Existentially Bored
"Does anyone else just feel weirdly, inescapably bored?"
It’s hard to look at the literal meaning of events and not feel the approach of hysteria. I’m not talking about extrapolating current events to a logical, dystopian conclusion but the textual meaning of what happened on Wednesday. But if every day brings the post-empire evidence of our ruin and the status quo certifies residence in crazy town, how do you deal with happiness? In her latest contribution to The Experiment, Rachel Megan Barker asks what I’ve been wondering: Why does this all start to seem boring?
by Rachel Megan Barker
Does anyone else just feel weirdly, inescapably bored?
Not all the time. It's not as if, post vaccine, I haven't done anything. But every time I am not actively doing something, I become immediately restless, irritable and just plain bored.
It is not exactly like burn out, but maybe adjacent to it? A second cousin, perhaps.
With burn out, you are depleted of energy - to the point that normal ways to recharge don't work, and everything is just exhausting because you are running on empty.
I feel like I am running on a deficit of enjoyment, or fulfillment, or dopamine or something.
When I was twenty, I forgot to bring a book with me to read on the Amtrak up to Maryland. I randomly picked up a book called The Happiness Project.
This book wasn't really written for me. Firstly, it explicitly lays itself out as not a book geared at people with depression - something I have. Secondly, it's pretty grounded in the "husband and two kids and a well paying job" model of life which personally is never going to be for me.
But I read it and for what was the first time in several years at that point, gave some thought to happiness. I worked on finding ways to boost my happiness at times when things were good, often in the smaller moments. It felt like boosting my overall supply of joy.
And here's the thing - I struggled then and, oh boy, am I struggling now with the idea of being happy. Everything around me just feels far too broken. And trying to find ways to boost my happiness isn't going to change my hopelessness and anger at the idea of having to live in a world with people who won't get vaccinated, or stop my anxiety about what the next few years hold, or do anything about the lack of vaccines being made available to the vast majority of the world, right?
I struggling now with the idea of being happy. Everything around me just feels far too broken.
But on the other hand, happiness can just be....chemical. It's not a moral thing to try and find ways to grab feeling good in the middle of the chaos.
However, on yet another hand, the thought of trying to confront this restless boredom fills me with an existential dread. I am not even sure at what. Possibly that it will open up a deeper dissatisfaction that feels impossible to overcome. Or something. It feels existential - like something that cannot be fixed just by doing a lot of stuff that gives me a bunch of dopamine (although, I do also really want to do a bunch of stuff that gives me a bunch of dopamine).
It would be easy to blame this on being twenty eight, but I do think the number of people I know who feel bored or existentially lost or something like that means, well, it's not that. The pandemic has left a lot of us untethered in ways I don't think we have words for. In ways that spiral out in so many directions. But it’s also left a lot of us…just depleted of joy. Which really is not surprising; so many of us spent months upon months stuck in our homes. Of course we feel like our "enjoying life" supply is in the red.
And in my case, that leaves me with a...boring sense of existential dread.
So, here's what I am going to do over the next twelve months. Try and find ways to fix the boredom. Face the fear that it’ll unearth something deeper and more deeply dissatisfied.
At least interesting existential dread will be, well, interesting.
Rachel Megan Barker is a highly caffeinated feminist, wanderer, bookworm, and organizer. Follow her on Instagram at @rachellybee and on Twitter at @rachellybee.
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