This piece is a part of the OneFiveHundred series. Read the mission statement here.
i: want not
Of course, time isn’t real. But it does slow down when you’re bored.
Recently, I’ve been spending the last twenty minutes of my flights sitting in my foam economy seat, staring out the window at the clouds stretching into the distance between each slice of apple or orange I eat, just waiting for the plane to swoon into its landing, thinking about my life. It’s terrible.
This isn’t because sitting there, my brain would snag itself upon some misanthropic feeling, whether it be my uncertain future or my ossified past or even the ways I’m currently deficient. Rather, there was a more profitable venture to what I’d be currently doing. Three feet away from me is a computer zippered up in the back pocket of my Räven 28, it has ~20 books and at least five video games, beside it is my iPad which offers at least ten more articles; in the front flap of the seat in front of me is my phone, stocked with six of my favorite albums, leaning against my Airpods case. Turn your thoughts. It would take me ten seconds to listen to music. Twenty for a book. Thirty for a game. All of this, under a minute — to be pleasantly distracted.
When the plane is landing, and you look past the rows of tree-blocked suburbs, or the lesion of the city at night, it’s much like David Foster Wallace’s opening chapter of The Pale King. To describe it reductively, it’s a description of the Illinois countryside, but the vernacular he uses is nothing short but a demonstration of his command of language. “Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skyline of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight…” he begins.
Therefore, he ends with a command. “Read these.” The rest of the book follows a series of IRS agents at their terribly dull job of filling out reports, and like the characters, the book is filled with terribly technical and boring descriptions of tax laws. Still, you ought to read it (even if the writer himself is a bit morally dubious), as the central thesis of this unfinished book is that to triumph over our boredom is the thankless task of a modern-day hero, to “function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human.” Yes, boredom is rote, and often meaningless, and there is something low-grade painful about doing chemistry flashcards or reading assembly code, so what’s the point of trying your best if there’s easier ways to get it done? Where is the glory in needless suffering? Shouldn’t it be easier?
It then seems reasonable to add some positive reinforcement, to pad your pleasure with pain. Make interesting the dull, aestheticize your job with 9-5 tiktoks or listen to music or have a gander at Youtube on the second monitor.
ii: it’s rotten work
It is true that work — especially rote work — brings deprivation of the worker, with the rise of wage labor and the assembly line, etc, etc. What was once human is now animal, what is animal is now human. Tempting then is the idea of some restorative salve of labor, to carve out your own space, to reproduce a matrix of power that does not reify its domination.
With noise cancellation technology, you can create your own world. But music, that’s what pours tor and substance into it. My primary concern here is with music; while older generations bemoan the “Ipad kid” or “TikTok youth”, I choose music over other forms of distraction because it’s the most frictionless activity you can do concurrently with another low-brainpower labor. To explain, there’s three ways in which music quantifiably improves your life:
- Listening to something while you do it functionally lowers the hypothetical y-intercept of the task, as when queuing the playlist of dark academia or lo-fi girl before you begin studying, and the initial pleasure of sound makes it easier to start the arduous task ahead. It’s a ritual: first, you queue your playlist, then, you check your phone, lastly, the studying begins.
- And when you begin the task (or if it requires little startup cost), music also serves the cognitive role of filling in the blank space left over while you do your rote task. Imagine that focus is normally a light switch switch, either you’re locked in or not (and if you’re not, any work you do will be bad). Now, with music, there’s a bit more leeway between being focused and unfocused, there’s now a space where you can slip in halfway between attention, whether it’s thoughtless transcription or copy-pasting while your ears are filled with chord progressions or d&b. Maybe the lights are dim, but someone’s home.
- I think too that the specter of narrative tips the scales; in setting the aesthetic situation; music soothes the tedium of work into a narrative, invigorating dead facts with real art, discovery of the inner life of objects. I say this because the rise in popularity of cute notebooks or notion templates (and of course, study playlists) simply fills a niche of turning what we initially think as useless into something glamorous.
However, there is a sense that if the purest things in the world must be music and silence[1], work should be silent, and to listen to anything while doing so mars its nature. It shuts out your thoughts, it peels away the corners of not only your perception, but your brain as well. Instead of leaving a space for boredom to seep in, instead you’re doing the work so you’re doing the work so you’re doing the work. No zoned area for the reading or problem set to overtake itself, its assigned percentage; rather, everything is in its place. No land for the linked list to plant its stake in your mind, like cells interlinked. No cairn for Milton to layer his firmaments on top of one another, a strong and then a stronger rope.
I will admit that my arguments are weakest against work; it is true that you can completely enter flow state while listening to classical music or a Kaytranada Boiler Room set, and rituals for doing things are good! I don’t want to glamorize needless suffering, promoting the idea that “pain is intellectual, only evil interesting” as Le Guin writes in The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.
iii: rotting
However, I do think that the way we work drastically affects the way we live; in a discussion during an externship I had, my mentor? interviewee? said that she viewed it more as a work-life harmony than a balance. It carries over. In No Name in the Street, James Baldwin writes about the way in which the actions we take leave a deep groove in our psyche, how we’ll all be paying for the things we do, in one way or another. He writes, “People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead.” Baldwin’s point repudiates the idea that there can be a clean severance between our jobs and our lives, and I agree; extending this to how we waste our time, while you can’t draw a person’s personality out of their algorithmic FYP, you can glean something from their 8 hr/day screen time.
It seems that in our contemporary culture we have killed the brute, lumbering beast crawling towards Bethlehem; waiting for nothing, here are railroads, washing machines and leaf blowers. Or, you can wait with everything, the World Wide Web, a plastic rectangle in your pocket. Still, as much of our leisurely chores are predicated upon patient action, the fact that there is no gulf of patience that we’ve been forced to learn makes it so that we don’t even know how to vault the roadside ditches browning with grass. Microwaving my DoorDash order, I ask myself: three minutes is how many Tiktoks again? Well, how fast can you scroll?
You will pay for this, there’s blood in everything presumed free. duh. (have you ever read a land acknowledgment?) If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. You pay with your imagination, of course, on the body’s dependency for things slow and vast, direct confrontation with Chronos — the brute of time — and you stand beholding him in the clouds, killing him without thought. The variability of work and focus is now two different cups of activity and distraction, with them, how much closer can you fill yourself up until you are maximally entertained while you clean your dorm? When we have a task in life, how do you want to adjust the desired muzak to a point your brain can handle?
This idea of “brain capacity”, or how much your brain can handle, is expressed in an article in “Maybe Baby” by Haley Nahman who discusses leisure and rotting. “The problem is actually in the TV shows you do want to watch…they still only take about 90% of your attention. Better to watch something mediocre that takes up only 50% so you can fill the other 50% with something else, thereby maxing yourself out, not a drop of attention to spare for yourself or your life or the nature of reality,” Nahman writes. “Even a depressed mind feels less perilous when it’s filled to the brim with entertainment packing peanuts. A 90% show just can’t offer that kind of insulation.” I believe that one of my worst desires is that we shouldn’t have this kind of choice to fill ourselves up to the brim, to work ease out of our pain like this. I sometimes feel that Hobbes was right when he said we must agree to brutal governance to escape the ‘war of all against all’. I am aware that Milton believes that laws were created to make us feel like we are sinners, naturally predisposed to evil. I’m also aware of ideology in Althusser, of the way that juridical structures create the subjects they define. That doesn’t change how I feel, however. I don’t think I can ever outsmart my brain.
Therefore, we reach the primal and dual of this equation: maximize happiness, minimize boredom. I reaffirm that this equation is dependent on the idea of efficiency: to get the most out of your time. Work is directed towards dulling the dull, so Pomodoro without suffering, and leisure is situated upon action over relaxing, a friend group event instead of lounging around, and if you are to do so, you must exert at least a little effort to stimulate yourself, to be entertained on Twitter or Reels or TikTok. What valuable information, you’ll trawl and swipe your net of short-form videos.
iv: radical
In a recent Humanities Research Center event, we discussed the uses of reading and its malcontents in the modern era. Between discussing AI tools and crunch time and the general culture, one phrase stood out to me: Return on Investment. If, one of the students argued, college was just a way to propel yourself into a stable job in a collapsing economy, then why would you view knowledge as something different, nothing more than a collection of brute facts?
Certainly, this is why Sparknotes and ChatGPT summaries are so ubiquitous in school*. If there is a correct answer to the text or a right way to write, then you don’t need to push against your intellectual limits slogging through Paradise Lost or Oyez cases, instead, your energy is more efficiently spent on scaffolding off of this pregenerated structure. The results are quantifiable — for less suffering, you get more info, or better grades in class, or more time outside of school with your friends. And in a world where intelligence is something quantifiable and measurable through grades (and we are good at what we measure[3]), it is the best return on investment. The resource committed being your time, which I think is another vital concern that drives this ideology of summary or effectiveness; when the HRC director said that at Yale he only took 9 credit hours a semester, we were aghast. Did you do any extracurriculars on top of that, I wanted to ask? What about jobs? Surely you didn’t waste your time at such a high-quality school. But here and now, even with Rice limiting our schedule to 18 credit hours, there’s still a valorization of the grind, the cult of business, our flag, the fully-wefted Google Calendar. And as an OR (previously COMP) / ENGL double major, I’ve certainly had my hell semesters, and something had to give. But what I gave away was, of course, what was deemed less valuable: much easier to skim Sontag than rush-job a COMP 182 assignment, much more efficient to work on homework in English than doze off during a lecture on graph theory. It’s simply a value proposition, so what would you do if you were me? The consequences are readily visible if I give less effort in STEM, invisible in the humanities.
What about the soul, you might ask? Ha. If there were such a thing as a soul, I think it would be behind the gallbladder, but above the kidneys[2]. & I’ll shred it.
But this is just a thing I’d tell myself just so that I can believe it; we all do this, Austin wrote Performative Utterances and said all speech is performative for a reason. Now, if we are to return to reading, to do so is to do something that seems to occupy a middle ground between work and leisure — it’s hard to read during your free time in a way that scrolling on your phone isn’t, and instead of discernable bites of easily consumable content, the value of books are couched behind pretentious prose, or proasic descriptions of cities, or simply inscrutable. So it’s easy to take the primrose path and read whatever’s easiest; I know this to be the case, many a time I’ve looked at my bookshelf and found everything on there too hard to read, the Lowest Common Denominator of my brainpower being Faulkner or Morrison, formidable writers all by themselves, and scaling all the way up to Aquinas or Rawls. But is simply reading what you want, or what’s easy, the right way to read?
I think that soul-crushing labor is bad, but I also think that it is extremely important as a test for us to endure it and choose to become better humans after it. These may be contradictory beliefs, and most likely the most Asian trait I have (if I can claim such a thing). I have inordinate standards for things, I will bash my brain in over theory I don’t understand until I can, I will revise and edit articles that I believe are anything less than perfect, I will quote 20 things to you in a conversation to demonstrate my intelligence. This is not a good habit. But I think that hard work and dedication can convert themselves into a way through boredom and the terror of ennui. bell hooks writes about this movement from pain to pleasure in All About Love, stating, “When I had a teaching job I hated (the kind of job where you long to be sick so you have an excuse for not going to work), the only way I could ease the severity of my pain was to give my absolute best. This strategy enabled me to live purposely. Doing a job well, even if we do not enjoy what we are doing, means that we leave it with a feeling of well-being, or with self-esteem intact.”
I believe that what hooks writes is true as skill and aura have no dividual being, but this “conversion” also applies to how we read and what we read. (It is important for me to note that reading is inexplicably tied to writing, and it is no small part that this essay draws upon Rayne Fisher-Quann’s article comparing writing to walking, as a sort of spiritually fulfilling activity that is often ineffective or useless and inefficient, in contrast to the ease of maximizing profit through platforms like Sudowrite that turn your ideas into straight-line narratives.) The idea of value, of easy value, is something so insidious that it precludes the true development of character, of self-respect, of creating meaning. Sometimes, to read a hard text is to stop in the middle of it and recognize that what you’re doing is valuable to no one but yourself, perhaps even less than that, that it’ll never be used as a demonstration of skill, and you certainly can’t brag about how you read such a difficult book like Anti-Oedipus, no one cares. But to do so anyway, I think, is a way of becoming human, to create meaning where there is simply none. It’s facile today to only do what we want, to only tolerate things that are comfortable or digestible. But this intolerance of friction is surprisingly what weakens us: if we don’t open ourselves up to difficulty, there’s never going to be a chance to grow. In this sense, boredom offers us a test, a rebuff onto ourselves to see if we can develop a more discerning eye: when I am bored, I ask, what am I bored of? What hurts more than others? Why is this task boring and what does it reveal about myself? Why do I want to be entertained and how can I find ways to entertain myself? Creativity comes from this space, that place where because everything is impossible, to imagine anything is thinking outside of the box (and famously, we can only think of what we know). Again, I do not wish the trials of Job upon you; to suffer is not inherently holy and I hope that my first essay explained that well enough, but the everyday indignities we face force us to react: when worthless, do we quench our desire for worth & avoid living? Are we swallowed by the hurt and inflict others? Or do we do the arduous and thankless work of choosing dedication and mercy, the real “correct” answer, as many times as we can, and then once more?
A side note: it is correct to be skeptical of easiness. But are we willing to accept the challenge?
There is our focus on the use-value of things especially applies to non-fiction writing; if it’s a collection of facts or histories, there’s nothing beyond the text. Even lesser, there’s nothing beyond the facts. It’s data, baby. I still hold the opinion that sometimes, it’s okay to be incorrect, and it’s a bit charming. An inversion of Thesus’ line in Midsummers’, where he states, “Love therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity/in least speak most, to my capacity.” Their misfire speaks of their love, therefore I love them — not out of skill, but their passion. I don’t think that things need to be correct or even true for them to be admirable, I don’t that Plath’s Fever 103°’s line “I love, I/am a pure acetylene virgin” really represents a masterful trick to display self love[4] (I love I, or I love myself), but simply the attempt at analysis by Wayson is worth something because if it was true, how then would I mimic it in my own verse — perhaps twisting Descartes’
“I think, I
am”, or something else entirely? In this, I think that there is a certain art to speculation, to harvest only chaff, to cook literally nothing. Even nonfiction books are more than a collection of quantifiable knowledge; its organization, or prose, or focal points and blurs, its recommended reading and epigraphs — they all matter.
v: again
When I was little, every time I ate sunflower seeds, I made sure to take it step by step, correctly. No rushed crack and seed-split-swallow, rather, it would be a long drag of the tongue around the outside of the shell, soaking in its vat-flavored pinstripes, then a careful split of pips, licking the nacre off the interior, finally, I would pestle the kernel with my tongue, breaking it into smaller, then smaller, pellets of sharp seed.
I think reading is like this, in a sense. It might be boring to spend deliberate time visiting and revisiting something, inside and out, and you don’t maximize the nutrition/time ratio, but I find it to be more rewarding. Back to music, really quick: when I listen to music when I walk or read, I can feel the sharp corners of my mind being rounded out — I’m not troubled by the barbaric edges, instead tending towards a happy median of thought. No worries, no immense joys. But it’s mediocre. I think that silence opens up spaces, spaces for anything and everything, and it’s incredibly scary ofc; to be left in a room with all your worst thoughts as you lay in bed, but to simply think, to dive into things in all their terrible glory is what makes you more of a person.
Instead of being afraid of failure, we should be afraid of mediocrity. I had a history professor in high school who would consistently ask us: do you want to be good, or do you want to be mediocre? Tongue in cheek, I would think, depends on how good being mediocre is. The truth is, I don’t think it’s good at all. “Many things may be boring or arduous, but it’s far better to be bored in feathers and furs than to be bored in the blue light cast by a three-hour doom-scroll,” Charlie Squire writes on their Substack on “How To Be A Better Lover”. To read is to develop a taste, to laugh at trashy pulp fiction but still drink some delight in the bodice-ripper’s audacity, to enjoy Midsommar and Megalopolis alike. It is to say “screw you” to Butler when they write something incomprehensible and then hurriedly underline and photograph a page that makes sense a second later. It is to read and reread anything, to ask like some stupid child: what does this mean? Why do I feel this way? And if this is the reason, why is it? Why? Why? Why? your looping cry.
What I’m trying to say is that I want to move away from certainty, the “dull straight lines
of two by fours and endings,” I want to embrace the stuttering of Leslie Jamison when she writes about her medical record in The Empathy Exams as
“a tape that keeps correcting itself, that messes up its dance steps:
Patient is here for an abortion for a surgery to burn the bad parts of her heart for a medication to fix her heart because the surgery failed. Patient is staying in the hospital for one night three nights five nights until we get this medication right…Patient is angry disappointed angry her procedure failed.”
“I’m very afraid of assertion. Always trying to get out of ‘totalizing’ language”[5]. And I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear enough, or too discursive, nor not discursive enough, or my jokes weren’t funny. I understand that I am still a sophomore, ‘wise fool’, that I barely grasp many contours of the argument I’m trying to make, but I think I’ll end with this: things don’t need to be worth anything for them to be worth anything. Read this, or that, or then, or now. Or simply, read these.
OneFiveHundred is a series by Wild Grain Editor Hongtao Hu, all thoughts are his own and not necessarily representative of The Wild Grain or the Rice University English Department.
Works Cited:
1: Fitzgerald, Penelope, and Mark Damazer. Human Voices. Mariner Books, 2015.
2: Rakdos Shred-Freak, RTR #221. Illustrated by Wayne Reynolds.
3: Goodheart’s Law
4: Wayson, Kary. “Poem Guide: Sylvia Plath: ‘Fever 103o.’” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 13 Aug. 2007, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68911/sylvia-plath-fever-103.
5: Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf Press, 2016.