Subject #10: On boredom and interest

Boredom is usually defined as lack of interests. Those interests are usually actions, if one feels that there’s nothing to do then frustration rises and people have named that frustration feeling as ”boredom”. Boredom is labelled as negative and interest as positive – people try to avoid the former and gain the latter. However, it seems that whether one is spending time by doing something interesting or doing nothing and feeling bored – they are both just ways to avoid the real problem. What real problem is that? Problem of finding the joy in being.

Let’s see how it goes. Interest is linked to external thing which causes pleasure. Boredom is lack of interest. Therefore one is either feeling pleasure because of some external thing or feeling frustrated because pleasure is missing – where is the real joy? Even though to many people words ”joy” and ”pleasure” seem like synonyms, here they are used differently. Pleasure is a momentary feeling which targets of our desires produce (to be more exact: our minds produce that feeling in the basis of projected image of desire). Joy is not a result of desire, it has no reason and it’s always right here. Metaphorically speaking, joy is the sun – warming up always even if one’s mind has created too many clouds to see it. And pleasure, well it can be anything that ego-oriented mind hungers for.

Schopenhauer saw the same:

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

There’s nothing wrong with having lots of interests. But if interests exist because one would feel bored without them – then it’s just about attempt to cover up something, same kind of substitute as mentioned in subject #5. The amount of these substitutes in human life is staggering. Movement from world of pleasures into world of joy is sometimes called as enlightenment, sometimes as going to heaven and sometimes as returning to long-lost home.