You're Too Old Not to Be Utterly BORED by All the Caterwauling
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
Are you not just totally exhausted by all the noise?
Maybe, maybe not. It’s been very noisy for a long time, with the increasing need for the public to be entertained by more blood, gore, guts. Perfect example: the John Wick series. Each one more bloody, nasty and grisly than the last.
Wrestling. Politics. Name your public spectacle. Our own lives, too.
Seems we have an insatiable appetite. The media are exhausting. Social media is a screaming campaign for eyeballs and eardrums.
Even Substack is exhausting right now. If we want solace, we’ll be doing a lot of muting, at least for the nonce.
Worse, my inner voices are exhausting.
I feel like Maximus screaming at the crowd
Are you not entertained????????
Before the election it was bad enough. Since then…..I can’t speak for anyone else but I’ve actually reached the point where I am bloody well
BORED.
Over the last year of writing on Substack I’ve addressed the issue of boredom, and how, as a culture, we cannot BEAR to be bored. In fact, we complain about being bored. Even terrified of it.
Oh. My. God. Are you not BORED to tears by all the idiot noise?
Are you not BORED to your bones by all the screaming shouting hollering yelling finger-pointing caterwauling?
Are you not BORED beyond belief by all the screaming for attention?
Even better, are you not BORED to your soul by all the bullshit stories your inner demons keep repeating, that you and I aren’t worthy, don’t deserve, are stupid-fat-ugly-unlovable?
My friend Melissa is my lifeline. After being put through the emotional wringer all over again (four years of the same old) by her partner, a few days ago she said she was BORED.
Her comment sent me into fits of breathless laughter because I was in a state, created by the mob in my own knob.
It isn’t that people in my situation don’t have cause for concern; it’s the runaway worry that took me down a rabbit hole for a few days. Genuine despair, not helped by a habit of catastrophizing.
Her comment gave me the wherewithal to shut that shit down.
Melissa had reached the point where the circular nature of the same issues finally caused her irritation instead of pain. She stopped taking someone else’s poor behavior as a reflection of her own imperfection.
She called the behavior for what it was: BORING.
So are all the (overblown catastrophic) stories in my noggin.
I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d been boring Melissa. Fair question.
Maybe we’ve become boring.
Many of us have good reason to be afraid, angry, frustrated, offended. Name your poison, right? But to be heard above the noise, we scream louder and louder to be heard.
Look at the headlines.
As a society, we drown out everyone else trying to earn eyeballs, pity, attention, whatever the desired currency may be. We can drown out our own inner wisdom that seeks the quiet, soft, safe places.
Perhaps it’s time to be bored, to snore into the skin of our dog’s belly and breathe in their farts and giggle. To fall asleep in the middle of a book while it rains outside. To choose to do nothing. Nothing.
NOTHING.
Instead we may exhaust ourselves and each other in the process, alienate people who love us and who want to help. We alienate ourselves, in fact, when we cannot allow ourselves quiet, and the space and grace to just REST.
I didn’t say retreat from the world forever. I just said rest.
No matter how we voted, no matter what our situation we need rest. Part of my personal rest plan is to put more adventure into my life so that I’m reminded that I have plenty of courage, and plenty of agency. I find my strength in the wild.
What do you need to do to remind yourself that you’ve got plenty of what it takes to deal with whatever life throws at you?
I just walked this path these past few days. We are fortunate if we have friends wise enough to drop the right words when we desperately need them.
We also need to hear those words, then act on them.
Can we hear potential healing above the noise of our own self-bullying?
How invested are we in how bad it is?
As I have written this past week, despair has a purpose, but it’s temporary.
It sucked for a couple of days. I chose not to run from it. Then I finally reached a point where I got bored, with help from Melissa’s laugh line.
What a point of power that is.
In case you decide I’m mad (hell, we knew that already) please see The Power of Boredom.
I gave myself permission to be BORED by all the old stories: you don’t deserve this gorgeous house, you don’t deserve to get paid fairly for your work, you don’t deserve love. If you grew up in a troubled house (who didn’t) and especially if you were the family scapegoat (please again see
‘s work), you know these stories.Those lies are SO. OLD.
Worse, I hated the possibility that I was likely boring my closest friend. She didn’t say that, but kindly, think about anyone you know who tells the same damned complaining story every time you talk, right?
I recently wrote about catastrophizing, something my family honed to a high art. I got great responses. Here’s one of my favorites.
posted a comment which is directly related to this, and I’m posting it here with her permission.
…going through a particularly difficult time in my life, when some of my worst fears actually happened, I discovered a ways to mitigate my worrying. I knew worrying about my loved one was using my imagination, because at least right that moment I had no idea what was going on. So, when I couldn't bring myself to imagine a positive picture, I imagined a mundane one. So, my loved one might not be dead, or in terrible trouble, but they were probably either asleep or watching tv and eating cereal. I found that imaging that was so boring, my mind would stop obsessing on the fears and was more easily distracted by things like what I was eating or watching on tv. (author bolded)
Like Louisa, some of my worst fears have indeed happened. I’ve been bankrupt. Divorced. Been homeless for eighteen months in my thirties. Lost all my savings in the dot.com bust. The incest, the rapes in the military, on and on.
I could caterwaul all night long about All The Things that I’ve been through.
Not only would I be terminally boring, you would be terminally snoring. Especially if I wasn’t making those stories funny (many of them are) and trolling for pity.
Am I not entertained by now? It’s all just life.
Nobody gets through life unscathed. In fact, that would render them….wait for it….
BORING.
Their scars are proof of a fascinating life. Every single thing I have ever experienced has prepared me to deal with right here, right now.
As for me, so for you.
Going through the hard things teaches us who we are. Watch people like
deal openly with her challenges and rise anyway. So many good people speaking openly about their pain, then their process, then their path forward.For my writing and reading dollar, the Stackers who are willing to feel the pain and keep going are the ones worth reading.
Despair is the moment before great strength arises, borne of a different perspective. A different purpose. That’s the hero’s journey- despair plays a critical role in the arc of becoming.
In fact, in all the best stories, there is a moment where our hero is fully in the grip of the villain. S/he faces deep despair, all is lost….until. Something pushes our hero/ine to rise up and do the hard thing anyway.
Despair has a purpose.
The challenges I’m facing didn’t go away. What did disappear was the sense of futility.
Above all I am glad that I have friends who are willing to drop something profound and profoundly funny in my lap right when I need it.
Passing that gift along for what it’s worth.
Let’s be bored by the headlines, the idiocy, the confederation of dunces. Let’s be bored by the brutish behavior of our fellow humans. Let’s be bored by old stories that bark at us about our lack of worth.
Boredom is a force field that protects us from the idiot noise, especially from inside. Especially paired with humor,
…weirdly, boredom is, in this sense, profound self-love.
Be your own hero/ine. Play anyway.
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If you know someone who needs a boost, please consider
I am leaning heavily into small daily lessons from Eckart Tolle, who manages to find ways to make the same basic message fresh enough so that it has a chance to seep into my nervous noggin: the present moment is IT. Our unhappiness comes from wishing the past had been different and fretting about how awful the future might be, even though neither, in reality, exist. It's a simple truth but one that's hard to wrap our conditioned brains around. I'm working on it, and actually appreciate that the nuttiness of our current national/global situation is forcing me to do so. Meanwhile, here's an observation for you, Warrior Woman Julia: anyone who has been through all you've been through and not only survived but thrived and is now inspiring others — is someone who is way too tough to be taken down by anything the power-drunk twittering egos about to take the reins in our country can throw at us.
Julia, this essay made me think and think hard, using the framework of boredom to re-examine the stories and thought patterns I've created throughout my life. Indeed, when these stories and thought patterns get repeated so many times and make us yawn, it's time to think of and do something else ;-) In fact, when I noticed how my stories of my ex started to bore my closest friends and even myself, I decided it was time to put an end to my contact with him for good, so there would be no more repetition of those unnecessary dramas.
I like the comments by M. Louisa Locke. That's such a creative way to use our imagination. As a "worry wort," I can see how this reframing can help me to calm down my overactive nervous system when it comes to certain aspects of life.
Lastly, thank you for being so kind as to mention me in your essay.