Practicing Boredom

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I don’t know if there is any way to make what I’m about to say sexy. I don’t think there is any way to make it sound cool. And I don’t think there is any way for this idea to go viral. I want you to be bored. I want to be more boring. I think you should make an effort, in the year ahead to be bored, to get bored, to do boring stuff.

Part of what triggered this thought is as I was scrolling along on my phone‚ and I honestly can’t even remember what I was scrolling, was it Insta, was it X, was it Tik Tok? Does it even matter as all apps on your phone convergently evolve into the same mind slop funnel? It was a short video of Terrence Mckenna talking manically at the camera, I scrolled right past the embedded video without slowing down, with the sound turned off— but of course my eyes still read the subtitles, Terrence was saying “and the future is going to just keep getting weirder, and weirder, and weirder . . .”

Terrence McKenna had the theory that novelty, that is weirdness was just going to explode starting. He was saying this in the 90’s and predicting the weird wave would start to rocket up and up starting in 2012, ascending towards some unknowable future event he called the Singularity. Normie Journalism largely ignored the drug-addled prophet of the coming Wyrding, but in hindsight maybe they should have taken his ranting a bit more seriously. I’d say he called it. I’m not sure where to place the exact date things started to “get weird” but 2012 is exactly when Facebook shifted it’s algorithm to optimize for attention farming— that’s about when social media shifted from being a place you shared pics with your close family and friends to a place that would derail the USA elections, launching a deranged narcissist into the most powerful job in the world, and basically saw the dismantling of consensus reality, fast forward to QAnon, January 6, the Pandemic and now AI and not only has Terence been proven spot on, he got the exact date right within a few months.

Now, keep in mind, he cooked up his theory by ingesting heroic doses of psychedelics and messing around with the I-Ching. A divination system that’s just a little older than civilization. That is, well . . . weird.

The weirdness wave is upon us! (If you want to deep dive into Mckenna and the Weird check out the fantastic book High Weirdness by Erik Davis.)

But I am not here to talk about the weird wave we are in. (As long as I’m letting my freak flag fly I will say this ratcheting weirdness corresponds quite well to Pluto entering Aquarius for the next few decades, a harbinger of revolutionary change in technology, systems, and communication.) This matches up perfectly with Mckenna’s hunch that in the future change will happen so fast that meaning won’t be able to keep up. Few would disagree that we are currently riding the waves of weirdness, there is a perfect storm of novelty, change, and adaption all around us. So, the question is—what are you going to do about it?

The weird future is here—I offer the following solution: get bored. Do boring stuff. Find a boring hobby. In a world of rapid change, the more things that you can do that are predictable and grounding and grounded the better.

Cooking

Cooking slow and boring dishes like oatmeal or beans

Simmering stews

Squash Vibes

Casserole Energy

Gardening

Pottery

Taking long walks

having lazy evenings where you sit around and feel kind of bored.

Lazy Sundays

Knitting Scarves

Hobbit Fashion

Comfortable silences with other people around you

Jigsaw puzzles, Sudoku, Newspapers

Think rainy day at the beach house energy

Lighting candles.

Sewing buttons

Drinking tea and gazing out windows

Watching clouds

Try not having your phone out while you eat. Great place to start. If that sounds rough just do that for one meal. There is something we humans need in that empty space, that down time, that slack nothing is happening moment—that is the gold and honey of the coming age.

The Pacific Northwest is actually a great place to be bored. You can do boring stuff outside or indoors. Bundle up and take a hike. Or sit around. The key to being bored? For god’s sake get put down your phone. It is off course impossible to really experience boredom with you pone near at hand, because when you feel that little itch of discomfort you can grab it and check it and then check it again 15 minutes later, and then 5 minutes later. We aren’t really addicted to our phones —we are addicted to not having to experience discomfort or boredom.

So, the ones who are going to survive the escalating weirdness of the coming age, will be those who train themselves to be bored, to be slightly uncomfortable, to space out, to look out a window, to day dream, to do things in quiet with their hands, to spend time in with other humans, in the same room, doing not much. Just spending time in comfortable, slow, boring old reality.