How to never be bored
Welcome to my first Substack post ever! Welcome also all the people who subscribed to my previous email newsletter via my site at davidyoon.com.
I’ll start things off where it all began, meaning with my mom.
My mom never gets bored. It’s a skill. I learned it, and so can you!
I think she cultivated this very special skill during all her years of working at our bodega—the family business—standing in the same spot day after day, even on holidays. At first, she used to tell me that Life is boredom. But over time, she started saying I am never bored.
Even in retirement, Mom still never gets bored. It’s because her mind is always working. If she’s not busy remembering the past or thinking about the future, she’s deep within the present, noticing every detail of the world around her no matter how simple things may seem, no matter if she’s seen them a thousand times over.
Let’s try out this skill for ourselves!
Imagine you’re in your room at home. Imagine the internet is down. Your phone is out of batteries. Even better, the power is out as well.
You try all your appliances, but they won’t wake up. Maybe it’s very early morning. Maybe the snowbank outside has grown tall enough to block the door in, and you don’t want to risk losing heat to go shovel it.
You stare at the power outlet and will it to come back to life, but it doesn’t. If you live in the United States, the power outlet looks like a little surprised face. What is it so surprised about? It looks like it’s shouting. A warning? An exclamation? A funny factoid it just learned and had always wondered about?
Desperate for something to do, you leaf through a book from your childhood that you haven’t touched in years. Books always work. That tumbled pile of books in your closet will work for centuries, a prospect you suddenly find mind-blowing. You even make a little surprised face.
In the book, you see a page showing all the different electrical outlets around the world. Who knew there were so many different variations on the same old theme of neutral, hot, and ground? Some outlets look gobsmacked (India), others unimpressed (UK), some happy (Denmark). Some are tormented ghouls (China), others cooly non-anthropomorphic (Italy).
You start to wonder why there isn’t just one type of outlet. Wouldn’t it be easier if we had a world standard? Then again, is there a world standard for anything, really? There are still holdouts against the metric system, even.
You start to think that the great variety of outlets has nothing to do with standards, or electrical engineering, or specific local needs. Electricity is electricity, after all.
Instead, you realize the electrical outlets mirror evolution itself—that great never-ending swirl of traits in nature, eyes, snouts, legs, hair, all mashups that are then mashed up further to create new mashups to later mash up once more. There are thousands of kinds of flowers, not just one. There are thousands of kinds of everything!
You can’t discern any rhyme or reason to evolution. You want to believe that there’s a will behind it all (a will to survive? Maybe?) but that doesn’t explain something as hilarious as the platypus, for example. Evolution, you guess, simply does its own thing, like a wave moves because it’s a wave, or a cloud forms simply because conditions are right to make a cloud.
You realize that evolution is a constant happening, and that it is wonderful to behold. Humans do not stand apart from evolution, or nature. We’re in it. All our so-called artificial things are also part of nature, too, no matter how different from the so-called natural world they may seem.
The huge variety of electrical outlets around the world, you conclude, is simply another part of the evolutionary wonder all around us.
How funny is that?
There’s a beep, the lights come back on, and your phone announces that it’s at long last charging its battery. You reflexively close the book and notice an entire hour has gone by.
And that, my friends, is how you can never be bored!
But wait—why did you close the book? There are thousands of other people in the power grid around you—how did they spend the last hour? Did they do the same thing as you? Or, speaking of evolution, did they engage in a huge unpredictable variety of activities, dancing or eating or making love or singing or sleeping or fighting or cursing non-stop? Did they have any free will in the matter? If so, did they get what they wanted?
Did you?