Experience, Boredom, & Life's Questions
Wednesday Wisdoms for July 10, 2024
Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I distill worldly advice for better living by presenting three quotes, three observations, and three questions.
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Experience
🤨 Quote
"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."
Aristotle
Source: Shop Class as Soulcraft (by Matthew Crawford)
Observation 🧐
As young children, we build causality maps of the world through experience and observation. This is one reason why trial and error, success and failure, and all around play are so important in early development.
It is through these causality maps that we begin to understand how the world operates and what we need to do within it in order to not only survive, but thrive. And this is needed as unlike other animals, we have the longest developmental period from birth to adulthood.
It is through this vigorous experience of childhood and adolescence that we learn to navigate the world on our own.
But just because we’re no longer in adolescence does not mean we don’t need to continually experience life first hand. In fact, those who are continuously living outside their comfort zones, traveling, starting a business, allowing themselves to try new things, often expand more than their horizons, they grow more and deeper knowledge of the world.
It is through these experiences and lessons that people are able to pick themselves up off their feet, find answers to problems, and draw on an array of rich experience to tackle whatever comes their way.
When we get outside our phones, when we live life in the real world, we allow experience to take hold and it is these lessons that push us forward.
🤔 Question
Reflection: When we give up trying, when we allow fear to stop us, we give up on endless possibilities and in the process, we erase an existence that could have been.
Boredom
🤨 Quote
“We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. We have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement.”
Bertrand Russell
Source: The Conquest of Happiness
Observation 🧐
We are, as the journalist Chris Hedges has pointed out, trapped in Plato’s allegory of The Cave. For many of us today, consumed with the rise of social media, we cling to the “value” non-stop entertainment brings.
“We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture,” writes Hedges in Empire of Illusion, “the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism, and pop psychology.”
But why are we so driven by entertainment? Do we truly fear reality to such an extent?
This was after all Plato’s argument in his allegory, there would be those who would be content watching the images of puppets flicker across the wall rather than see reality for what it is.
We would rather be entertained by external forces than we would, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal, sit in a room of silence by ourselves.
This fear of silence goes so deep that David Foster Wallace once pointed out that every experience in America has been curated to hold some sort of noise, an outright rejection of silence.
But there are benefits to boredom.
When we are forced to forget entertainment, when we lack a phone attached to us, we are reminded of what it means to just be. We see the world, our surroundings, the people who we inhabit the world with. We also come to see ourselves in a much larger pond, with more and more diverse fish swimming endlessly around.
If we were to grace ourselves with the flexibility to be without technology for a time, if we were allowed to decline entertainment and just be bored, what is the worse that could happen? What’s the best?
While we think of boredom as a negative, perhaps in our entertainment-driven culture, boredom is the cure we need to resume normal living.
🤔 Question
Reflection: Our fears are just imaginations until we bring them into reality.
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We explore the wisdom of Leo Tolstoy on life’s questions for our final Wednesday Wisdom this week.