August 19th, 2024
I don’t give advice, but there are things I say often that I think are worth saying.
I wouldn’t call it wisdom; in fact, they’re just words from an arrogant, not-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is asshole (these are all choice words said about me in my own comment section over the years).
I can’t help but notice how increasingly reflexive human beings are with their phones. I’m sure you’ve seen it too, unless, you know, you’ve been too busy looking down at your own. I’m guilty of it at times. It’s not generational; I see just as many elders who are incapable of enduring a moment where nothing is being said or scrolled, though I do work with a lot of young people, and some of them have had these devices placed firmly in their fingers from birth.
We are in constant stimulation, bombarded from below with lights and sounds and the tightly-edited and barely-formed opinions of eight billion faces.
You don’t have to be around people for long until one of them inevitably, dramatically declares that they’re bored. And this is where I, an arrogant asshole, like to chime in:
“It’s okay to be bored.”
I mean it. It’s okay.
It’s okay to experience time as it’s moving at regular speed.
It’s okay to spend a minute in your own mind, to check in with your own thoughts, to sit on the floor in the attic of your head.
It’s okay to discover parts of yourself that you’ve forgotten or haven’t known yet. It’s okay to get to know you and how you feel and what you actually think.
We are not meant to be optimized. I say this to me as much as I say it to you. As an artist who answers to no one, who isn’t supported or encouraged to create by anyone, who will never produce any work unless I do it myself, I constantly feel the pressure to use every aspect of my life as steps towards goals, when being alive is the only real goal.
Life isn’t an algorithm. Our brains and hearts and souls are supposed to collide, with difficult people and uncomfortable situations, with near-impossible challenges and crushing boredom.
And it’s all okay.
It’s fine and, better than that, it’s the opposite of our phones. The more you live life, the more you realize it isn’t about you. How cringe is it to read comment sections where mobs of people complain that something out there displeases or despairs them because it just isn’t for them? (How cringe is it that I use cringe?)
Technology can be great. It can take notes and photos and videos to support our memories. It can connect us to people we may not see often or might otherwise never meet. There are positives in the plastic boxes in our pockets.
But think about how you use it.
And rethink it. Rethink everything. Rethink time. Rethink space. Rethink boredom.
The Den 