Boredom and Freedom

After all the stories in Time, after all the "thought-provoking" books, after all the segments on the television newsmagazines, I have finally come up with the definitive trait, universally shared by all members of my generation: boredom. One cannot walk into a high school or a college dormitory without hearing complaints of boredom at every turn. TV is boring; most movies are boring; books are boring; my stupid job is boring; schoolwork, above all, is boring. Video games are boring. Sitting around talking to my friends is nice, but it gets boring after a while if you know what I mean.

I think that we need to stop being bored all the time, and I think that I have found the solution to boredom: working dilligently. I have had nothing but amazingly crappy jobs, and I have performed remarkably well at all of them. I was a fast and friendly grocery bagger. I sorted pop bottles with alacrity and zeal. I am the fastest and most accurate user of a weed wacker east of the Mississippi. I took deep pride in my workmanship when I went an entire Friday night without messing up any pizzas. And I am the best data entry person Grumish Chiropractic has ever seen.

But isn't that kind of pathetic that I take pride like that? I think that question crossed the mind of virtually every member of my generation, perhaps accompanied by some kind of "witty" or "ironic" comment like "Yeah, that's cool, I guess" or "Hey, to each his own, I guess." Well, guess this: it's not pathetic. It is the natural human response. Sure, every job has its moments of drudgery. In every job I have had, I have looked at how much needed to be done and just wished it could be over right now. That is not the problem, because that is also a natural human response. The problem comes when work is always a means to non-work, either in the form of leisure or advancement. There are occasionally people who work really hard, but it is always in service of something else. The best examples of this are the archetypal 4.0 students who actually hate school and the very idea of intellectual challenge and development: they're just doing it so that they can get a "good job", which they will also hate.

People who actually work hard as an end in itself, however, are not suck-ups at all. They are, for lack of a better turn of phrase, sticking it to the Man. In our society, power does not demand that everyone be happy and content in his or her job or school or family life. Rather, power makes an infinitely more oppressive demand of us: Enjoy yourself. Do what you want. Be yourself. And along with this, it delivers a disturbing series of images from the bad old days (ca. 1950) when one was supposed to be a slave to duty: a mindless factory worker or office drone, a sexually repressed family man or housewife trapped in a pathetic shell of a marriage, a person for whom society had a well-defined and horribly growth-stunting place. And implicitly, we are led to believe that that is still "what is expected," still our "duty," so that we end up doing the math and coming up with the idea that things like taking pride in our work and remaining faithful to our spouse are obviously just going to hold us back from realizing our full potential -- and what worthless people we would be if we failed to realize our full potential! How guilty we would feel if we did not take full advantage of this new freedom from duty and freedom to our self-actualization!

But now our duty is precisely to "enjoy ourselves," and that is a horrible burden, because the demand is by its very nature unfulfillable in our current situation. Someone is going to have to be an accountant, and can you really be self-actualized as an accountant? Can you really be self-actualized and mow the golf course? Or teach the same damned thing to a new group of third graders every year? As long as we are told that we have much more freedom to "write our own stories" or "find ourselves" than any previous generation, as long as we are constantly told of the unprecedented opportunities facing our generation, we are never going to be happy -- unless we take some actual responsibility for our situation and refuse to be bored.

So we just give up, play Playstation for too long, and hate ourselves afterward. Because it gets boring after a while, you know?