Existential Boredom

Life becomes a set of repetitions. There are the long taxi rides, moving through traffic up and down Vibhavadi Rangsit. There are the walks to the corner food stall, via the little bridge over the filthy, twilight-darkened canal, as the men in blue workshirts are just getting off their shifts at the printers' shops on Phra Ram 6.

And I know this is supposed to be a brilliant equatorial metropolis, a city hemmed in by crystalline beaches and perfumed jungles, a city of unparallelled vibrancy (as the glossy travel magazines are wont to put it), where all pleasures can be had at the wink of an eye and the drop of a coin.

But what they don't tell you about places like this is how fucking boring the nightclubs and the beach towns can be. Beyond being tragic or even pathetic, the bargirls and the sexpats and the backpackers and the fugitives are by and large just so goddamn dull. The dullness starts here, and bleeds over into everyday life.

Now, there are boredoms that can be remedied and there are those that cannot. The boredom of sitting around one's apartment can be resolved by going for a walk, putting on a movie, reading a book, whatever. And there is also the boredom of long waits at train stations and hour-long meetings. This boredom is conditioned entirely by circumstance, and is often defined by spatial and temporal constraints. You're stuck in this one place at this one time, and it's not a place you want to be.

But there is also a third form that defies easy categorization, and is far more insidious than either. It is the unresolvable boredom that is unconditioned, a melancholy and existential boredom. This is what occurs when you flip through every channel on the TV and they all seem equally dull and crass. Existential boredom is marked by its sense of inescapability. You look around yourself, and everything presents itself with a harshness and a clarity, as if it's being illuminated by an industrial-sized fluorescent light.

Existential boredom is experienced quite differently by those who are rooted and those who are rootless, to draw a suspect but convenient distinction.

For the "rooted," existential boredom might present itself as an unsatisfying career or a loveless marriage. They think they might be able to fix the situation by quitting their job, getting a divorce, or moving to a new town.

But for those of us who don't have as many solid connections, we can't really draw that conclusion. And I think this explains the cynicism of so many rootless types, because there is this awful and nagging suspicion that things will never get better, and that we're doomed to repeat our motions again and again, in slightly different circumstances, like a set of piano variations carrying on into infinity.

Eternal tourists seem to keep moving because there's nothing else to do. It's not that they/we/whatever think that the next stop will necessarily resolve the ennui, but maybe there's something unnameable and unknowable, however distant it might be.

My mind is drawn back to the legend of Tantalus, who in Greek myth spent the afterlife in a lake beneath a plum tree. When he reached up for a piece of fruit, the branches would raise up. And when he bent down for a drink, the waters would recede.

During the Dark Ages, theologians like Evgarius of Pontus, commented on the monastic hermits that lived in the harsh regions along the Black Sea coast. Alone with their thoughts, their minds so often didn't turn inwards, towards the heavenly father that scholastic thinkers believed was reachable through wisdom and logic, but towards a darker place. Lonely, slothful, and restless, they fell slack in their clerical duties and eventually stopped living like humans altogether. Acedia, Evgarius called it.

And this was believed to be a laziness, a refusal to take the effort to know Christ, and an intentional turning away from all that was good and right and humane.

What this point of view gets right is that the state of acedia is as much as anything else a temptation. When one accepts everything fading to gray, there is a certain peacefulness, a letting go. And it provides a justification for one's own unhappiness-- a depressive realism, as certain psychiatrists call it.

So we find whatever bright spots we have as a way of taking solace-- the sun setting over the Olympic Mountains, a box of faded photographs, the smile of someone next to you in bed in the blue light before sunrise, a book of Flannery O'Connor short stories, a white ceramic cup of jasmine tea.