Guest post by Hursh Joshi.
I am at a loss for what to do. So, I sit and play solitaire. Mindlessly. Some outcome of the universe banking on every game. Sometimes it becomes very serious – like I am the police monitoring my own moves. Other times it is careless. When it gets too tedious I switch to see if anyone has emailed me, messaged me, sought me out in some other way. Hardly ever is it a message I want. Then I go wandering into my past. Remembering things that people said. My friend Takahide once said to me, “We act first, and make explanations later.”
Takahide wasn’t talking about apologies. It wasn’t something lost in translation. He meant what he said. That we do what we’re going to do without reason, and only create a narrative explanation later. Do I do this shit because I’m bored, or do I just do it and then reason I must have been bored? It’s an interesting question, because we don’t have to be bored. We can tease ourselves with interesting conundrums even when we can’t move, even when we are in moderate pain (nobody in extreme pain is ever feeling bored).
Years later I read that writing plays an important role in mental well-being, even if we only write to ourselves for less than a minute a day. We process our own narratives differently when we have to write them down from when we merely speak them. That is we create a better explanation of our actions.
Can that mean that boredom is merely a construct to mask our own ineptitude? A narrative to explain inane action that doesn’t have to be? For a moment I thought I was onto something, but then I got bored…..
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Above is blog post no. 1 in the small blogging experiment here on jonathanwichmann.com feat. content written/created by Hursh Joshi. The experiment is about testing what kind of content drives what kind of interest and traffic. The result of the experiment will be shared afterwards. The topic, it seems, revolves around boredom. And there’s a rule too: Hursh is not allowed to write two blog posts of similar style.
