And other GBS

OK, so. I know it really looks like not the newest of books and frankly it isn’t. It’s been kicking around the pile for a minute, but I did just recently start in on it this month on or about the first. I threw it into a bag with a dewy bottle of soda and messed up the cover. Very wabi-sabi. I guess. Something like that.

But I digress.

There’s also one new and a few older stickers I slapped on the back cover. And by “slapped” I mean strategically, carefully, and more or less precisely placed. Of course theres some labels I printed for added emphasis. Because, also, why not.

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And now for something completely different…

Maybe this should be its own post.

In high school I read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and loved it. Several faculty told me variations on the phrase “you can’t possibly enjoy or understand that books because you don’t have enough life experience”. To which, I basically said nothing but should have given a solid “fuck you” to each one. Kinda did that by finishing the book in spite. But I really did enjoy it and understood as much as I could at the time. Read the thing with a dictionary in the other hand because of my relatively limited vocabulary and Heller’s completely unlimited vocabulary. I also used CliffsNotes or Sparknotes, whatever was available at the time. I do not remember which. The point I’m trying to make is that I went out of my way to get every morsel out of the book.

The character I want to bring up is Dunbar. Roundabout way of getting here, but we’re here. Dunbar’s whole idea was that if life was exciting time moved faster. And to combat this, he cultivated boredom to slow down time. This is a pretty gross reduction of the concept and its implementation in the novel. I’ll expand: Dunbar believed that when they were flying missions and just about getting killed every second of them, time seemed to move faster. He feared death. Dunbar reasoned that since the action of the missions sped up time, the opposite of that kind of action was boredom and therefore the cultivation of boredom would slow down time and extend his time being alive. There’s a hell of a lot of philosophy that goes into this line of reasoning and in Catch-22 Dunbar even goes into the math behind it reasoning how much more life he has given himself.

I’m not going to go into all of the details, we have the gist of the idea and will move on form here.

There have been more than a few articles written on the importance of cultivating boredom from the sake of creating art (like this one on Medium or this other one by Phil Vance) or fostering the development of a child. (A note for clarity’s sake, I just googled these articles up and do not endorse any or the aforementioned links. I know effectively nothing about Phil Vance or the Child Mind Institute. I’m really hoping they’re not insane in a bad way, or politically motivated, or evil in some way. Not saying they are, or aren’t. I just don’t know.)

To be perfectly clear, I agree with the Medium article. The other two I partly agree with to varying degrees. The Googlemachine is one hell of a device.

I first read the Medium article a while ago, really not sure when. But it has been weighing on me ever since. I constantly go for the cheap dopamine hit on my phone or the tv and spend very little time just bored and waiting for something to come to mind. I spend entirely too little time musing without a goal in mind. I’m hopelessly addicted to instant gratification. That dopamine is so easy to get out of the internet, I desperately want to stop it.

For example, I really want to get myself a dumbphone and leave mobile internet in my dust. Unfortunately i rely way too much on GPS to do that. I’m a transplant and hopelessly lost without the maps on my phone. I’ve been looking at the Light II Phone for quite some time. That and another one, the Punkt MP02. These are the frontrunners in my dumbphone race. Now I’m very distracted again, this time by shopping for a new phone. Murder.

Phones aside, I really want to get off of Social Media. I really want to get off of the mobile side of the internet. I really want out of the smartphone rat race.

I need to cultivate time to be bored and just let my mind wander without getting the easy dopamine from the aforementioned sources.

Tomorrow is a new day and i can start eliminating the things I don’t need on my phone in the morning. Maybe that’s a project that can actually happen.

The plan for this post was to go in depth about boredom an art, looks like that really is going to be its own post. Possibly tomorrow.

I’ll post again later, when I know more