Yes, Me and the Rest

The thing about boredom is that it is often paired with laziness — the assumption being that one cannot bring oneself to do much of anything, when in truth the more accurate diagnosis is that until you have done something, anything at all, you feel as though your soul is quietly packing its bags and making for the door. This, upon a brief moment of reflection, sounds rather like a bout of the blues, shall we say — and in the words of a rather famous maison du vin, "yes, me and the rest." You will, of course, have to translate that for proper attribution.

The social misreading is the more interesting problem. Laziness implies a choice, a deliberate withholding of effort that carries with it a faint moral failing — whereas boredom of this particular variety is less a choice than a condition, the body present and the self somewhere slightly adjacent to it, waiting to be recalled. The laziness accusation stings precisely because it is both wrong and not entirely wrong; one is not choosing inaction so much as finding that action requires, in this moment, an implausible act of will.

And so one does something. Anything. Makes tea. Reorganises a shelf. Sends an email that did not strictly need sending. And for approximately eleven minutes, the soul returns, unpacks its bags, and resumes its usual position. The cure is not resolution — it is distraction elevated to necessity, the absurd but apparently non-negotiable requirement that human beings must periodically remind themselves, through the performance of minor tasks, that they are still here.