to awaken individuals from the unwholesome roots of greed,

It is usually being refashioned into a banal therapeutic self-help technique that can actually reinforce those roots.

The slow gaze,

However,

Resists this commodification.

It is not a product to be sold,

Nor a technique to be mastered.

Neither is it about self-improvement.

It is not a means to an end,

But an end in itself.

In a world that demands we always be on,

Always producing,

Always consuming,

To simply be is a radical act.

The Uncommodifiable Even our inner lives are not spared from commodification.

As French cultural theorist Guy Debord argues in The Society of the Spectacle,

Modern capitalists turn our experiences and emotions into commodities.

Our boredom,

In particular,

Is exploited by the market.

As Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen notes in his study of boredom,

One of the most important tasks of the industry is to take our minds off boredom Boredom resists cure.

It is not a problem demanding a solution.

Whilst I agree,

I argue that boredom itself resists commodification.

It is an experience that cannot be packaged or marketed.

In a culture that constantly demands our attention and money,

Boredom is a way of saying no.

In this refusal we say yes to something more profound.

We awaken that which cannot be colonized by consumerism.

Though distinct,

Boredom and the slow gaze share a resistance to the market's grasp.

United in their quiet subversion,

They challenge a system that seeks to colonize every aspect of our lives.

In a world where everything is for sale,

They remind us of the value of that which cannot be commodified.

Presence,

Stillness,

And the unfathomable depths of immediate experience.

The fullness we flee.

My critique of modernity is not a lament,

Nor a nostalgic yearning for a bygone era.

Instead,

The commodification of experience,

The tyranny of choice,

The knowledge-wisdom gap,

They are mirrors held up to our collective psyche,

Reflecting back the paradoxes we live within.

I am also compelled to add that in noting our secular society,

I am not explicitly advocating for a return to religion.

Rather,

I observe the meaninglessness left in religion's wake,

A longing that science and materialism,

For all their merits,

Have not been able to fill.

The perennial questions of meaning,

Purpose,

And the nature of reality remain even more pressing than ever.

I offer no comfort here,

No quick fixes or simple answers.

These words may provoke discomfort,

Uncertainty,

Even resistance.

But the comforting illusions of constant progress and endless choices have not served us.

So I leave you with this proposition.

The more we fill our lives with noise,

The more we empty ourselves of presence.

The more choices we have,

The less freedom we experience.

The more information we consume,

The less wisdom we embody.

And the more we try to save time,

The less time we have.

We run quicker only to get nowhere faster.

We consume more but are satisfied less.

And yet boredom,

The void we flee,

Contains the fullness we seek.

Reviews

Thank you! A great talk! ✨🙏✨