I read this from JG Ballard: “If I (…) had to make a prediction about the future, I could sum up my fear in a single word: boredom. Here is my great fear, that everything has happened; nothing that is exciting, novel or interesting is going to happen again; The future will be a huge and resigned suburb of the soul, nothing new will emerge, no escape will take place again. This is what can happen and it is my great fear.” The Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in The fatigue society, a defense of boredom: “Walter Benjamin calls boredom profound the bird of dream that incubates the egg of experience. According to him, (…) deep boredom corresponds to the high point of spiritual relaxation. Pure agitation generates nothing new. “It reproduces and accelerates what already exists.” I admire Byung-Chul Han, but in this I am of the team Ballard. I experience boredom as something regretful that drips its abolic tar made of lack of enthusiasm and dissatisfaction. It doesn’t make me lucid but rather restless, aware of being wasted. It afflicts me, it corrodes me. There is a great phrase in a book by the Argentine writer Sergio Bizzio. It is not referring to boredom, but it describes it: “It’s like I know what’s going to happen tomorrow and I’m not interested.” There are articles on the web that claim that “Being bored and doing nothing is good for the brain”. That the opposite of the narcotizing productive hyperactivity in which we live is boredom seems sad to me. He flâneurism vital is something else. Having the ability to daydream while looking out the window, to read poems at any time of the day, to arrange the plants, is not about doing nothing, but about doing by not doing. One is there but it is somewhere else. It is a migration to an inner world where countless things happen. These are moments that have nothing to do with the tiresome opacity of boredom and everything to do with a risky activity: living more alive.
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#Narcotic #boredom