Bring forth The Great Bore, an ecstatic hologram projected 20 feet high across a classroom wall, for those teleschooling it’s projected directly into their living room, the audience dull, anaesthetized, their eyelids heavy.
“The Great Bore,” the teacher remarks “was a period in history dating from 2012 to [emitted from transcript]”.
The students ears glossed into an aural mainframe, their eyes panning to and fro searching for the next glimmer of excitement, hands in gloves allowing touch from another time, all is incredible, awe-inspiring, technology wrapped around humanity causing thrilling vibrations…and all are bored.
The compressed strains of Western hedonism, complacency and ignorance combine into a virulent mixture of perpetual malaise. The strain is caught easily, thrown into nation upon nation until all that matters is the strongest psychopath. Genuine absorption into knowledge no longer exists, attempts are made to find those who will listen, those who care for the past and for thought, but no such soul lives. Turn your heads left and right, witness the forever-end of the human race, overweight, narcissistic, discipline-lacking husks of being, fawning over their individual screens, messaging nothings back and forth, engorging on the sweetest of goods – “Am I hungry? Or am I just bored?” asks the sweat-laden, breathless hollow-man. Misanthropy heightened for all, and for all no sense of belonging.
The universe wont even throw you its scraps, not even a mere morsel, you beg chaotic zero to give you something for your hunger, but it wants you famished, an animal race deprived of soul-food for eternity. Scattering humans on an apathetic sphere, attempting to scrape up the most minor of events, trying to find their meagre portion of life.
The mass wishes to be freed from this mind-numbing, wage-slavery of nothingness, one minute away from nothing, an event, a moment, some unique instant must exist. The mass that live their lives in mediocrity, neither dumb enough or smart enough for pure-fulfilment. We are the grey matter of life, playing out our time until death, just waiting ‘round.
“I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again … the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.” – J.G.Ballard, Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
We’re bearing witness to death of fantasy, wonder and play, examples of the latter that survive only help curate the demise of others. Evolution, adaption and natural selection will all accelerate into the micro. As depression rises, tiredness evolves and we select our mental misadaptation towards the future. You say you’d love a world without work, but just take a second glance into the eyes of the jobless. Those free to do as they please, without financial worry or burden of fatigue, stability and security amount to very little in a world without event. Wondering ceaselessly from entertainment to entertainment, the monotony continues for those without interest. Those without mandatory occupation for survival end up addicted to consumption.
We used to list the amount of terrorist attacks by the year, now we list them by the month. How long will it be until they’re listed by the week, by the day?
“Not a bad few hours, 2 bombings and a shooting.”
Less than 100 deaths is a good day in the future. All extremes pushed to their limit, excitement exists only in further dreams of unique failures. Less than a million people care that we may get to Mars, or that AI might take over. And as the apathy rises, constructions begin not only to dismantle, but to fall off altogether; bring forth the rude, stinking, unpresentable, tyrannous, self-centred, overweight, unemployable, untrustworthy, emotionless and ultimately indifferent human-race. Only worthy of spit and shun.
I’ve seen entertainment beyond imagination, guns shots, explosions and car crashes blend into a static haze of boring filler. I can click into any channel any time, wildest desires in the morning, compilation of misery at lunch and vomit-comps for dinner. I could listen to albums of death metal at full blast and remain exhausted. In a few years I’ll be injecting high fructose corn syrup into my corneas for sweet relief from The Great Bore.
Perhaps Foster Wallace’ posthumous novel The Pale King rang the loudest truth, at least for the coming era:
“To be, in a word, unborable…. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”
No wonder so many of us are excited by North Korea vs USA, perhaps the only thing that could possibly break boredom is a nuclear blast.
No one told me acceleration was going to be numbing.
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