Devil’s Advocate
Writer and mysterious musical artist Nag’s Head stands up for boredom.
These are infotainment saturated times, and boredom has been banished forever. Millions of dedicated media professionals work quite hard 24 hours a day to ensure that your every desire is served up on a digital dinner-plate in three seconds flat. If you’re tired of my spiel already then google ‘celebrity midget fisting’, and hey presto, you are instantly un-bored. But do you NEED all that pleasure and stimulation? No. What you NEED is some of that lovely velvet-grey ennui.
Don’t get me wrong I like doing stuff, just not all of the time. Constant excitement and entertainment will make you thick. Your brain will melt, drip out your ears, leaving you with a nothing but a big sloppy grin. Boredom, on the other hand makes you super-clever because you start noticing things, and actually thinking about them. Stephen Hawking grew so bored of getting his speech synthesizer to say ‘pissflaps’ that he eventually decided to work out the shape of the universe instead.
Children, in particular, need boredom. TV and computers have turned the yoof into crack-smoking lady-stranglers. My grandmother told me the only toys she had as a child were bits of broken plates and cups. Provide your child with these items, rather than a Nintendo DS. They will be forced to think, and create something useful to humanity.
If you are bored it means nothing bad is happening to you. Stop whinging, make yourself a cup of tea, and enjoy it.
Life is short:; boredom makes it longer. I’m not making this stuff up, it’s called the human condition. If you spend your life frolicking and laughing like a pansy you’ll be in your coffin before you even know what the bloody hell happened. Alternately, if you regularly gaze out the window at the rain for hours on end you’ll see the grim reaper coming from miles off.
Whilst we’re getting all cosmic: Buddhism, meditation, chanting and all that spiritual hippy-jazz, is just foreign for boredom. People in the east have known for thousands of years that a nice bit of tedium sorts you right out. Folks in the west are only just cottoning on to this one. Therefore, we fork out thousands on Zen retreat holidays to purge our ‘inner bad mongy dragonfly energy’. No wonder Buddhist monks are always laughing.
I hope I have demonstrated the various rich and subtle shades of boredom to you. Now you will be able to enjoy boredom for what it really is: contentment. I will waste no more of your valuable time. Goodbye.
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