Not being bored is why you always feel busy
Kai Brach cites Anne Helen Petersen about cultural tipping points relating to technology use. Petersen, in turn, quotes Kate Lindsay who discusses the lack of boredom in our lives — which exhausts our brains.
In my own life I’ve found that anxiety can be absolutely paralysing, stopping me from getting done the smallest tasks. I have techniques for getting around that, some of which involve supplements, but mainly in terms of just doing stuff. That lends a kind of momentum which allows me to get things done.
However, always doing things is tiring. It takes me back to a couple of posts: Who are you without the doing? and Taking breaks to be more human.
Or perhaps, as Anne Helen Petersen suggests in her latest piece, we’ve reached a cultural tipping point:
“The amount of space these technologies take up in our lives – and their ever-diminishing utility – has brought us to a sort of cultural tipping point. [Our feeds have completed their] years-long transformation from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of brands.”
The spaces we once inhabited feel increasingly alien, overtaken by algorithmic ghosts and corporate voices that leave us restless, overstimulated, yet empty and disconnected.
Petersen quotes Kate Lindsay’s writing about how boredom is missing in our lives – and it’s the perfect observation:
“Boredom is when you do the things that make you feel like you have life under control. Not being bored is why you always feel busy, why you keep ‘not having time’ to take a package to the post office or work on your novel. You do have time – you just spend it on your phone. By refusing to ever let your brain rest, you are choosing to watch other people’s lives through a screen at the expense of your own.”
Source: Dense Discovery
Image: Saketh