Sudden Boredom: a disease that rots the mind

[callmeal]

i was talking to my girlfriend yesterday about food. she really likes eating well and knows a lot about different foods. i was asking her why food is sorted by country, and not by flavor. it was an interesting discussion, and we theorized that it was a traditional thing, biased on migratory patterns to England. a wave of Indian migrants brought curries, and now we think of curries as an Indian dish, despite the fact that countries all over the world make curries.  The next thing i was asking was is it the best system of categorizing food, or should we invent a new way?'

 

we were debating the merits of this system, when, seemingly out of the blue for me, my girlfriend became agitated. she said that  the conversation was boring her. i was taken aback, because my girlfriend is always talking to me, and we often talk about food, but now she was bored by the topic. i asked her why she was bored by the topic now so suddenly, when earlier she she seemed  passionate and interested.

 

she told me that the subject wasn't very interesting. i didn't really understand this response. a subject of conversation is rarely just boring. how interesting a topic is usually comes down to the speaker. since me and my girlfriend are often talking together, i think it is safe to say she dosnt find my company boring. even if my girlfriend is bored by a topic, she usually finds a way to change the topic without becoming agitated and unhappy. lastly this still didn't reflect the suddenness at which this boredom seemed to strike. if the whole conversation was boring to my girlfriend, she would not have been engaging in the conversation at all.

 

this is not the first time my girlfriend has used 'im bored' as a way to shut down a conversation, but this was the first time i recognized it as what it was. earlier, i would be attacked for being 'boring', and self attack if i felt i was becoming 'boring'. the only time i would be boring however, was whenever i talked about logical principles, anarchy, Stephan Molynux, rtr, Austrian economics or anything related to freedom.

 

so the emotion call boredom is categorized by a lack of affecting stimulus. my girlfriend was receiving stimulus from the conversation, and being emotionally affected by this stimulus. i asked her if she felt bored, or upset. she told me she felt upset. i asked her to theorize why she felt upset. she told me that she felt that i was not listening to her, or giving her enough time to speak.

 

i didnt feel this was the case, we were talking quietly and slowly in our bedroom. i had been simply asking her questions about this food thing, and listing to her responses.

 

i asked her if she had felt this way before. she said she felt like when she was young, and her dad and her brother, who were both religious catholic at the time, would have these debates over her head, and not allow her to talk. she talked about how when she didnt want to go to mass, her dad would dismiss her opinion and force her to go to mass. i myself remembered several family arguments i witnessed which have were ended with her dad saying the line 'i dont want to talk about topic now, im bored of it'.

 

this line makes the person talking seem like a crazy obsessive, who is refusing to stop talking about a subject everyone knows all about and is of little importance. the last time i saw my parents, i was explaining to them for some strange reason, how an anarchistic society would work. it was a good conversation, because for the first time ever, i seemed to have these new fdr spectacles on which let me see through all my parents attacks on my character.

 

At the end of the conversation, in a complete parody of this line of attack, my mum tells me that i am boring her. my dad had called me a twat loudly several times, his face was all bulbous and red, and all he had been doing for the last hour was literally shouting 'haidus corpus, show me his body, it is the law if the land'. It was about 3 in the morning, my mum and my dad had both been passionately arguing for close to 5 hours and had failed to find a single hole in the theory of a free society, and now suddenly, the topic is a bore.

 

incidentally i dont want to give the impression that my girlfriend is a bad person. she was happy to talk about her emotions in an honest way, and we reached some conclusion. i am just interested if anyone else has been made to feel 'boring' because they have talked about the truth in a public setting, and also what are the causes of this form of passive aggression.

just to relate it to the original point, in its abstract, my girlfreind was happy to talk, but as soon as it became a question of her own values being called into question she became 'bored'. i want her to be able to tell me if i am actually being boring but i dont want to reenforce her perceived boredom by dismissing her feelings and i dont want to dismiss my own feelings to preserve her delusion.

 

When my parents tell me i am being boring i am fine with it, because i know it is corrupt and hollow attack.

 

my girlfriend however dosnt want to hurt me, so the approach i take is telling her how i feel and asking her to be honest about how she feels. she has responded wonderfully to this approach so far. its really cool also, because after we had this conversation, we became a whole lot closer. it was still a sudden and interesting realization however to see a tangible application of Stef's philosophy

[Kevin Beal]

"Boredom is rage spread thin"

 

I think it's a mistake to think about boredom as a lack of stimulating conversation / activity. That could be the source of your confusion.

 

The fact that the boredom was sudden, to my thinking, confirms that it's not simply a lack of stimulating conversation. How it's related to FOO stuff is also supporting evidence.

 

I think it may be more helpful to think of boredom as irritation, but where you feel like you are disappearing. The sudden part is the strong sense that you don't want to disappear.

 

I'm sure your conversation is very thoughtful and interesting, but I can tell you as someone who gets bored in conversations easier than most, it doesn't really matter about the content of the conversation sometimes.

 

I wonder, if you can remember, what was your first person experience right before she mentioned that she was feeling bored? Were you feeling connected with yourself and her both? I would imagine not. Otherwise she wouldn't feel like she was her kid self again with her parents talking over her.

 

I'm really glad you could talk about it and become closer as a result. But if my experience is applicable here (which maybe it isn't) then it's likely to come up again. I would just suggest continuing to have that conversation, especially if you guys become closer as a result.

 

I would also not make boredom out to be a bad thing. It's not a disease that rots the mind. Being in situations where you are made to feel bored rots the mind. You're blaming a symptom without reference to the cause. And it's making it like it's her problem, when maybe, you just actually were boring. I don't know, right, I'm just pointing it out as a possibility.

[callmeal]

A real worry for me was the moment of boredom shutting down the conversation. I am fully open to the criticism of being boring, but only if what follows is a conversation on why I was being boring, else it is difficult to not feel attacked.

 

If the thing that seems to be producing this feeling of not wanting to disappear is real exploration of emotions then it is difficult to address the problem with out being boring.

 

It's interesting that when you said to go through the conversation and work out if we were connecting, when I did that, I thought we were connecting . This is why the boredom came as such a shock to me.

 

I think in blaming her now maybe I am projecting my own problem of not being aware of this disconnect earlier onto her.

 

This is quite a shocking revelation to be honest. I wonder if I perhaps defend myself from the knowledge that I have lost the connection to someone else and continue without changing my approach. When I do lose them compleatly I then blame them for being lost even though I ignored the warning sighns.

 

I thought about this when I was considering your definition of boredom as being lost. I was thinking about how my girlfriends experience of boredom related to this definition, of being frustrated at not being heard and not wanting to disappear. When I think of boredom however I think of trying to talk to my mum about video games or music I liked and her being unresponsive and bored by me. My response was to talk more incessantly about my stuff. I think I talk more and more and my girlfriend ends up suffocating and feeling this disconnect more and more which reinforces my own behavior.

 

?

[Kevin Beal]

And maybe she could have mentioned something earlier, I don't know.

 

It seems like both of you had a history, and what that usually sounds like to me is that it's like a perfect storm where it's usually brought up too late and people's feelings get hurt.

 

The fact that you can talk about it like you did though with her is pretty freaking awesome.

 

I have a very specific experience that I remember of this happening and it could easily be coloring the way I'm imagining what you're saying, so please disregard anything that doesn't apply. But what I remember seeing in the other person who was boring me was that they were on a roll with some idea they had, and they weren't making any eye contact and I got the sense that this conversation would be going exactly the same if I wasn't even present. The content was kinda heady and intellectual.

 

I didn't say anything until after I was already overwhelmed, and talking about it afterward was a slow slog of mutually confusing possible explanations. So it sounds like your conversation afterward was much more successful than mine, which is really cool.

 

I just assumed that it was a forgone conclusion that her expressing her boredom was bad, and I wanted to challenge that.

[dsayers]

just to relate it to the original point, in its abstract, my girlfreind was happy to talk, but as soon as it became a question of her own values being called into question she became 'bored'. i want her to be able to tell me if i am actually being boring but i dont want to reenforce her perceived boredom by dismissing her feelings and i dont want to dismiss my own feelings to preserve her delusion.

 

This was the part that stood out to me above all. Her being bored is not the same thing as you being boring. It could be, but there's no guarantee. Also, your use of "perceived boredom" and "her delusion." If she experienced what she describes as boredom, that's her experience. It seemed as if you were trying to discredit her experience. For example, in the beginning there, you didn't say "she was perceived to be happy to talk."

 

It could be that she's misusing a term or that her experience has nothing to do with what's happening in the moment and is the result of unresolved trauma. In the moment though, if she's expressing her experience, take it for what it is and explore it together. I realize that this can be problematic if discussing her feelings is simultaneously what brings about the disconnect and is the solution for identifying the cause of the disconnect. That's something you can talk about later.

 

Not trying to make it sound simple. It seems like you're doing an excellent job of asserting yourself AND being empathetic of her at a time when it might be difficult to do both. I just wanted to point out that you might be dismissing her experience based on a conclusion you've arrived at by yourself.

[Holo Cene]

It might be a criticism she places upon you that you are not taking her needs into account when you have conversations. Analytically trying to figure out why people ascribe one culture to a specific spice might be interesting to you, but not necessarily to other people. Conversation is most certainly an art form, and a skill. Broaden that horizon as a general rule and in her case take her desires into account of what she finds interesting. Emotional content is always of prime importance. If she is telling you that bluntly it has perhaps happened often in the past and she is telling you now after many such conversations.

[Matt J]

Perhaps something else was on her mind that she wanted to discuss but couldn't?

[callmeal]

i have spent a while thinking about this and even longer acting on my thoughts. 

 

for whatever reason, i was completely insensitive to the feelings of someone i care about. i really found the metaphor of her being lost, helped me 

visualise the problem from the other side. i did an experiment with myself, which was to try and talk to my girlfreind without dismissing her. i found this 

remarkably challenging but it solved my problem of her being bored by my conversation.

 

i started by asking her whether she would send her kids to school. we had a 

conversation about school that was entirely me asking questions and her forming her own opinion. for some strange reason however, i constantly felt the need to hijack,

and talk about an article i read on whatever, or podcasts or books ect. everytime did this, she would suddenly become withdrawn. it was clear to her that i didnt

care about her opinions, i just want to sound my own agenda and prove how smart i am.

 

For this conversation, i decided that i would only ask questions, to curb my own desire to become dense. we talked about philosophy, and her life and it was really

cool. after an hour it was as if someone had rewired my brain. only asking questions didnt feel like a restriction, it felt like the only way we should

talk to each other. 

 

i realised a couple of things about myself, firstly that sometimes, when i talk to people this other mode in my brain switches on. the new me has this desire to be

 told he is right, and to win and prove the other side wrong. this side of me really sucks. i am talking to my girlfriend and she tells me something and i dismiss it 

so i can get to the part of the conversation where i am right. i then become frustrated at her for not engaging me. 

 

 

i felt a degree of reticence even to return to this thread. reading this is like reading a report of my old school teachers; 'she doesnt apply herself, she must be 

defective'. i feel embarrassed, and i can feel my brain trying to protect my ego from the information i am receiving. i wouldn't listen to the things that my girlfreind

was telling me through body language, and even when she told me straight, i had to reinterpret this as a flaw in her character. 

 

 i feel confused as to why i dont want to address this problem. i also dont know why i feel other peoples boredom as a form of attack. 

[dsayers]

i also dont know why i feel other peoples boredom as a form of attack.

 

I thought I addressed this sufficiently. Does it seem different for you?

 

Thank you for sharing your experience. I found value in what you said.