Hey Friends,
Another week passes by, and another email hits you inbox from Caesura.
The other day I was thinking about confidence and what makes me feel confident. I had to do a series of presentations at work, so this question settled in my mind for quite some time. I figured out that I feel confident when I am in full control of myself, and if possible, of my surroundings. This, however, makes me less compassionate and empathetic to myself and others, and more like a micro-manager with touch of a dictator. Instead of being a friend to myself and saying “I can do this,” I tend to be a dictator, who does not allow a true me to come out until the stress is gone.
Which is, if you think about it, not really a confidence. It is a total opposite — a mode of operations under a stress, when you protect yourself from any possible danger. You became so strict and rigid, and conserved, that you do not spare any energy on non-essential things until the stress factor is gone.
Confidence, in contrast, is about being flexible, relaxed and going with the flow of your surroundings — that is, not being afraid of not having a control. It is about being fine with making mistakes and not penalizing yourself if they happen. As I am writing this, there is a better way to describe way — being confident means loving yourself and not conditioning this love on anything external, like your performance, people’s opinion and so on.
In other news, below I am attaching the draft of my archived essay on boredom. I worked on it from time to time, but never finished and the idea really lost its momentum. It is very rough, but it captures the idea and I thought its worth sharing now as I am unlikely to continue working on it in the future.
💭 The Archived Essay on Boredom
We often are consumed by the idea of being offline, off-the-grind and unconnected from the Web and everything it entails, including social media. The idea goes that if you go offline, you pay more attention to the real life, be more present and enjoy it. I am all up for this to be honest.
Getting offline, however, seems more like running away from the problem than solving it. It’s like addressing symptoms of a disease, but ignoring its root cause.
Symptoms being short attention span, being sucked by content scrolling, not noticing how time goes by, not feeling productive, stressing about time spent — the list goes on and on.
The root cause though, is different. Once you actually go full-mode offline, you enjoy being disconnected, feel energized and even inspired to live and do all those things you always wanted but never had a time. Ah, finally, this must the magic of being present in the now and now you are truly living. This goes for few days, may be even week or two, but once excitement phase passes, you face the harsh reality of everyday living — boredom, and how bad we are at managing it.
Humanity build a whole civilization around avoiding boredom, instead of addressing it. Every form of entertainment is aimed at filling the silent moment and empty spaces that we cannot handle. We artificially saturate our minds, making every emotion, every thought, every color, every sound brighter, stronger, more filling and engrossing. If our mind is snapshot of a street that we make on our cameras, then entertainment, media and technology are filters that we use to make that dull picture more colorful and attractive. We designed our environments in a way that every single item seeks our immediate attention. Buried under the amount of incoming information, our brains fragment our mental attention to tiny pieces, which eventually turns into nothing.
Why do we avoid and fight boredom so much? When asking this question, another question came to my mind. Why do I saturate my photos so much before posting? My answer is: so that the photo does not look so boring, bleak, gray, dull and pointless. Once I saturate the hell out of this photo, it is almost as if a different reality, where shades are profound, water is virid, the sky is vividly blue, hills are deep green and the sun is brighter.
Yet, it is not an “almost different reality,” it is a different reality. Not the one I live in.
To my utmost non-acceptance of comparing living to a photo editing, I see the parallels. Life, once you solved your basic survival needs (place to live in, food to eat, job to earn money) can be boring — sometimes its dull, sometimes it’s just purposeless. Sometimes, or all the times, we just exist as any other biological beings. We eat and sleep to survive in order to continue eating and sleeping for survival. That is just the fact of life.
And yet, we refuse to accept this fact. There is a significant gap between what we think life is and what it actually is. Boredom is the time when it becomes crystal clear. We get uncomfortable as we sense it. And we rush to do something about it — like applying all those artificial filters (read: media and technology) to make life seem more exciting than it is.
The problem, in other words, is not boredom. Problem is our expectations.
Every art has its basic move. In writing, it is writing a single sentence. In reading, reading a single sentence. In running, it is a stride. In walking, it is a step. In order to master any art, you have to first master the foundations — basic moves. Once you master a basic move, you perfect it. Once you perfect it, you can improve it, experiment with it, reimagine it and make your own contribution to the art.
In the art of living, boredom is a basic move. A default setting, where nothing happens, except for your existence. And yet, instead mastering it, we avoid it at full cost.
See ya,
Adil.