Boredom

There is a neighborhood close to me where the scuttlebutt is that there is a lively swingers scene. People putting keys in a bowl, etc. A few points here. If anyone ever propositions my wife, I am going to be loading my gun. That’s number one. Number two is, it’s just gross. You’re going to be exchanging fluids with your neighbors and then have to look them in the eye at the oyster roast? I am allergic to drama like this. And say your neighbor is Jonah Falcon and your wife likes it, and there are emotional attachments, and so on? Seems like a pretty good way to fuck up your perfectly good life for no reason. You’re rich, you live in a big house, things are good, and you have to fuck it up. Why?

Now, I’m not going to pass judgment on other people’s kinks—we all have one or two—but other men having sex with my spouse is not one of them. It’s weird. Anyway, the reason this happens is because people are bored. They have a little bit too much time on their hands, and not enough things to think about. Especially when you get into your 50s—the kids are out of the house, and life settles into a bland tedium of getting up, existing, and going to bed. Let me volunteer that I am no boy scout—my brain goes the same places that yours does, and you probably know that from reading my fiction—but the difference is that I keep busy, I have a million things to do, and I don’t have any space in my head to fantasize about Mrs. Robinson down the street. I hear stuff like this, and I think to myself, people have way too much time on their hands.

I think this is broadly true. I think the vast majority of people, like, 99% of them, are bored. We live in a post-industrial society, the workweek gets shorter and shorter, we have time-saving inventions, and a lot more leisure time. If you are an economist or an ethicist, this is decidedly a good thing, but I don’t think any deep thinkers have really dwelled about the consequences of having too much leisure time, if there is such a thing. If you really want to dive deep into this, maybe in 20 years, AI and robots will do everything, and we will really have nothing to do. Has anyone…thought this through? About the types of things that people do when they’re bored? I think this has something to do with the intensity of politics these days—unencumbered by work and work obligations, people have the luxury of fighting on the internet, and by extension, fighting in the streets. I think the prospect of a post-post industrial world is horrifying. The communists say they will make art and work in their garden. No. They’ll be schtupping their neighbors, or assembling suicide vests. Am I saying that the world was a better place when people were doing backbreaking physical labor 6 days a week, 12 hours a day? In a way, yes. Now, I am a capitalist, and I want people to have higher living standards and more wealth over time, but we have lost our sense of purpose, because things are too easy, and we’ve become unmoored. Maybe this is what JD Vance is getting at.

This is a point I have been trying to make for over a decade now: people are just not very good with unstructured free time. This is the point that I was trying to make about the FIRE movement. You retire at 35 and…do what? Paint? Garden? Become a world-famous DJ? I haven’t heard that story yet. I haven’t yet heard the story of someone who retires at age 35 and then goes on to do something spectacular, unencumbered with the responsibility of a 9-5 job. You know what story I have heard, and hear over and over again? Someone who does something spectacular in whatever free time they have outside of a 9-5 job. There is a saying that if you want something done, give it to the busiest person. The vast majority of famous artists were once struggling artists, who were working multiple jobs to make ends meet in service to their art. I think about retiring sometimes, from the newsletter, and the longer I think about it, the more I think that is a bad idea. It’s so much more satisfying to be juggling a bunch of things at once, to be task-saturated, and go to bed exhausted at the end of the day. But like I said, 99% of people do not experience that, and never will, and they go to bed thinking about Mrs. Robinson. Time is more valuable when it is scarce, just like anything else.

I will tell you a secret about my new book The Awesome Portfolio coming out on September 8^th. I wrote it in ten days. Sat down and banged it out in ten days. The math took a little longer, but the manuscript was done in ten days. I had other shit to do! Stephen King says you should write 300 words a day for six months, and presumably spend the rest of the day screwing off. You should see Hemingway’s diaries of his typical writing day—not a lot of writing going on. On the other end, you have folks like Michael Crichton, who at his peak, was cranking out 10,000 words a day, basically a novel a week. I will admit that writing fiction is quite a bit harder than writing nonfiction, at least for me, and I am halfway through a novel that I put in the freezer five months ago. I hope to finish it by this spring. Sometimes you need to step away from it to get some perspective. Writers write, as they say, and if you want to write a book, then write the book. Don’t dick around with it.

About six years ago, I read an article that was titled “In Praise of Being Idle.” The author basically said that the best time of the day was the time you spent rolling around in bed for three hours after you woke up. What? I like rolling around in bed, but only for about 15 minutes. Three hours? Some people take lazy to a new art form. And this is what I am talking about—we have a pandemic of idleness. And it’s not just confined to the rich—poor people are just as or even more idle. Video games and energy drinks, etc. Middle class folks, the working stiffs with a couple of kids, are probably the least idle. You work at UPS for eight hours and come home and chase children around and put them to bed at eight and spend an hour zoning out in front of Netflix. If you want to read a book about the opposite of idle, read Monkey Business. It’s hilarious, and you get a snail’s-eye view into investment banking around the turn of the century. Those kids were working so many hours, they didn’t even have time to do laundry. They would just buy packs of underwear, wear them, and throw them away. They complained about the hours, but I got the impression that they were pretty happy.

Society is pulled forward by the one percent of people who actually work. The people at the highest levels of government, the people at the highest level of corporations, the financiers, the high-up people in entertainment, the stud academic researchers. I left out teachers. They work hard, but they get a lot of time off, and judging from what I see on Facebook, there is not a lot of work going on in their time off. I do not know many idle successful people. There are some, but my guess is that they put in the hours earlier in life. You can skate in just about any profession. There are professional athletes who skate. There are doctors who skate. There are pilots who skate. I am paraphrasing here, but Roger Clemens once said that he didn’t see the point of being mediocre. Yes, he cheated and took the gas, but that doesn’t obscure the fact that he was one of the hardest-working pitchers in baseball. When Andy Pettitte started working out with him at his compound in Texas, he was puking during the workouts. And Clemens made him a better pitcher. Making millions in baseball, he could have skated. He wanted more. It’s a long, grueling season, and it is natural to want to take some time off in the offseason, but you don’t want to show up to training camp fat, as Gleyber Torres once did. It’s the best game in the world, and we get paid to play it, so put in the effort. That is true of just about everything!

I can only speak for myself, but when I get bored, I start thinking of ways to get in trouble. That is probably true for most people. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, right? That is the point I am trying to get across here. I ain’t got time for the devil’s workshop, or anything else. Like betting on sports. Jesus H. Christ, get a hobby.