Churning Boredom into Beauty

Ever since I started my new job, I worry I’m becoming boring.

Part of it’s the practical aspects: my schedule is insane. Client meetings, gym, hurried meals of pre-made deli food. Everything that gives-life or is-fun (Writing, socializing, traveling) has lately met the chopping block.

But it’s not just that.

Lately I’ve found myself ensconced in a beige confluence of business life, productivity culture, and Toronto (a city, I maintain, with no magic). My days are structured, and along with them, my interactions—enclosed within the parameters of professionalism, with all its attendant self-control and masking.

These days Quirky Professionalism is du jour. Business casual, still competent and controlled, but with dashes of (curated, curtailed) individuality. Tell them about my trip to New York, but not that I was meeting a lover there. Or mention that I went to Burning Man, only to be met with quiet bemusement, and later, ribbing about my age (leaving me laughing politely, pretending not to notice the double standard—being perceived as young could hurt my career, but not as much as throwing it back by calling them old farts).

But maybe there’s a positive side I’m ignoring. After all, constraints are essential to creative production. What’s an art form but a set of strategic constraints, upon which the creative impulse grows like a vine on a trellis? Perhaps my new circumstances represent an Apollonian turn*, a difficult but ultimately helpful binding of my creativity within the twin pillars of discipline and skill.

The problem is, I loathe the artform of business-making. Not so much the systems theory/organizational design aspect—a process that echoes the austere beauty of architecture or mathematics. It’s the interpersonal aspects that grate me, shot through with mean self-interest, Machiavellian bloat, and grinning inauthenticity. I worry I’m surrendering into someone I hate.

I’d hoped, of course, to contain the damage. To spend my days in business-mode, my evenings and early mornings creating beauty. But when work bleeds into mornings and weekends, my few moments of leisure get quickly swallowed up by daily workouts and exhausted scrolling.

This aesthetic poverty has bled into the moral. For one, I find myself unable to write about the Israel-Palestine conflict, even though I’m significantly tied to the unfolding situation (despite my grandfather being an Israeli veteran of the War of Independence, I spent my 20s as a pro-Palestine activist, and co-wrote a documentary film centered on the al-Shifa hospital recently in the news). Nor did I write about the recent hurricane in Acapulco, which destroyed the beach town where I once lived. Nor about the natural disaster at Burning Man, where I, you know, was.

Over the past three months, there have been multiple, catastrophic global events I’ve felt connected to: events related to climate change, the possibility of global war, the geopolitical conflict in which my family and ethnic group is ensnared—

And I’ve responded by staying silent and working. Keeping to my routines. I’ve engaged in a few freaked-out rants, while guiltily circling my own inaction and outwardly pursuing my goals with relentless discipline.

And yes, maybe I’m being hard on myself. I’ve been working 60–80 hours a week, and maybe I shouldn’t judge myself so harshly for the exhaustion—> inaction—> silence pipeline. Isn’t there something toxic, anyway, about this whole idea that we all have to be social commentators? It does little to resolve global conflicts, and much to profit social media companies. Maybe I don’t need to express an opinion on everything.

But silence becomes its own feedback loop. I spend my days in contexts where I can’t discuss, so I don’t. And without those discussions, my inner mess of inclinations remains fragmented, coherent opinions don’t develop, and soon my interior feels less chaotic than empty. I don’t know what I think, I have nothing to say, so I don’t say it, and the silence spreads inwards, approaching my core.

And of course, the obligatory cop: I know I’m incredibly lucky to have spent any part of my life focused on idea-crafting. And I feel like a total asshole, complaining about my recent good fortune. An opportunity landed in my lap, and it won’t last forever. If I make the most of it I can get back to what I love in the future. There’s obvious wisdom in keeping my head down and grinding.

But then—what if it all means something? The Greeks had two notions of time, Kairos and Chronos: the former, moments of crisis and transformation, where life is meant to be fully lived, conversions sealed, and destinies met. Chronos, by contrast, is normal time, where we fall into routine and do the dull maintenance to prepare ourselves for those great moments, when they arrive.

Ultimately, I am a superstitious person. I believe in signs and omens and fate. I worry I’m spending a moment of great Kairos clinging to boring Chronos. There’s a part of me, locked in terrified paralysis, convinced I’m allowing my destiny to pass me by.

And then the self-criticism chimes in. I’m being narcissistic (it’s not all about me), psychotic (seeing patterns in the noise, really?), narcissistic again (the world will be fine without my opinions, or if not fine, whatever it would’ve been anyway). I worry there’s a real tension here. Between, on one hand, childish grandiosity, and on the other, the necessary realization that life isn’t always interesting, dramatic, and creative—or if it is, I won’t always be the center of attention.

When I was twenty-three, at my first job after college, I got into an argument with a co-worker during lunch. It was a tech company, and he made the case that men were inherently better suited to computer programming than women (the workplace has changed over the past decade). I emphatically disagreed, and didn’t hide my feelings about his opinions.

Afterwards my boss spoke to me, and the basic thrust of her advice was that I needed to grow up. At the time I was furious, an angry ball of feminism and resentment, but she had a point. The ability to control one’s emotions, to decide when to remain silent—these are essential elements of maturity, of navigating the adult world.

It’s true that these days, I am becoming more mature. My self-control is through the roof. I can get on a client call while annoyed or exhausted or searing with rage—and slap on a smile, engage in breezy conversation and close the deal. The skills needed are akin to meditation: I observe how I feel, and make the decision that my behavior will be something different.

But this skill is double-edged. When we install an observer, swell in self-awareness, exert control over spontaneous impulses—doesn’t that risk draining the color and variety from experience? And in turn, erode the uncontrolled core from which creative expression arises?

There was a time, back in Acapulco, when I sat on a beach, high on mushrooms, trying to write my novel. Characters twisted through distant snowstorms while sweat ran down my face, and it all became too much. I stripped down and jumped into the ocean, swimming out to the second wave line, buffeted between exhilaration and the realization that I had no idea where I’d left my stuff. As I waded back to shore (and found my bag!), I impulsively decided to rush downtown and look for some friends, making it just in time to catch them and disclose all the sharp feelings and half-formed opinions I’d previously concealed.

I didn’t get much writing done that day, but it still felt like progress.

The Dionysian demands its due. Spontaneous and unfiltered expression is essential for artistic creation. And this might be why artists have such a hard time navigating the adult world—there’s a childishness one must preserve in order to create, but that same childishness jeopardizes, and is jeopardized by, most adult enterprises.

I don’t know what the solution is. One approach is to split time, daily, switching between creative and practical modes. Another is to accept being broke, and to live within that constraint until a “making it” opportunity arrives, or doesn’t.

And then there’s what I’ve been doing lately, throwing myself into work, spinning the gears and merry-go-rounds and hamster wheels. Becoming slowly boring, but hoping I’ll eventually be able to grind all this boredom into beauty.

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*Nietzsche wrote about the Apollonian / Dionysian distinction in art. Apollo symbolizeis one extreme—God of the sun and truth, flawlessly handsome. Apollonian art is linked to the clear, rational side of human nature, and is characterized by strict form and disciplined practice. Dionysian art is symbolized by Dionysus—party animal, God of wine and possibly psychedelics. This type of art is linked to the chaotic, instinctive side of human nature, and is characterized by spontaneous self-expression and ecstatic experience.