I live in the US and I've also lived in Europe, specifically in Italy and Germany. I was so bored in Europe so I moved to the US for more exciting opportunities. The bureaucracy and culture there is pretty stifling. But life is boring here in the USA too but in different ways, mostly because we're all struggling to get our basic needs met.
My own solution to wrestling with these feelings is to go out and reconnect with nature. I believe we feel this way because we're cogs in capitalism and as such we've been completely disconnected from the land we live on. Learning about local forests, plants, animals, birds. Taking hikes. Planting and tending a garden. Becoming hyperlocal in your consumption. Talking to my neighbors. Building community with like-minded people.
There's so much you could do with your life instead of going on mindless vacations and mindlessly hyper-consuming in your free time whether that's material things or social media.
Innovation can kill adventure. Look at the innovation of the automobile. Is anything more sickening dull - and ugly, that too - than the car-culture we've become?
Lack of innovation is one. We do not have true innovation because necessity is the mother of invention, and who is claiming all of these inventions? The rich, born in a nest of money, who don't understand necessity. They understand patent poaching from real talent, calling it their own and proclaiming themselves genuises. Which they are absolutely not. They had deeper pockets than the innovative and more opportunities to exploit them. That's it.
“Did you learn how to do that? Are you tired of the same old bugs and FeatureBugs? I’m sorry. We have made some changes, and added some things you neither want nor need, and which you didn’t ask for. Because, of course, we couldn’t leave well enough alone, you’ll have to relearn the procedures you used to follow to get the things done you need to do. And, oh yes, in this new ‘release,’ we didn’t fix the old bugs, either. Again. Also, you’ll have to start paying for things the application used to provide for free.”
Imagine if every time you got into a car of a different make and model you had to learn the location of the throttle pedal and the brake, and where the steering is, and how it points the car when moving.
Well said. Fuck yes. Western culture is utterly meaningless and offers nothing of substance. Read Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin if you yearn for meaning and connection. Those qualities are dormant in everyone. We are wild animals, not yet caged but fenced in certainly. There are plenty of us still connected to soul and life. I have found a mentor who is the most incredibly authentic, loving and free woman. This system will come to an end and when it does, when the guard rails of mediocrity buckle, we will seed the new culture.
Check out Desmond Morris' old flic, The Human Zoo, it's on youtube i believe. He makes an argument for our cities not being the proverbial 'jungles' at all, but rather zoos for human zoo animals. Which perhaps explains the popularity of movies depicting insipid ubanites going to the woods and getting jammed up the fundament by hillbillies. Be the hillbilly being the takeaway for me. Other than the jamming up the fundament part, which is symbolic at any rate.
What an excellent little essay. Hits the nail right on the head.This piece captures the exact feeling that (among other things) made me flee Europe a decade ago in search for a realer, more exciting and more "humane" (i.e. "natural") life.
I'd like to think that I've made a few steps in the right direction, started growing my own food and planting trees, but I feel the same grey monotony increasingly penetrating every aspect of life, even in the exotic faraway place I ended up in. No matter what you do, the dominant culture's influence is stronger. And in the meantime we've pretty much run out of places to run away to, as the global "Einheitsbrei" slowly became all-encompassing. They say "be the change that you want to see in the world," and I've really tried - but that alone is not enough. Nothing changes. Not yet, at least.
Nobody is safe, and escaping this system has become almost impossible. Let's hope some major disruption puts an end to all this soon, so that we may be less restrained by coercive power and hence more creative, and more alive. It's our only chance if we want to survive as a species.
I don't think this was the point of your post, but the line about "I'm just a privileged white dude..." caught my eye.
Lately, I have begun to dive deeper into state-sanctioned "safe" outlets for anger, boredom, questioning. Identity politics for me feel like this. Instead of questioning why on earth we are using energy for something meaningless, we are asking: "which group has done me wrong, which group have I done wrong?"
Other tidbits I loved: find your group of weirdos and refuse to be normalized. Amen! Solarpunk, degrowth, and community-building have been the salve to my raw soul in these times. I've been developing a non-hierarchical intelligence and consciousness. I feel like a sleeper agent.
I have hope this internal, 'quiet', resistance that I see building, in little corners and spaces, online, at my local coffee shop, and in quick, one-liners in conversations with coworkers, at the doctor's office, and so on. It is there.
You get to decide to make life fun. Go find some Witches and dance naked in the moonlight. Go find some Rennies and bash each other with swords. Go find a trail that is just beyond your ability and climb it. Find whatever passes for Rainbow Family in Austria and take shooms and talk about hopeful dreams of peace and love. Go make love on a beach at midnight.
You may have to work for the machine but in your private life go crazy. Conformity is the mind and soul killer.
Most of that stuff is just stupid. If you gotta take shrooms not to be boring? You may be the most boring of all. Now maybe producing and selling illicit drugs, that might not be boring.
Antonio, I fucking feel this every day. I've been referring to it as the boringest dystopia to my friends and I'm glad to see other are feeling this shit too. The world is alive, we can resist being domesticated. Let's tear shit up. Great read!
It isn't boring for people without a place to live or food to eat... it's terrifying. 3 substack writers I know are living in their cars.
I help financially but they are overseas so I can't share my dwelling.
I don't see any long term solution but I know if people don't open their hearts and homes to people that they allign with when shit goes down ( and it's coming for everyone) then that's it. Humans are done.
I've had homeless people live at my place so I'm walking the talk.
I agree that the boredom is manufactured and destructive but I don't think that's a today problem for billions of people.
People have always been boring and sedentary. Youth’s illusion, powered by a mix hormones and ignorance, sees the world as a dynamic and changing place. We live on a straight line of stimulation and education, every day opens up something new. As we grow through our 30s and 40s, everything becomes more circular, we cook the same meals, exchange the same pleasantries, wake up to the same set of duties.
Don’t worry, most mammals do this just like we do. It is the transition from youth to adulthood. Our earth is in the same phase. We are like a lobster whose shell has become too hard to crack for moulting.
You can grow to hate the familiarity of things or you engage the root of that word and make the things your family. Develop a romance with the quotidian, fall in love with your cutting board, notice your knife, see how they age and change with you as you circle together.
Your quip about "Sell out or starve" kind of reminds me of Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters (and all his work, actually). The way he ponders the tension between conformity and personal fulfillment, agency and authenticity, while uniquely focused on Austrian society, speaks a lot to the feeling of spiritual neglect that's surreptitiously crept up on most people in the modern world. Your words, I'm sad to say, resonate a lot. I often feel nothing and there's a dread brewing in my gut I can't ever seem to shake. It's like being alive makes me feel sick which is, perhaps, a fitting -if narrow- indictment of the promise of our time.
Don’t fash yerself. Things are going to be getting pretty damn exciting very soon. You will before long look back upon this era of bored calm with nostalgia… even there in hyper-controlled Austria.
Bang-on and a big AMEN to this. I've managed to avoid it in part cos i smelled this rat you speak of even before i was in my teens. I've made sacrifices and i've been extremely lucky. Also, i was born in 1964. A person born in 2000 might not have gotten away with what i did, even taking the measures i did. Most born when i was did not, i've had to abandon most old friends out of disgust with how dull they've become, they don't seem to know they even have a pulse. I don't know, the measures would have to be more extreme, for instance, there's probably no damn way you could do it in a developed nation now. On the topic of how excruciatingly boring life and people are today, i recently read a book on the white hunters (African professional hunters) of the final years of the 1800's and the earlier decades of the 1900's. I don't think i've read anything that underscored just how boring we've become like reading of the lives of those men. WDM "Karamojo" Bell, for instance, an ivory-hunter who roamed Uganda - on foot! - hunting elephants. (Not that i'm condoning hunting elephants, but one thing you can say about it - it is the antithesis of boring.) The lives of those men with their daily adventure, year-in and year-out and something like 50% premature mortality rate make men today's lives seem like algae. Probably because men today basically ARE algae. Maybe take up hunting, at any rate. I hunt five or six months of the year and hang out in places where grizzly bears swarm (my own lane for instance). The contract of life was written in blood. It's good to get out in nature as some recommend here. It's better to get out in nature and participate as-nature. Tooth and claw.
Dearest Antonio, I'm wondering if you play video games. Video games and technology in general have robbed the soul of many a young person. One begins to recognize the vacant lost look behind the eyes. Connection, meaning, and peace can all be found by spending time in Nature every day. If you can't spend time outdoors, then keep a few plants in the house and sit in front of one and speak to it and then listen. It will begin to bring you peace as you realize that plant is doing beautiful work just being a plant which then bring the realization that you are purpose-filled and equally beautiful. Lots of Mother Earth love to you!
I live in the US and I've also lived in Europe, specifically in Italy and Germany. I was so bored in Europe so I moved to the US for more exciting opportunities. The bureaucracy and culture there is pretty stifling. But life is boring here in the USA too but in different ways, mostly because we're all struggling to get our basic needs met.
My own solution to wrestling with these feelings is to go out and reconnect with nature. I believe we feel this way because we're cogs in capitalism and as such we've been completely disconnected from the land we live on. Learning about local forests, plants, animals, birds. Taking hikes. Planting and tending a garden. Becoming hyperlocal in your consumption. Talking to my neighbors. Building community with like-minded people.
There's so much you could do with your life instead of going on mindless vacations and mindlessly hyper-consuming in your free time whether that's material things or social media.
Innovation can kill adventure. Look at the innovation of the automobile. Is anything more sickening dull - and ugly, that too - than the car-culture we've become?
Innovation™ has become the obsession of the PMC (professional managerial class). They've drained the art world of any soul because of it.
The US is dying for some of the same reasons.
Lack of innovation is one. We do not have true innovation because necessity is the mother of invention, and who is claiming all of these inventions? The rich, born in a nest of money, who don't understand necessity. They understand patent poaching from real talent, calling it their own and proclaiming themselves genuises. Which they are absolutely not. They had deeper pockets than the innovative and more opportunities to exploit them. That's it.
I grow weary of constant iNNoVatioN:
“Did you learn how to do that? Are you tired of the same old bugs and FeatureBugs? I’m sorry. We have made some changes, and added some things you neither want nor need, and which you didn’t ask for. Because, of course, we couldn’t leave well enough alone, you’ll have to relearn the procedures you used to follow to get the things done you need to do. And, oh yes, in this new ‘release,’ we didn’t fix the old bugs, either. Again. Also, you’ll have to start paying for things the application used to provide for free.”
Imagine if every time you got into a car of a different make and model you had to learn the location of the throttle pedal and the brake, and where the steering is, and how it points the car when moving.
Yeah. That’s right. We need more INNOVATION.
——
Aftet uearz pf doftwsre ypdayes, rhe uOS Applr ceklphine keyvoarf us dtill rhe lstest snd gtearest!
And Appel’s spelt chequer ease eh trough ex sample off aa con textual marble. Fir shore its watt wee wore locking fro alley long.
Things definitely went to shit when we went from shrinkwrap to pushing updates at Microsoft.
They were outsourcing testing. Mostly to end users because shit went out that used to get people fired. I was a tester first.
A lot of Not Invented Here reinventing the wheel bs. Like, here’s the same shitty features, differently broken with some cheezy fischer price ui 🤣
So yeah, there’s rarely any real innovation, it’s all hype.
Well said. Fuck yes. Western culture is utterly meaningless and offers nothing of substance. Read Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin if you yearn for meaning and connection. Those qualities are dormant in everyone. We are wild animals, not yet caged but fenced in certainly. There are plenty of us still connected to soul and life. I have found a mentor who is the most incredibly authentic, loving and free woman. This system will come to an end and when it does, when the guard rails of mediocrity buckle, we will seed the new culture.
Check out Desmond Morris' old flic, The Human Zoo, it's on youtube i believe. He makes an argument for our cities not being the proverbial 'jungles' at all, but rather zoos for human zoo animals. Which perhaps explains the popularity of movies depicting insipid ubanites going to the woods and getting jammed up the fundament by hillbillies. Be the hillbilly being the takeaway for me. Other than the jamming up the fundament part, which is symbolic at any rate.
Dude u just killed it & nailed it right on the head, damn.
Thanks man
What an excellent little essay. Hits the nail right on the head.This piece captures the exact feeling that (among other things) made me flee Europe a decade ago in search for a realer, more exciting and more "humane" (i.e. "natural") life.
I'd like to think that I've made a few steps in the right direction, started growing my own food and planting trees, but I feel the same grey monotony increasingly penetrating every aspect of life, even in the exotic faraway place I ended up in. No matter what you do, the dominant culture's influence is stronger. And in the meantime we've pretty much run out of places to run away to, as the global "Einheitsbrei" slowly became all-encompassing. They say "be the change that you want to see in the world," and I've really tried - but that alone is not enough. Nothing changes. Not yet, at least.
Nobody is safe, and escaping this system has become almost impossible. Let's hope some major disruption puts an end to all this soon, so that we may be less restrained by coercive power and hence more creative, and more alive. It's our only chance if we want to survive as a species.
I don't think this was the point of your post, but the line about "I'm just a privileged white dude..." caught my eye.
Lately, I have begun to dive deeper into state-sanctioned "safe" outlets for anger, boredom, questioning. Identity politics for me feel like this. Instead of questioning why on earth we are using energy for something meaningless, we are asking: "which group has done me wrong, which group have I done wrong?"
Other tidbits I loved: find your group of weirdos and refuse to be normalized. Amen! Solarpunk, degrowth, and community-building have been the salve to my raw soul in these times. I've been developing a non-hierarchical intelligence and consciousness. I feel like a sleeper agent.
I have hope this internal, 'quiet', resistance that I see building, in little corners and spaces, online, at my local coffee shop, and in quick, one-liners in conversations with coworkers, at the doctor's office, and so on. It is there.
But no, it's not much better in the US.
You get to decide to make life fun. Go find some Witches and dance naked in the moonlight. Go find some Rennies and bash each other with swords. Go find a trail that is just beyond your ability and climb it. Find whatever passes for Rainbow Family in Austria and take shooms and talk about hopeful dreams of peace and love. Go make love on a beach at midnight.
You may have to work for the machine but in your private life go crazy. Conformity is the mind and soul killer.
Defy mediocrity!
Most of that stuff is just stupid. If you gotta take shrooms not to be boring? You may be the most boring of all. Now maybe producing and selling illicit drugs, that might not be boring.
Antonio, I fucking feel this every day. I've been referring to it as the boringest dystopia to my friends and I'm glad to see other are feeling this shit too. The world is alive, we can resist being domesticated. Let's tear shit up. Great read!
Thank you! Completely agree
It isn't boring for people without a place to live or food to eat... it's terrifying. 3 substack writers I know are living in their cars.
I help financially but they are overseas so I can't share my dwelling.
I don't see any long term solution but I know if people don't open their hearts and homes to people that they allign with when shit goes down ( and it's coming for everyone) then that's it. Humans are done.
I've had homeless people live at my place so I'm walking the talk.
I agree that the boredom is manufactured and destructive but I don't think that's a today problem for billions of people.
Sharing...what a stupid idea....
Counterpoint, it was always this way.
People have always been boring and sedentary. Youth’s illusion, powered by a mix hormones and ignorance, sees the world as a dynamic and changing place. We live on a straight line of stimulation and education, every day opens up something new. As we grow through our 30s and 40s, everything becomes more circular, we cook the same meals, exchange the same pleasantries, wake up to the same set of duties.
Don’t worry, most mammals do this just like we do. It is the transition from youth to adulthood. Our earth is in the same phase. We are like a lobster whose shell has become too hard to crack for moulting.
You can grow to hate the familiarity of things or you engage the root of that word and make the things your family. Develop a romance with the quotidian, fall in love with your cutting board, notice your knife, see how they age and change with you as you circle together.
buy bitcoin. take the ride.
It's the lifeboat everyone needs.
Your quip about "Sell out or starve" kind of reminds me of Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters (and all his work, actually). The way he ponders the tension between conformity and personal fulfillment, agency and authenticity, while uniquely focused on Austrian society, speaks a lot to the feeling of spiritual neglect that's surreptitiously crept up on most people in the modern world. Your words, I'm sad to say, resonate a lot. I often feel nothing and there's a dread brewing in my gut I can't ever seem to shake. It's like being alive makes me feel sick which is, perhaps, a fitting -if narrow- indictment of the promise of our time.
Don’t fash yerself. Things are going to be getting pretty damn exciting very soon. You will before long look back upon this era of bored calm with nostalgia… even there in hyper-controlled Austria.
Bang-on and a big AMEN to this. I've managed to avoid it in part cos i smelled this rat you speak of even before i was in my teens. I've made sacrifices and i've been extremely lucky. Also, i was born in 1964. A person born in 2000 might not have gotten away with what i did, even taking the measures i did. Most born when i was did not, i've had to abandon most old friends out of disgust with how dull they've become, they don't seem to know they even have a pulse. I don't know, the measures would have to be more extreme, for instance, there's probably no damn way you could do it in a developed nation now. On the topic of how excruciatingly boring life and people are today, i recently read a book on the white hunters (African professional hunters) of the final years of the 1800's and the earlier decades of the 1900's. I don't think i've read anything that underscored just how boring we've become like reading of the lives of those men. WDM "Karamojo" Bell, for instance, an ivory-hunter who roamed Uganda - on foot! - hunting elephants. (Not that i'm condoning hunting elephants, but one thing you can say about it - it is the antithesis of boring.) The lives of those men with their daily adventure, year-in and year-out and something like 50% premature mortality rate make men today's lives seem like algae. Probably because men today basically ARE algae. Maybe take up hunting, at any rate. I hunt five or six months of the year and hang out in places where grizzly bears swarm (my own lane for instance). The contract of life was written in blood. It's good to get out in nature as some recommend here. It's better to get out in nature and participate as-nature. Tooth and claw.
Dearest Antonio, I'm wondering if you play video games. Video games and technology in general have robbed the soul of many a young person. One begins to recognize the vacant lost look behind the eyes. Connection, meaning, and peace can all be found by spending time in Nature every day. If you can't spend time outdoors, then keep a few plants in the house and sit in front of one and speak to it and then listen. It will begin to bring you peace as you realize that plant is doing beautiful work just being a plant which then bring the realization that you are purpose-filled and equally beautiful. Lots of Mother Earth love to you!