Last night or, rather, very early this morning, we were pulling notes together for today. The idea, such as it was, was to write about how a TikTok channel called @FreshdailyMontreal was/is putting out almost exactly the same content as a website called MTLBlog.com. Given that each of these sources (ostensibly) reports the news, it isn’t at all surprising that they cover the same ground - but they also overlap in terms of whatever the below constitutes.
Are these advertorials? We really can’t say. There’s no clear indication that BIG LION has given either entity money for this kind of publicity. Maybe these folks - a couple days apart from each other - independently learned of the existence of this bizarre place being built an hour north of the city. Maybe neither wonder why on earth anyone would want to rest near terrifyingly large cats. Maybe they each passed up the rare opportunity to reference The Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Maybe they individually chose to write “amongst lions” rather than “among lions” because “amongst” is fancier and lions are jungle royalty. Maybe lots of things.
We gathered a handful of other examples - stories about recalled cheese, for instance - to highlight the similarity between these seemingly unaffiliated sources. We intended to talk about the murky ethics of content creation and the strange way that the attention economy makes everything seem like it’s part of diffuse, overdetermined marketing campaign and while typing up provisional remarks we found that we were completely and totally apathetic in regards to both the content we were discussing and the argument we were making about it.
It wasn’t that we thought we were off-base or wrong, but rather that our eyes were glazing over as we scanned these sites for something that was… what? Exciting? Novel? Lion hotels and content shenanigans ought to be both of those things, but still we felt that we were missing something, missing an angle or edge that might make things more… Provocative? Intriguing? We weren’t sure what we were looking for, but we knew we had to look for something more. We decided to cast a wider net. Perhaps if we found a third, fourth, or fifth outlet advertising/editorializing the (apparently) common desire to bed down beside apex predators then the basis for the argument would gain heft or warrant or something.
We didn’t look for long because we really didn’t care to find anything. Our apathy had grown and spread. We were no longer merely indifferent to what we had found, but indifferent in advance of finding anything more. We suffered what we guess you’d call anticipatory boredom. We could have found out that both FreshdailyMontreal and MTLBlog were, in fact, run by recently sentient lions who were soft-selling their own chain of lion hotels (for fun and profit) - but it wouldn’t have mattered. Even if the cloudy ghost of Mufasa himself (RIP) were guiding the dubious content strategies of these outlets, we wouldn’t have perked up or taken much interest. It all seemed to us like just more of the same. The internet and world-at-large was involved in some awful and worthless ouroborous-type activity again. Nothing new. Nothing meaningful.
Staring, then, at the fragments and argumentative dead-ends we had assembled, we were unfortunately reminded of the opening sentences of Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave. “The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having drawn the conclusion, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked!”
We regularly wish we had never read these sentences and especially wished it late last night when we ought to have been sleeping.
Given that we weren’t optimistic about achieving even non-iridescent mediocrity, we thought about ditching the lion hotels and the competing content creators. Occasional work like this is, as Connolly writes a little further down that austere first page, always “doomed to disappointment” because “[i]t is the nature of such work not to last.”
We needed, then, a topic or idea that would last. There was no time for masterpieces, fine, but maybe we could achieve something that was something above or at least equivalent to iridiscent mediocrity (sparkling adequacy? twinkling sufficiency?). We wouldn’t be dispirited by the long ago words of this dead man. Who was he to decide what was or was not worthwhile?
So, we clicked around looking for something, anything, that might grab our attention. We saw a Hong Kong high-rise burning down. We saw a young woman seemingly assaulted for the sake of a make-up advertisement. We read hot, cold, and temperate takes on political affairs old and new. We clicked and scrolled and clicked and scrolled and continually felt that Cyril Connolly was judging us and what we were up to.
It seemed hopeless. Everything we encountered either didn’t merit mention or didn’t inspire interest. Connolly definitely wouldn’t approve. Our apathy started to sour into something worse. It wasn’t just that we were bored by the infinite scroll of words and images, but bored with the prospect that we might have to write about boredom itself. We were meta-bored which had to be worse than just plain bored and at this point we started really worrying about what you would think. Were we doomed to disappoint both ourselves and you. Was it possible - just possible - that our boredom could lead to your interest?
We were, as we said, quite tired.
Rather than pulling out of our apathetic death spiral, we decided to lean in.
Heidegger, Benjamin, Byung-Chul Han, David Foster Wallace, and countless others have examined and re-examined boredom over the last century. Each in their own way suggests that boredom might be beneficial or enlightening. Each in their own way suggests that modern life forecloses the opportunity to be truly and profoundly bored (oh no!). “We endlessly move among the boring,” Mark Fisher writes, “but our nervous systems are so overstimulated that we never have the luxury of feeling bored. No one is bored, everything is boring.”
Leaning in may have been a grave mistake. We surpassed meta-boredom.
The luxury of boredom? This is a deranged phrase if ever we’ve read one. Who were these people? We envisioned (or, given how tired we were at this point, maybe just truly hallucinated) a scene where assorted thinkers and writers sat glumly together on a bench, kicking dirt, at an amusement park just wishing that they could be bored. Just this once, y’know? Man, what they wouldn’t give for some sweet, liberating boredom.
Despite the fact that all these arguments for the salvific power of boredom struck us as silly or false, it was (we hate to admit) interesting to disagree or outright hate what we were reading. There was a kernel of interest here, but how is it that the idea of boredom inspires interest and actual lion hotels don’t? Why is, say, a poem with the objectionable title “Ennui” by an undergrad Sylvia Plath more interesting than duelling content foragers on the internet?
Why, for the love of god, is the jankiness of those typewritten lines more interesting than potentially plagiarized stories about recalled cheese?
The problem, obviously, has more to do with us than anything else.
It isn’t that recalled cheese or TikTokers and Bloggers competing over the same sliver of a sliver of the online population’s eyeballs are boring, but rather our wholly dismissive attitude towards these things precludes anything interesting from arising. We should’ve known better, but - and we’ll rely on this excuse for as long as it serves us - it was late and we’d been on Twitter for a while, so our mind was far from right.
In a talk titled “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” William James makes a simple argument that we wish we had remembered before spending hours fretting about boredom and its consequences.
“Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associate already with a feeling,” James writes. “Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat, is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.”
James’ point in the talk - and please know we are restraining ourselves from just quoting all twenty pages at you - is that our failure to entertain the worth, value, meaning, or significance of any object or subject in the world is, amongst other things, a failure of sympathy. To assert that such and such an object or subject or topic is boring or worthless or invalid appears - at first glance - like an act of intellectual strength. One has seen from the heights of reason what does or does not merit scrutiny. But this posture is, as James has it, just the guarded refusal to adopt an emotional perspective other than one’s own. The argument is chastening in its simplicity.
“Hands off,” he concludes, “neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, altogether each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which [they] stand [...] It is enough to ask of each of us that [we] should be faithful to [our] own opportunities and make the most of [our] own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.”
The argument isn’t that things are made meaningful just by dint of the beliefs of others, but rather that things might be meaningful or interesting or significant from a perspective outside of one’s own. This does not magically transform boring shit into profound treasure. James isn’t saying that the real interest is all the boring we made along the way. But rather that if one is able to sustain the possibility that meaning, interest, or whatever lies beyond our individual reach, then one is able to cut short the ever-creeping threat of solipsism and the nihilism that comes along with it.
We, ourselves, are incapable of seeing much interest or significance or meaning in content farms, lion hotels, or boredom philosophers (oh my!), but it’s very possible that you find no interest or significance or meaning in our prolix writing, that Plath poem, or William James’ avuncular (and, in many places, questionable/problematic) philosophy. Maybe absolutely all of these things are truly boring! Or utterly thrilling! We have no idea. Or, rather, we have nothing other than some ideas about some things in the world anchored to certain feelings in us that are unlikely to be shared by everyone or even anyone else (including and especially Cyril Damn Connolly).
But - sorry - just to be totally clear: that lion hotel is abhorrent and anyone who is not openly critical of its existence ought to be offered up like a wounded gazelle to the sentient lions who may or may not run the entire Montreal-based content industry. That nightmare place is meaningful or interesting or significant only insofar as it might serve as the setting for a real-life 12 Monkeys-style apocalypse. OK. That’s it. We are no longer bored, but incensed. Our brief moment of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual clarity has passed. We feel good/angry again now. Thanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzIXlttNCyo&ab_channel=DavidBowie-Topic
Good thought provoking stuff as life flashes before our eyes.