Question: Why was there no such word before the eighteenth century?
(a) Was it because people were not bored before the eighteenth century? (But wasn’t Caligula bored?)
(b) Was it because people were bored but didn’t have a word for it?
(c) Was it because people were too busy trying to stay alive to get bored? (But what about the idle English royalty and noblemen?)
(d) Is it because there is a special sense in which for the past two or three hundred years the self has perceived itself as a leftover which cannot be accounted for by its own objective view of the world and that in spite of an ever heightened self-consciousness, increased leisure, ever more access to cultural and recreational facilities, ever more instruction on self-help, self-growth, self-enrichment, the self feels ever more imprisoned in itself — no, worse than imprisoned because a prisoner at least knows he is imprisoned and sets store by the freedom awaiting him and the world to be open, when in fact the self is not and it is not — a state of affairs which has to be called something besides imprisonment — e.g., boredom. Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
(e) Is it because of a loss of sovereignty in which the self yields up plenary claims to every sector of the world to the respective experts and claimants of these sectors, and that such a surrender leads to an impoverishment which must be called by some other name, e.g., boredom?
(f) Is it because the self first had the means of understanding itself through myth, albeit incorrectly, later understood itself through religion as a creature of God, and now has the means of understanding the Cosmos through positive science but not itself because the self cannot be grasped by positive science, and that therefore the self can perceive itself only as a ghost in a machine? How else can a ghost feel otherwise toward a machine than bored?
(CHECK ONE OR MORE)
Question: Why is it no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
Thought Experiment: Imagine that you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look — it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on the serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions — good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide — be a bore?
Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico.
Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?
Explain.
(11) The Depressed Self: Whether the Self is Depressed because there is Something Wrong with it or whether Depression is a Normal Response to a Deranged World
THE SUICIDE RATE among persons under twenty-five has risen dramatically in the last twenty years.
A recent survey disclosed that the symptom of depression outnumbered all other medical symptoms put together.
On a daytime radio psychotherapy talk show, 80 percent of all women calling in reported that they were depressed.
The incidence of drug use in teenagers and preteens has increased an estimated 3000 percent in the last thirty years. On a recent talk show on “tough love,” it was claimed that about one-third of all teenagers were depressed. Of the one-third, as many as 75 percent were on drugs.
In one small Southern city, a study of the families of the upper socioeconomic class revealed that 79 percent of the daughters left home after high school, moved into apartments, and either attended college or got jobs. After five years, 53 percent of the unmarried daughters had returned to the homes of their parents and 43 percent of the married daughters … Typical responses: “I didn’t like it out there.” “It is too much.” “I couldn’t cope.” “I got sad.”
In one Midwestern town, 27 percent of high-school students dropped out and stayed home. Chief complaint: “I can’t cope.”
Question (I): Are people depressed despite unprecedented opportunities for education, vocations, self-growth, cultural enrichment, travel, and recreation
(a) Because modern life is more difficult, complex, and stressful than it has ever been before?
(b) Because, for men, competition in the marketplace is fiercer than ever?
(c) Because, for women, life as a housewife is lonelier than ever, what with the vanishing of the traditional community of women around the well, sitting on stoops, gossiping over back fences?
(d) Because, for young people, education is more inferior than ever, leaving one unprepared to face the real world?
(e) Because belief in God and religion has declined and with it man’s confidence in the place of the self in the Cosmos, in the Chain of Being, and in its relation to others?
(f) Because the self nowadays is other-directed rather than inner-directed and depends for its self-esteem on its perception of how others evaluate it — something like a beggar in a crowd with his hand out?
(g) Because the self, despite an embarrassment of riches, is in fact impoverished and deprived, like Lazarus at the feast, having suffered a radical deprivation and loss of sovereignty? With the multiplication of technologies and the ascendance of experts and expertise in all fields, the self has consented to the expropriation of every sector of life by its appropriate expert — even the expropriation of its, the self’s, own life. “I’m depressed, Doctor. What’s wrong with me? If you are not an expert in the field, a doctor of depression, can you refer me to one?”
Thus, the rightful legatee of the greatest of fortunes, the cultural heritage of the entire Western World, its art, science, technology, literature, philosophy, religion, becomes a second-class consumer of these wares and as such disenfranchises itself and sits in the ashes like Cinderella yielding up ownership of its own dwelling to the true princes of the age, the experts. They know about science, they know about medicine, they know about government, they know about my needs, they know about everything in the Cosmos, even me. They know why I am fat and they know secrets of my soul which not even I know. There is an expert for everything that ails me, a doctor of my depression, a seer of my sadness.
(h) Because modern life is enough to depress anybody? Any person, man, woman, or child, who is not depressed by the nuclear arms race, by the modern city, by family life in the exurb, suburb, apartment, villa, and later in a retirement home, is himself deranged.
(CHECK ONE OR MORE)
Question (II): Why do so many teenagers, and younger people, turn to drugs?
(a) Because of peer-group pressure, failure of communication, psychological dysfunction, rebellion against parents, and decline of religious values.
(b) Because life is difficult, boring, disappointing, and unhappy, and drugs make you feel good.