Paradox of boring — When boring becomes great!
Life is full of paradoxes, but I didn’t know nor understand this when I was younger.
By the paradox of boredom I mean the following:
You are bored.
You don’t want to be bored.
You start doing something new.
It has novelty and aliveness in that experience.
Eventually, you “go back” to boredom.
And you are now in boredom.
But the trick here is that boredom from the beginning of the journey and boredom after the experience is not the same boredom.
On the surface level, things appear to be the same. But when you dig down, dig deep down (said in Arnold Schwarzenegger voice) you will find a very big difference between those boredoms.
Like a plane-to-needle size difference.
And from boredom, you will experience aliveness and novelty, just so you can, later on, come back to boredom.
It’s like the Heisenberg quote
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
Like wtf are you talking about Bruno?
About the next concept, I am about to introduce called “The Hero’s journey”
The Hero’s Journey
“ The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes.” — Marcel Proust
Most of us know the story of the Hero’s Journey.
There is a person.
Something happens that forces him to take an adventure.
A wise mentor comes along to push him into the adventure.
He takes the adventure.
He crosses the “point of no return” where everything is unknown and uncertain.
He encounters problem after problem after problem on this adventure.
He grows from every single problem he solves only to face an even bigger one.
This culminates when the Hero faces the biggest obstacle. The Hero solves the problem and totally transforms himself in the process.
Now, totally changed, the Hero starts heading back home.
And the Hero at the end comes back home as a totally different person, bred in the crucibles of the adventure.
But if you would only look at the surface of the Hero’s Journey, you would only see a person going from point A to point B and then back to point A.
It would simply appear that the person just came back to the same state that it had before the entire adventure started.
But as anyone who ever watched a movie in his life knows, the person’s life has completely changed. Maybe the surface looks the same. But the person behind that attire is a totally different man.
Modern-day Hero’s Journey and the Paradox behind it
When I first understood the Hero’s Journey, I started seeing it everywhere.
Even in situations which are not an obvious Hero’s journey:
A religious guy starts exploring science.
Becomes atheist.
After a couple of years of deep exploration of science, he finds unexplainable things that can only lead him to the belief that there is God.
Goes back to being religious.
An observer would say that the guy is either crazy or delusional. And the world is filled with people who would judge this behavior immediately.
But we are not like that. Because we understand what happened. The Hero’s Journey carved this man’s character and led him back to the same spot, but with totally different belief systems in the “background”.
And as M.Scott Peck would say:
Is it possible that the path of spiritual growth leads first out of superstition into agnosticism and then out of agnosticism toward an accurate knowledge of God?… The God that comes before skepticism may bear little resemblance to the God that comes after.
The same thing could have happened with someone who was an atheist, started reading the Bible or sacred/spiritual documents and books to become enlightened, only to figure out after deep exploration, meditation and self-reflection that there is, in fact, no God, putting him back in the position of an atheist.
But his core is different now.
And that’s why the quote from Heisenberg at the beginning of the text was so powerful.
What the average Millennial has to do with this?
Now for an example which is super close to young people.
Pay attention!
You don’t travel anywhere.
You want to travel. Because you want to explore the world. But the truth is, you want to explore yourself.
You start traveling.
You travel to 50+ countries in the world.
You figure out things about yourself from the traveling.
Therefore, traveling lost its first purpose to you.
You come back and create a home in one place.
You stop traveling.
You see, we made a full circle.
But the behind the scene story is that you have no idea who you are until you travel somewhere else.
Only when extracted from your own culture, daily life, and environment can you realize the absurdities of the things that you thought are indispensable for your life.
You realize, that your life back home was nothing more than a mirage of things that you thought mattered, but inherently don’t.
The same thing happens with terminally ill patients. They have a sudden realization of what is important in life. And assure as hell, that isn’t a new dress, car or 55' inch TV.
When you realize who you are, and what is important in your life, you can go back to the original point A and commit to one thing in your life. You own mission that guides you forward.
As Mark Manson would say:
You realize that you will never be able to explore or encounter all of these destinations. Because you realize that the more you spread the breadth of your experience across the globe, the thinner and more meaningless it becomes.
You realize that there’s something to be said to limiting oneself, not just geographically, but also emotionally. That there’s a certain depth of experience and meaning that can only be achieved when one picks a single piece of creation and says, “This is it. This is where I belong.”
Perpetual world travel literally gives you a whole world of experience. But it also takes another away.
From the outside, it looks the same.
But from the inside, it feels different.
When you commit, your daily life becomes predictable. But it has to. Because you committed to a certain cause. And it takes time, perseverance, and grit to make it happen.
That can only be achieved by having a proper routine filled with habits which push you towards your mission every…single…day…
And that can become boring.
But as we saw at the beginning of the text, this is a different type of boredom.
It is the one you chose because the problems you overcame showed you what kind of a person you are.
The paradox of boredom.
