Overstimulation Nation

How embracing boredom could help us

Marjorie Taylor Greene proving that she has opposable thumbs.

I watched the State of the Union the other night. Not because I wanted to. But because the batteries in my remote gave out, and I was too lazy to change the channel to something more edifying and dignified, like Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New Jersey or TLC’s 1000-Lb Sisters – “the Slaton sisters are back and it’s the heaviest season yet.”  (Easy, body positivists, it’s not my ad copy.)

But have no fear. I’m not going to subject you to your umpteenth postmortem on the spectacle, which will be forgotten before the next spectacle takes off any second now, as the spectacle taxiway is pretty congested these days.  In fact, I couldn’t subject you to one if I wanted to. I didn’t bother taking notes, and my attention was divided with my nose simultaneously buried in my laptop, since I was trying to unseat some joker named MAGAlicious as the high scorer in Tri-Peaks Solitaire.  (I was playing to avenge the injured Capitol police. I assume MAGAlicious was playing to avenge the so-called January 6^th martyr Ashli Babbitt, who the police shot in cold blood as she was innocently trying to maim Nancy Pelosi and hang Mike Pence. So the Solitaire stakes were high.)

Though just because I was distracted doesn’t mean I can’t easily paint the State-of-the-Union picture in a few quick brushstrokes:  Joe Biden did just fine, proving less animatronic than usual. The Prevagen smoothies appear to be doing their work - he didn’t even accidentally order a waffle cone at the lectern mic, mistaking it for a Friendly’s drive-thru.  Democrats applauded like trained chimps, ready to credit Biden for everything from making the blind see to the lame walk. While Republicans scowled at him as if he were a war criminal (not the “good” kind of war criminal like Vladimir Putin) or a drag-queen-story-hour reader (no offense intended to Republican George Santos, an actual drag queen who tells fanciful tales that could only be believed by dim children and/or Kevin McCarthy).

I kept telling myself I should’ve been more excited. These things used to be staid, predictable affairs. But thanks to the new breed of foaming-at-the-mouth congresstrolls, there seemed to be an endless barrage of heckling and eye-rolling and booing every few minutes. (“Liar!”……“It’s your fault!”….. “Give us Barabbas!”)  The heckler chorus was led, naturally, by Outrage Barbie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, dressed in a snow-white fur-lined getup that made her look like the White Witch of Narnia.  (I half expected her to turn her enemies to stone, and to groom children with Turkish Delights – not to be confused with the groomer that her tangelo-flavored Lord’n’Savior is now suggesting Ron DeSantis  is.)  MTG and company shouted and catcalled like they were at amateur night at the Apollo, trying to get the Sandman to give the hook to a bad ventriloquist, instead of paying some basic respect to the President of these-here United  States. (I use “United” loosely.)  MTG was so excitable, you’d have thought she’d just received a Q-drop alerting her that The Jews were having a clearance sale on space lasers down at the synagogue gift shop.

And yet, even with all the excitement, I couldn’t sustain any. I was bored by the excitement. Or rather, I craved boredom, finding all the excitement dull in a not-this-shitshow-again sort of way. For the last decade or so, we’ve been too over-excited, over-provoked, and overstimulated. I could pull a thousand examples with a five-second Google search. And you can too. So let’s skip it. Instead, I’d just direct you to take a look at your browser history.  Which, after you get past all your porn searches (face it, you’re a dirty bird), is probably loaded with one faux-news story after another - like the kind I religiously read on Mediaite (hypocrisy, thy name is Matt Labash) - which invariably involves someone “ripping” someone else, or documents stupid things stupid people say on TV, or which informs us that “Twitter is reacting” to something, meaning that yet another  poor schmuck is at the bottom of a mean-girls pile-on.

One of the shrewdest observers of our times, Tom Wolfe, used to be fond of employing the French term nostalgie de la boue, coined in 1855 by the French dramatist Émile Augier. It translates as “nostalgia for the mud.” Or what Merriam-Webster now defines as “attraction to what is crude, depraved, or degrading.” Unlike Wolfe, I try not to pepper my copy with French phrases. Not because I’m opposed to looking smarter than I actually am – I’m perfectly fine with that. But because I don’t speak French. I can’t even master the lyrics to “Lady Marmalade.” And yet, I find a French phrase rolling around on my tongue just now: nostalgie de l’ennui. Or, “nostalgia for boredom.” (Thanks, Google Translate!)

In other words, I miss what it feels like to not be overstimulated or provoked or moved to outrage, which we are constantly prompted to be. There is not much our society won’t ingest these days.  We like at least two of everything, and supersized. But one thing we seem to have no appetite for is being bored even for a second. Letting our minds sit still, instead of wandering around in our pathology-driven media hellscape. Being overstimulated, mind you, is something many consider a gift of the modern era. As the old Chinese curse has it, “May you live in interesting times.” Well, we do.  But the times might have become too interesting for our own good.

The other day, I re-read an old essay in UnHerd from another great observer of our times, Douglas Coupland. Most know Coupland as the coiner of “Generation X,”  a place-holder of a generational  handle that we GenX’ers were too apathetic/jaded  to swap out, thus proving the moniker’s point.  But the Canadian Coupland is much more than that  – he’s an artist, a prolific novelist, and has been a keen observer of what is happening to us for a good three decades.  His piece was called “Why the Nineties Rocked.”  And while it was about a lot of different things, it was partly about how different life looked in the last days before we had constant noise in our ear. Sample:

I do think that deep down, nobody was really surprised by 9/11. In some ways the 1990s were too good to last. By 1998, daily life began feeling like visiting a department store to buy a shirt and realising your Visa card is likely to be declined, and the darkness of the early nineties began to re-emerge. In 2000 the Spice Girls, who may as well have been named The AntiKurt {Cobain}, disbanded and, when tech crashed later that year, a lot of people lost a lot of money — but nobody, to be honest, was the least bit surprised. And then came 9/11. The western world kept a buzz going for twelve years, and that’s an accomplishment. It must also be said that the 1990s weren’t squandered, because even in the dark years they were fun. They weren’t complicated. Chuck Klosterman says that young people always glamorise and grow nostalgic for the world that existed 20 years before them. I remember wondering how great the 1950s must have been like. And the 1990s make great nostalgia bait: simpler politics, plus great music, plus cool fashion cues. And maybe we can create another halcyon bubble again one day! The generation that came of age in the 1990s, now well into middle age, have a lot of happy memories of a sort that may never be possible to have again. At the moment any possibility of collective joy seems about as realistic as a Miss America contestant trying to wish world peace into existence. In the 1990s we still had the future, a place that you could travel to, that would be cool when you got there, like Australia or the South Pole. Right now we merely have a future, and a murky one at that, and it’s probably more like Kenosha, Wisconsin than Sydney. I remember doing a book tour and ending up on a local AM radio station’s podium at the grand opening of Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota on 11 August 1992. It was full of Americans in alpha consumption mode, eating ice cream, faces beaming, walking around in unselfconscious bliss. The local radio jock said to me, “You must think all of this is pretty silly”. He motioned towards the crowd and then to a rollercoaster directly beside us that came screeching at our heads every 95 seconds. But I said, “No. In a century people are going to look back on right now as a sort of magic era, a charmed time of peace and prosperity and freedom from fear, as something that can never happen again, no matter how much they wish it would.”

That might sound a bit like despair. Or maybe it’s just hard truth. And telling the truth always liberates us, even if it scares the hell out of us simultaneously. (We shouldn’t be scared of being scared.)  Bad things have always happened in this world. That’s nothing new. And bad things will continue to have their uninterrupted run, right until the end of time.  But the “freedom from fear” Coupland speaks of is largely a function of not wallowing in it all the live-long day, which  our trusty bad-news delivery systems are pretty good about making us do. They give us the illusion of constant movement, even if our only destination is backwards, prompting us to forever double down on fear, and agitation, and mutual suspicion, while steeping us in our own soul sickness.

It’s a trap, which maybe seeking out a little more deliberate boredom – also known as stillness - could help us avoid. As the old Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, whose praises I have sung in these pages before, framed it:

Our being is not to be enriched merely by activity or experience as such. Everything depends on the *quality* of our acts and our experiences. A multitude of badly performed actions and of experiences only half lived exhausts and depletes our being. By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. This growing unreality cannot help but make us unhappy and fill us with a sense of guilt. But the purity of our conscience has a natural proportion with the depth of our being and the quality of our acts: and when our activity is habitually disordered, our malformed conscience can think of nothing better to tell us than to multiply the *quantity* of our acts, without perfecting their quality. And so we go from bad to worse, exhaust ourselves, empty our whole life of all content, and fall into despair. There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform: and often it is quite beyond his power.

So maybe I’ll turn down all the noise and head back to Tri Peaks Solitaire with my old pal, MAGAlicious. It’s kind of boring. But being bored might be a good start for healing what ails us.

Bonus Poem:  I liked Pablo Neruda’s poetry a lot more than I liked the old commie’s politics. Here’s one called “Keeping Quiet”:

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about...

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Bonus Track:  In case I sounded too bleak, here’s a (quasi) optimistic song by one of my old favorites David Baerwald, formerly of David & David, off his Bedtime Stories album from Coupland’s storied 1990s.