Boredom

Description

'Expressive Egg':

"Boredom is solipsism, an inability to participate in meaningful experience. Consciousness becomes severed from the quality of the moment, making it impossible to feelingly respond to, meaningfully think about or act upon the world as it is, rather than how it merely appears to be on the screen of the personal mind and in the cauldron of personal emotions. The subjective I becomes trapped, here, witnessing an objective world, there. The self, turned upon itself, becomes confused, frantically anxious and, sooner or later, numb, passionless, the world it drifts through drained of reality, vitality, even of colour and taste, like a television screen sinking into a pond.

We can trace the catastrophic rupture between the conscious I and the quality of the moment back to the dawn of civilisation, around ten thousand years ago, when self first radically split subjective experience from objective nature1 and began informing itself and commanding others, creating a world which simultaneously protected self from a now threatening world, while at the same time frustrating and disheartening the same self, which no longer felt at home in that world. The consequences of this radical subject-object schism were dire — alienation, contention, corruption, sadness, existential fear and… boredom.

And so tedium did not begin, as the pseudonymous author of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or cynically claims, with the spiritual fatigue of wanton gods, but with the self-domestication of man (who then, from his confinement, projected a boring God as the ultimate cause of it all). Just as only domesticated animals exhibit signs of boredom, so only domesticated people do. "

(https://expressiveegg.substack.com/p/on-boredom-1)