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Before the Easter weekend, the Health Guide published an announcement summarizing the mental health situation. for many people at the moment It was an enumeration of the working days: long Monday, long Tuesday, long Wednesday, long Thursday, etc.
Every day now feels like Good Friday. The ad is there as a map pin in the past if we ever forget how boring we were this time around.
When my fiancee cries from the other room, “What day is today?” I answer: “Forty-three!”
For forty-three days I have lived at home in quarantine with her and our newborn daughter as the only company. I know every morning I draw a new line in the post note on the desktop.
It is not a shame for me. I don’t fight 24 hours a day, I don’t belong to a risk group. But I have started to get bored. It may be a strange statement during the most tumultuous days in modern history, but it is: very deeply boring.
I’ve started sorting the birds out of the window to cool down (the nutty scream is leading right now). I am dressed in cozy material from head to toe, from morning to afternoon. I have been depressed and constipated. My hair no longer requires a hairdresser as much as a certified arborist. On the days that I watch television a lot. About 25 times a day I have seen the Börje Salming commercials for the heavyweight mat.
And it’s a constant melting on the refrigerator door and pantry doors. I’m still hungry, no matter how many calories fast so time goes by faster. I have become the article “How to get the nightmare body”. One day I squeeze four saffron croissants and two bags of Fruxo between breakfast and lunch. But the minute hand resists. Why is time so slow?
Finally, I contact a psychologist. Specifically, associate professor Mattias Lundberg from Umeå University, with work and organizational psychology as a specialty. He says that our perception of time is based on the fact that we have some natural attitudes, like when you get tired or hungry, and that over the years we learned about when we got there, in part built Some, like when school starts, or what time is the afternoon ficke at work.
– When such control points disappear, the perception of time is affected. Obviously, this applies not only to time, but also to weekdays. It doesn’t have to be linked to boredom, but it does happen when we break routines and these checkpoints no longer exist, like vacations.
Therefore, I have started to create my own waiting times: coffee time, snus time, wine time after work, so that the day is divided into manageable pieces. But even fixed times eventually become predictable, mixed with the boring.
German language is the best To weld the depth of a feeling, so does this. “Langweilig” is German for “boring”. Lang means for a long time, Weilige means for a time. The word “langweilig” thus describes the feeling that the moment is long.
It is very well portrayed in Joseph Heller’s novel “Moment 22”, where Lieutenant Dunbar claims to have the longest possible life, which he does by making her feel prolonged. Therefore, Dunbar only does things he hates, usually shooting clay pigeons, to make time feel as difficult as possible.
One person who knows more about this over time is the philosopher Bodil Jönsson, whose 1999 “Ten Thoughts on Time” is still considered standard work in the genre.
She says we do now being with him is a collective but sudden crime in something that is fundamental to all life: anticipation, expectation. Since we don’t know what the next time will be like, we also cannot plan and therefore cannot act. We are paralyzed
– Most of them will be fully recognized in the driving forces if they cannot get any of the future opportunities. Our notions of the future affect the present at least as much as the past. Everything we do, we do for the future: the present is gone, so there is nothing we can do about it, “she says.
– At this moment, when all the new planning is gone, it is as if we demonstrate that we no longer believe in the future. Then a cloud of sadness settles over reality.
In this way, boredom reminds quite a bit about depression, where the joint and the apatina feed in a constant loop. You are sad because you do nothing, you are too bored to find something. Sadness is both the symptom and the cause of depression. The effect of isolation is that we move further away. When this engagement began at home, my colleagues and I had a 15-minute conversation via video chat every day. Today there is a destination, I just find my own empty face on the Google Hangouts screen.
It’s almost tempting to get so bored at a time when boredom is being eradicated by constant stimuli: marathon with “Master Chef” shows from around the world, autoplay on Netflix, podcasts about real crimes. He is enrolled in the social contract that never has to be boring, writes Mary Mann in the book “Yawn.” Adventures in boredom ”: the buttons on the elevator doors and the buttons on the traffic lights have no other function than to give us something to pose while we wait. In Cuban cigar factories there are employees who are paid to read aloud to their employees to cushion their advantage.
But the fact that society has given us the opportunity for constant activation and social contacts does not reduce the occurrence of boredom, says Mattias Lundberg.
– The opposite can be the opposite: the perceived sadness increases by giving us a habitual need for stimuli and activity. And when it is not reached, sadness arises, he says.
Martin Heidegger
Photo: Fred Stein
The philosopher Martin Heidegger put Finger on how lead, when it arises, reveals the conditions of existence. When we are sad, he wanted to say, life is exposed in its natural state, without distractions, and we face everything that is meaningless.
Petra Lindfors, a professor of psychology at Stockholm University, touches a similar sentiment. Among other things, he has investigated how telework affects us. And it is precisely when we are bored that we have time to pay attention to everything that happens in and around us, she says.
– Then it is obvious to us that we do nothing; We know we shouldn’t look out the window. There’s also a frustration built into that, if you can’t rest in the boring one.
The bad news is that people are worth nothing to rest quietly. In a study published in 2014 in the journal Science, participants were left alone in a room for 15 minutes with their thoughts. There was also an electrical appliance in the room with which electric shocks could be applied. In the choice between hanging out with their own brains or receiving an electric shock, should something happen, 67 percent of the male participants and 25 percent of the women chose to be electrocuted.
It is not a shame for me, as I said. But I’m sad. Not because I don’t have things to do: I’m home with a five-month-old baby, and the Russian poet Turgenjev did not say that young children are there so that parents are never bored. Well that’s exactly what he said, and maybe he was thinking about the coordination test where I try to change my daughter’s diaper while preventing the transfused big toe from sticking in her mouth. It’s fast, so it’s enough, and you’re done.
Then no, without incident. But there are many conditions on the spectrum of boredom, at least fifty shades of gray, and I am not bored by lack of things to do. I suffer for lack of people. According to the Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, it is a difference between the sadness of being trapped in a traffic jam or in a boring meeting (situativ boredom) and those who come from uninterrupted isolation, emptiness, the feeling of helplessness and alienation; what you chose to call existential boredom.
When one suffers from existential boredom, the days are so boring that even the nights turn, as the stillness of the night is no longer a grateful contrast to the noise and the office crowd. Now everything is the same; even sleeping becomes boring. My dreams today (and yes, I am aware of the irony that retelling dreams is by far the most boring of all) of the action in various old video games, so it has become because there are no new experiences or impressions. subconscious to process. You get bored deep down.
I recently asked a colleague if he had new prospects of sitting at home and working, and if he expected to catch a glimpse of something, it was in vain. His response: “The only perspective I have is from my depressing sink.”
In fact, even the most famous advertising campaign for isolation in cultural history, Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” (1854), is based on a lie spread by the media. Thoreau traveled extensively to uninhabited Lake Walden in Massachusetts, rented a cabin there, and wrote a book about how wonderful it was to sit alone.
Henry David Thoreau
Photo: Fine Art Images / Heritage-Images
But the true purpose of Walden’s stay is masked by natural romance and criticism of civilization: Thoreau saw it all as a “literary coup” to get good material to write about, but most of all he hoped that the years in the forest will improve it in what it found The most important thing in life: socializing with other people. Thoreau was the closest companion, Robert Sullivan writes in the book “The Thoreau you need to know”, and hanging on Lake Walden was a weight loss social cure to give his social a higher quality in the future. I can announce that it works: I’ve never been as hungry in a couple of big spins on the office hamster wheels as now.
No man is an islandBut when I see my colleagues scattered and separated on the small screens of video chat, I think we have probably become a heap of cut copper in an archipelago that used to be permanent land. Which used to be reassuring and consistent and always present.
Well, that’s the idea I got from isolation: how small a part of work actually consists of work, and how much of that consists of people. I understand now. I miss the little talk, the fools, the hugs. I miss my coworkers, in the simplest way possible: they make my life so much more boring by not being here.
