Excruciatingly Boring Dystopia

Our lives are the most mundane lives ever lived—and that is becoming a problem.

Photo by Chris J. Mitchell

Let’s just say it outright: we live in the dullest fucking times imaginable. Anyone with eyes can see it—if they aren’t already dead inside. Everything’s so ordered, so structured, so pre-determined that the sparks of chaos and life and soul get squeezed right out of us. All that’s left is routine, repetition, the depressing humdrum of modernity. We are squeezed-out oranges that have been forgotten behind a counter—somehow alive, still, but not really. Also, moldy.

And we call ourselves “developed.” I think “deadened” fits better.

I live in Austria, nestled next to Germany, these two epicenters of mind-numbing order, where the people are stoically polite and meticulously punctual and unbelievably fucking boring. (I can say that because I’m part of them.) The people here love bureaucracy because bureaucracy is boring. Any disruption, any change is an evil that must be fought. Most voters are senile fucks who care about nothing but their pension payments and immigrants diluting their brain-dead “traditional” culture which consists mostly of drinking unfathomable amounts of beer, the worst music you can imagine, and hating everyone different. When I visit Eastern Europe, on occasion, I see more excitement, more life, but they are on the path to boredom, too.

Think about it: work is excruciatingly boring. How many of you spend your precious hours each day sitting in an office, eyes glued to some soul-sucking software, locked in polite small talk about the weather or your weekend “plans” (translation: errands and obligatory family visits)? We nod and smile and bury our real thoughts deep because the slightest overshare could blow up our carefully curated image and maybe get us fired. Gotta play the game, keep the paycheck, rinse, repeat. The clock ticks slower than a funeral dirge. Every day is a Monday.

Small wonder we’re leaning harder into alcohol and weed and hard drugs and whatever else numbs the gnawing emptiness. It’s not an accident that drugs are (slooooowly) legalized around the same time we lose all sense of purpose—coincidence? I don’t think so. People do anything to scratch an itch of excitement. We hop on social media for a dopamine kick, then slip further into our numbness.

Even vacations are mostly dull, heavily regulated flights—fuck those ridiculous security measures—to some overpriced “tourist-friendly” zone, where you follow the same itinerary everyone else does—trip advisor routes, Instagram photo ops, hotel pools. A different backdrop, but essentially the same boredom. And then you come back to the office to endure the dreaded “So how was your trip?” conversation, which you answer with forced enthusiasm: “Oh, it was great!” Just another half-truth to keep the treadmill going.

And as for “community”? Good luck finding that. We’ve replaced villages and extended families with LinkedIn connections and Microsoft Teams channels. Our neighbors remain strangers, and our co-workers are mostly acquaintances—temporary alliances in the workplace wilderness. Even the random weirdos, the artists, the irreverent punks, eventually have to dilute their weirdness, make it palatable, brand it so they can survive. Sell out or starve. That’s the mantra. And so the edge gets lost, the flame snuffed out. Boredom overtakes brilliance. Brilliance gets shot behind a McDonald’s dumpster.

Europe is dying because there is no innovation here, no radical thinkers, no artists, only boredom and bureaucracy and conformity and bullshit. People who are “different” are ostracized and have to work twice as hard to enjoy the same material comfort. I am part of it all too, of course—you gotta be to “earn a living.” Not sure if the rest of the “developed” world is better, but I think the US, for example, is still more exciting than whatever the fuck this here is.

Look at the far right’s resurgence: they’re capitalizing on this vacuum of excitement. People are so desperate for any kind of disruption they’ll embrace extremist movements because at least those propose something different. Anything to break the monotony, to channel frustration at a system that leaves us existing in grey cubicles. War drums beat faster because destruction to some looks more exciting than this endless, suffocating cycle of brand loyalty and mindless productivity. The “crisis of men” (I’m not an expert, but I see it all around me) is a true crisis because, let’s be real, we were definitely not made for such lives (neither were women, of course). It’s a failure of the left, I must admit, that we offer no solutions to monotony. The far-right has always been better at propaganda and people are fucking stupid and think wars are something to be excited about. Bored and disillusioned men will be the downfall of the current paradigm—but for the worse.

No one is free. We’re not free to say what we think in the workplace, not free to sabotage the meaningless tasks that define our days, not free to lounge on a Monday morning just because we feel like it. We’re locked into compliance by bills, rent, health insurance, the looming threat of “losing everything” if we step off the hamster wheel. So we press on, half-awake, half-dead. Sometimes I start arguments at work just for the sake of feeling something.

I remember being a teenager—feeling unstoppable, daydreaming about being a writer or a filmmaker or something wild and rebellious. And now I’m an adult, meeting after meeting, email after email, forced laughter at corporate “team-building” nonsense. The fucking metamorphosis is complete: the caterpillar that wanted to grow wings ended up in a sterile office, pinned to a desk like a butterfly in a display case. This is adulthood, apparently. My only outlet is this publication. (Thank you for being part of it ♥️)

Meanwhile, “higher purpose” is basically a punchline. Most of us can’t even name a purpose beyond “get paid so I don’t starve,” or “pay off that mortgage in twenty-something years.” That’s not a life, that’s a prison sentence, doled out by a society that has more than enough resources to allow us all some measure of creative freedom.

(Do not forget that this entire essay is written by a privileged white dude in Western Europe.)

Is there a way out? Maybe. I see sparks here and there—workers’ movements, people experimenting with communal living, artists refusing to toe the line. And there’s technological potential: AI could replace a lot of these bullshit tasks if we’d only let it, freeing us for more human pursuits. But the powers that be want us tethered to the drudgery because bored, overworked citizens don’t have time or energy to resist. AI will replace all these boring office tasks and then they’ll find something even worse for us to do. The monotony is calculated. Who here can read a truly meaningful book after staring at a screen all day? Who here can organize and resist when they are taking our souls?

So it’s up to us—to you reading this, the bored wage slave or the uninspired freelancer (do those still exist?) or the burnt-out teacher or the anxious office drone. We can choose to break free, even if it’s just in small ways: say something real to a colleague, take a day off and do absolutely nothing except stare at the trees. Find a community of freaks and weirdos who refuse to be normalized (that’s an almost impossible one). Risk a bit of discomfort in exchange for a shard of authenticity. Because if we keep letting this boredom rule us, then… I don’t fucking know.

I don’t have a solution—I’m just writing some shit, stumbling through this labyrinth just like you, cursing the fluorescent lights and the sanitized city blocks. But I know one thing: life should not be this boring. We weren’t meant to become office furniture with pulses.

Antonio

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