03.04.2024 Boredom as survival

Boredom seems exceedingly irrational, illogical and impossible to me at times. How, when there are so many things-concepts-temporalities-developments-processes-etc.* going on at once every moment and travelling at many different speeds and with many different directions, all of which conflict to destroy and create new speeds and directions, how can boredom exist in this intense and chaotic reality? How, even if one doesn’t actively think about all this, can one be bored while being a part, a fragmentary whole (no matter how small) of the absolute chaos that is reality?

But at this point I have forgotten that boredom is a key survival strategy of the mind-body**. Without boredom blocking avenues and decreasing the speed of thought, the mind-body would disintegrate in the chaos constantly stalking and surrounding it.

Boredom in this sense can be seen as a counterpart of stress. If stress is seen as what happens when the body-mind comes into contact with more chaos than it can handle without starting to break and disintegrate in a specific timespace.

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* ‘-’ is used here instead of a comma to emphasize that the listed aspects of reality are not wholly/metaphysically different from another, as a separation via comma would rather imply. The ‘-’ also implies a separation, but of intensity, not existence. It articulates the fact that aspects of reality are different from another, while stopping short of essentializing their differences / using their differences to claim they have separate essences/existences. It instead makes the connections inherent in difference visible (by creating an indeterminate ‘-’ chain).

** ‘-’ is used here similarly to how a ‘=’ would function in mathematics. The order of the words (before or after the ‘-’) can be interchanged at will. Both ‘=’ and ‘-’ designate a strong connection between the words, the key difference between ‘=’ and ‘-’ in this context is that ‘-’ leaves it open whether the words mean exactly the same things.

*** The two explanations and uses of ‘-’ in this text are highly connected and share intense similarities.