Trying to Become a "Bored" Person

Taken by the author in Beijing

If, while walking, a person grows bored and cannot bear the boredom, they will pace around in a fretful, irritated way, casting about anxiously for something, anything, to do.

Someone with more patience for boredom, on the other hand, will, after enduring it for a moment, come to realize that perhaps it is this particular way of walking that bores them. And that realization moves them to invent a new way of walking.

Running is not a new way of walking; it is just walking sped up. Dancing, or drifting, is a genuinely new kind of motion. Only humans can dance.

Perhaps, while walking, the person tastes a deep boredom, and out of that boredom they turn their footsteps into dance.

That passage comes from the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in The Burnout Society.

Han's writing has a heaviness to it, a real density. The slim little book reads like a compressed biscuit for the mind, the kind you can chew on over and over without ever getting tired of it.

And it is wonderfully readable, none of the dryness you brace yourself for in a thick philosophy tome. Even when you do not quite recognize the examples Han reaches for, you can still grasp roughly what he is trying to say.

Let me use The Burnout Society as a way in. Today I want to talk, a little, about boredom.

Humanity's achievements in the realm of culture, philosophical thought included, all owe themselves to our capacity for deep, single-minded attention. Culture can only arise in conditions that allow for this depth of attention.

And yet that deep attention is being pushed further and further to the margins, giving way to another kind of attention: hyperattention (Hyperaufmerksamkeit). This scattered attention shows up as a constant shifting of focus among many tasks, sources of information, and processes at once. Because it cannot tolerate even a trace of boredom, it can never make room for a deep boredom, and it is precisely that deep boredom that matters so much to the act of creation.

Walter Benjamin called this deep boredom "the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience." If sleep is the highest form of physical relaxation, then deep boredom is the ultimate state of spiritual relaxation. Sheer busyness produces nothing new. It only repeats or accelerates what already exists.

Benjamin lamented that the nest of the dream bird, woven out of rest and time, is vanishing in modern society. There is no more "weaving and netting." Boredom is "a warm grey cloth lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks," and "in this cloth we wrap ourselves when we dream." We settle into "the arabesques of its lining," and there we feel at home, at ease.

Without relaxation and rest, we lose "the gift of listening," and the "community of listeners" ceases to exist. Such a community stands in direct opposition to our hyperactive society. The gift of listening rests precisely on a contemplative attentiveness (Aufmerksamkeit), a region the hyperactive subject can never reach.

As Han tells it, in a society that worships achievement we are like runners circling an endless track.

No one holds a whip over us, no one forces us to chase a better time. We run toward an ideal self of our own making. "The self becomes trapped inside an ideal self it can never reach, and so grows steadily more dejected and worn out. Out of the gap between the real self and the ideal self, a kind of self-aggression is born."

Burnout is like stopping mid-run, gasping, because the exhaustion has become unbearable. It is a rigidity brought on by too much self-exploitation, and its aim is not to end the state of frantic overactivity but to return to it.

For the person living inside the achievement society, working out, resting, having fun, all of it is in service of getting back to "health." Just as Nietzsche's last man makes health his new god, they will spend anything to keep themselves healthy and active.

But the core of all that health and activity turns out to be hollow. Being active and healthy is held up as the purpose of life, the thing we strive toward, and yet this so-called purpose points only back at life itself, forming a closed, self-referential loop. Being active and healthy means nothing more than keeping life going; it points to no end beyond itself.

This circular structure quietly usurps the place where a good life and a sense of meaning should be. And so "his life is like that of the undead. He is too active to die, and too lifeless to live."

Boredom is different. Boredom is non-teleological. It is like a reading-comprehension question with no correct answer in the back of the book, an opening of the heart, genuinely, to everything new. That is why it holds room for every future that might still come.

So deep boredom is exactly where creativity comes from. It is the soul of anything new.

The other day, reading Weichen's newsletter 「生活奇旅」(Strange Journeys of a Life), I came across a passage that stayed with me:

I stopped pushing myself to exercise for the sake of some future health. I just enjoyed the moving itself, and somehow it became a habit.

I stopped treating meditation as a tool for easing my anxiety. I just felt the experience of it, and somehow it changed me deeply.

I stopped resolving that this year I really had to read more. I just read whatever I was curious about, and somehow I read more.

I stopped worrying about whether my career was running faster than everyone else's, and somehow I slowly found out what I actually love to do.

(生活奇旅 · Weichen's newsletter)

What that passage describes is exactly the path of an overly active person who, after a moment of self-awareness, decides to slow down, to go for a walk, to pay attention inside the boredom to the small joys and sensations of each passing minute, and who, in doing so, comes away with an inner fullness and a sudden spark of inspiration and creativity.

Anything we call "relaxation" can, by the same logic, be sorted roughly into two kinds: the burnout kind and the boredom kind.

Take a walk, for example.

The burnout walk goes like this.

There is a deadline tonight and a presentation tomorrow morning. My heart is restless and I have no frame of mind to do any of it properly, so I pat myself on the head with both hands and say, "This can't go on. I have to fix my mood, that's the only way I'll get through what I have to do. Quick, go outside, take a walk, and come back in half an hour ready to actually work."

At that point the walk has become nothing more than a way of tidying myself up for something else, a process of turning myself back into a standard-issue cog for studying, socializing, and research. What I am looking forward to is not the walk itself but the result of the walk, the treatment that will cure me back into an active, healthy state.

A walk taken as that kind of rest is a burnout walk. It is a paralysis and shock to the self's own functioning, a stimulant-and-sleeping-pill way of regimenting myself, and it never breaks free of the achievement society's discipline or its loop of self-exploitation.

The boredom walk goes like this.

Maybe I am busy, maybe I am not, but I do not treat the walk as a means of smoothing myself over. I take it for the sake of the walking, as a long-awaited, delightful little journey of the soul.

Out on the road my thoughts run loose, aimless, completely free, and so I might notice all sorts of things I had never paid attention to before. Maybe the clouds at the edge of the sky are unusually beautiful, or maybe I stumble onto some quiet corner of campus I never knew was there.

My mind is open and free too. Maybe a point from a lecture suddenly clicks into place, maybe a research idea comes out of nowhere, or maybe nothing comes to me at all, and that is perfectly fine, because I have come away with enormous joy and ease, and recovered the energy to start working again.

Which kind of walk would you choose?

For a while, I noticed I had lost interest in things I once loved beyond measure.

Books, games, anime, films. I had a "list of masterpieces" that kept getting longer, all of them works I genuinely longed for, born from the hands of legendary creators, some carrying a metaphor or a dissection of social reality, some bursting with a wildly distinctive artistic style, some holding a depth of thought worth chewing over again and again.

I knew that any single one of them stood a real chance of changing how I see life, the universe, and everything else, and could hand me a stretch of beautiful, unforgettable time, happy as a dream.

And yet I just did not do it.

This exact, deeply irritating state of mind

I kept asking myself: "Why? These are pastimes with huge upside and no obvious downside, far more worthwhile than watching videos or scrolling on my phone. Why do you keep putting them off?"

I could never answer. It felt as if some force I could not name kept getting in the way of the things I loved.

Even when I did start (rubbing my hands together, say, to finally watch some old film I had admired from afar), I would find an impatience and anxiety inside me I could not hold down. It pushed me to finish quickly, pushed me to analyze the meaning hidden beneath the text, pushed me to come away with some so-called "takeaway."

The pleasure was stripped out, and the entertainment turned into an ordeal.

A few days ago, rereading The Burnout Society, I understood the reason all at once.

At some point, without my noticing, I had started to mistake everything, studying, books, games, anime, films, all of it, for a means of "learning a little, so as to prepare for the future," instead of feeling the pleasure and enjoyment of the process. They had slipped, slowly, from boredom things into burnout things.

So my instinct told me: I do not want to do this.

It was precisely because I wanted "relaxation," because I wanted something "good for me," that I had become an overly active subject, robbed of any chance of reaching deep boredom.

Chase meaning, results, achievement on purpose, and you lose them. Do the opposite, give up on efficiency, enjoy the process, and you end up doing better at the very thing you were preparing for.

So, starting today, I have decided to try becoming a "bored" person, to give boredom a little more patience.

I am Lunar Mare. Thank you for reading.

You are welcome to reach me by any means you like. My email is lunar_mare_official@outlook.com. Write to me, say hello, and I will reply to every letter 🙂.