No more repeating commitments. No more performance anxiety. We learn to get bored and enjoy the benefits of boredom. With some caveats
Boredom scares us. We perceive it as an inner malaise, a condition of discomfort, with which we find it difficult to live. Life becomes dark, in the dim light of a sense of emptiness and abandonment, and we end up in the vortex of anxiety, a compulsion to move, to do something. A real waste of energy and emotion. Boredom breaks through in the field of depression, and sometimes it represents only a daily mask, difficult to remove.
In literature, great writers (I mention one for all: Alberto Moravia) have recounted the man devoured by boredom, and I happened to meet accomplished, rich people with a good career in progress, however afflicted by the boredom virus. They are really difficult to date, they have no peace. They transmit anxiety, they always have the frenzy to change places and company. They do not enjoy the pleasure of any stable moment of the day. They can't draw a breath without turning it into a gasp of stress.
Long live boredom. Long live the rediscovery of something that we have lost in the era of haste, of performance anxiety, of wanting to do everything immediately, and of the times of super speed imposed by the technological domain. Long live boredom which relaxes, allows us to detach, helps us distance ourselves from anxiety and stress and accompanies us to a more sober and more serene lifestyle. A positive boredom, constructive and not demeaning and pessimistic. Long live boredom, for adults and children. For grandparents who experience the fatigue of aging and for children who are in a frenzy of growth. Many believe that inactivity is bad and can trigger the vicious cycle of laziness. In reality, idleness stimulates creativity. It reduces stress and tension and helps us cultivate new ideas. Does this mean we have to become idle? Absolutely not, rather let's re-evaluate the value and sense of boredom. Boredom obsesses us, it scares us, and we always feel it lurking. Sometimes we try to avoid it even by taking refuge in the virtual world, but in this case the remedy can be worse than the disease, because boredom is associated with a sense of loneliness. And we are even frightened by the risk that our children might get bored: a useless and wrong fear.
Ah, do you think we hear nothing? ... Because we have a porcelain head and crystal eyes, do you think we are deaf, dumb, blind, insensitive? ... You are wrong, my ladies, you are wrong. We, made in your image and likeness, we, if you want to know, we feel it as if our hearts were beating in our chest and our thoughts whirled in our heads. We get along well among ourselves; we tell each other our stories, we console ourselves, we rejoice; we are not at all inanimate, in short: so much so that each doll has its own good story. Would you like to hear mine? ... I will be brief and who knows that I won't teach you something.
I was born in Nuremberg; but who gave me the ability to feel was a girl's kiss, a kiss that made my life flow through my body, that made me know myself. - You are the most beautiful of all and I will make you princess, I will make you queen! - These were the words that accompanied the kiss, this was my baptism. Oh the praises! it is enough to have two ears to hear them; and if one collects them in his bosom with jealousy, he believes them to be good, as if they were truth. Praise benefits the wise and harms the fool, I heard later; but I was not born with wisdom in my body, and those words, which greeted me the most beautiful of all, buzzed in my head like sweet music, teased my nascent vanity, already gave me a haughty and contemptuous air.
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 