I have a bad habit of watching TV to fall asleep. And it’s not that I don’t get sleepy, it’s that I don’t want to waste the time I stay awake. And what better way to spend your conscious moments than being entertained?
Perhaps from the beginning of civilized society we have always sought to eliminate boredom. After all, according to Kierkegaard, it is the root of all evil. So we look for something to do, something to invest ourselves in, if not work then a book, a newspaper, a movie, a song, all these great murder weapons of time. Since its birth in the Industrial Revolution, mass entertainment has soared from a novelty to an expected convenience. Industries twist and turn to be able to feed us music and film from anywhere, any time; and as a result, we have grown accustomed to being entertained everywhere, all the time.
A cure to wasted time, they are. An antidote to boredom. But what exactly is an existence without boredom? It’s a loud, loud scene. It’s constant chatter. It’s endless laughter. It’s an unrelenting quest to be surprised, amused, interested, excited — it’s a limitless guzzling of content, limitless streaming of content, limitless content, period.
And we play this content all the time, so strongly is our association of entertainment to lack of boredom that the moment we are deprived of the noise, we feel bored. Extremely, heavily, unendurably bored, even in tiny moments like the five-minute cab ride or twenty-minute showers or that stretch of seconds before we fall asleep.
But isn’t amusement tiring? It’s quite like eating, isn’t it, in that no matter how much you love it, you can only go at it for so long before your body finally surrenders? Of course, people realized this fact early enough in, if not from the migraines then from the sluggishness of their brains, the mental equivalent of the food coma. And from this sudden wake sprung silent retreats, silent camps, etc. and etc. — adaptations of religious practices that, all things considered, can work and work spectacular well. But they are too radically different from how we live our lives — like a strict, expensive, and often one-time diet — that often they don’t offer much more than a blog-worthy experience. Counter-balancing the noise in chunks isn’t the point — the average person can go to a silent retreat every other week no more than they can go on a two-week juice cleanse every month. Coexisting with the noise (or, metaphorically, eating healthy), however — that sounds reasonable.
Now, if I had found a way to coexist perfectly, I wouldn’t be falling asleep to “How I Met Your Mother” every night (instead, I’d open … not a camp, but perhaps a weekly class). The obvious first step, though, seems to be the impossible task of placing less value on the outside world.
When I was little, I used to be able to entertain myself for hours with just thoughts in my head. But then headphones and TVs and speakers and books started to think for me, as was the fashion.
