Transcendental Nothingness

“Another day of staring at the big screen while scrolling through my little screen so as to reward myself for staring at the medium screen all week” reads a recent viral tweet that wrecked me other day.

We’re soon approaching the official one-year checkpoint since pandemic lockdowns began here in the U.S., and if you’re working from home (or hell, if you own a computer), I’m sure you’re well-acquainted with this feeling by now. The inescapable screen fatigue. The dopamine slot machine. As an elder-Zoomer casualty of classic teenage internet poisoning, I’m all too familiar with the irony of this routine. It makes me feel insane. 

But honestly, whining about this stuff is so 2020. Instead, I would like to offer a novel new alternative to this cyber-hedonia. I’m on a mission to bring back a very retro emotion, foreign to our digital cyborg brains, a nearly obsolete state of being: boredom.

Condemned by the Puritans, lamented by the young and wealthy and avoided by all, boredom is now an easily-remedied nuisance of yesteryear. No longer must one twiddle their thumbs in a waiting room, make small talk in an elevator, observe the faces of one’s Fellow Man in the subway, or gaze tragically out the window at passing scenery in a long silent car ride. As the late social critic Mark Fisher wrote in 2014, “empty time has now been effectively eliminated. In the intensive, 24/7 environment of capitalist cyberspace, the brain is no longer allowed any time to idle; instead, it is inundated with a seamless flow of low-level stimulus. … There is now neither an excuse nor an opportunity to be bored.” 

And he’s right — there’s really no practical “reason” to sit alone with your own thoughts, or even to passively observe your immediate surroundings. You have an email inbox to refresh! The Most Important Current Event Of All Time That You NEED To Pay Attention To And Form An Opinion About Right Now Or You Will Be Struck By Lightning seems to occur every single day. There will always be another algorithmically recommended video, another unopened message, another timeline to scroll, all perfectly bite-sized in your ceaseless rotation of apps like a bottomless buffet. The mental jellybean jar if you will. 

Granted, I’m well aware of the lukewarm temperature of this take. I know we all watched Black Mirror, The Social Dilemma, and various other works of heavy-handed “Smartphone = Bad” content. It’s been well-documented that our shiny devices of various sizes have seriously hindered our ability to concentrate, to think deeply, even to feel emotion fully, but you’ve heard this all before. These observations are repeated and dramatized ad nauseam. Besides, moral panics about popular media and "kids these days” are a tale as old as time — there’s no use in being naïve and reactionary. The reality of our seemingly endless pandemic is such that we have no other option — the device is now our only lifeline to social communion; we are psychically fused whether we like it or not. 

So, no personal guilt or grumbling despair allowed. Instead, just humor me in an experiment. Sometime today, detach yourself from the matrix for an isolated moment. Leave all the techno-distraction portals in another room and stare at something totally mundane. Call it the lazy man’s meditation — don’t worry about breathing or minimizing your thoughts, just let your brain simply idle, unstimulated. After 5 minutes is when I usually start feeling fidgety and anxious. But pay attention to where your whims take you in isolation. Keep going for 10 minutes, 15 minutes — you’ll start daydreaming, reminiscing, having pretend conversations. Go for a bit longer, and you may start to experience the liberating rewards of contemplation. A little inspiration, a tiny unconscious prayer, a brilliant breakthrough… what’s this? For once, an actually original thought!

Next, try it in the pockets of time during all those simple tediums of daily life. The ones we haven’t quite yet outsourced to frictionless automation. No headphones. Stare into space while pumping your gas. Eavesdrop at the grocery store. Watch your coffee as it percolates. Make up stories about the folks you see in the post office. And for the love of God, give yourself some analog solitude in the bathroom. Notice the relief of not acting as a walking stimulus-response machine for once.

If you have room in your day to sustain this for over an hour or so(lucky you!), your psyche will greatly reward you. Suddenly, you’ve created a void to fill. The simple act of giving your mind sustained breathing room is crucial to cultivating creativity, memory, curiosity, and dare I say, one’s own soul. Thoreau and Nietzsche and all those other guys were right about this one — the boredom vacuum is indeed a bedrock of all great culture and art, not to mention a highly effective impetus to action. Want to produce something truly original? To imagine new solutions to our overwhelming bevy of challenges? To actually ideate pathways to a brighter, more equitable and beautiful society? Feel the weight of that void. If counter-culture is what you seek, this is where you find it: resistance to the incessant psychic demands of digital capitalism. Don’t allow technology to reduce your human experience to merely a predictable, lucrative commodity. You have so much more freedom than you know. The FYP can wait. 

As Virginia Woolf wrote in her cherished bedroom of boredom: “It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface.”

And with that, I wish you all a profoundly boring week!