TS: bored vs scared

Bored
Vs
Scared

Which one is better or which one is more prevalent?

XTC vs. Adam Ant

Choose one

B-b-but there is no radio button to click!

Bored is very pleasant ime if you approach it with the correct planning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVqeoI4klLE

darraghmac otm

TS:

The comfortable life of a bureaucrat: nice house in the suburbs, but a life without dreams, shuffling meaningless paperwork against deadlines in single-minded pursuit of an index-linked pension;

vs

The risky life of an entrepreneur: living hand to mouth, with interesting meetings, sudden highs, deep lows, the chance of future riches but the greater likelihood that it could all go belly up.

The worst is when bored people fill their empty hours with scary fantasies about all-enveloping dangers and imminent catastrophes from non-existent cabals and conspiracies, which they must then dedicate their entire lives to publicizing and resisting, preferably by stockpiling guns and ammo.

https://boringconference.com/

What some fools call boredom might be often construed as something betwixt not quite being dead yet, but wishing you were. But I'm just describing a 12 hour night-shift job I did on a production line at the EMAFYL factory SE London for about 6 months in the 90's. The work was so boring it drove you insane after the first hour. The unrelenting clattering of the machines and they needed to run nonstop. The process was making strips of plastic look like they were antique brass picture frames by constantly feeding them onto a conveyor belt into this greedy evil machine that would fuck up and get you into all sorts of trouble if there wasn't a constant uninterrupted flow of plastic strips going into it! I only ever did more *interesting* jobs after that one, even if the wages were lower.

Is that from Luc Sante?

Bored of living, scared to die.

I'm bored all the time and not often scared so it's hard to compare them.

Boredom is probably more prevalent in the capitalist system in the UK at the moment , but it’s too easily disregarded. I really like this 1966 situationist observation:

”All that we can see anywhere is a grotesque travesty of human life, half nightmare and half burlesque: a degraded labour we never chose in order to produce an empty passive leisure we never wanted. Life has been reduced to living death. We reject the whole system of work and leisure, production and consumption, to which life has been reduced by bureaucratic capitalism."

If the level of scared is just 'eek spiders' then yeah all day long.

When I was a kid I would go to friends' houses and they would have sets of Encyclopedia Britannica or World Book, and I loved browsing through them. My parents however always said it was too expensive of an item to invest in. Anyway, the last couple of decades have seen that wish realized in a delayed sense -- w the partial result that I hardly ever experience boredom -- i.e., there is always (reading stuff on) the internet available as a diversion.

I would say that a lot of the fundamental experience of boredom centers around our relation to time. Boredom is in part the sensation of mentally rebelling against the present moment and relating to imagined future and past moments via overly worn and tedious grooves of our minds. The quest or demand for entertainment in itself perpetuates the frustration that one thinks of as "boredom". ime, anyhow...

Nice analysis. The experience of boredom is still readily available at work though (for me at least).

Yeah, work is boring if I'm not busy (but I'm usually busy), and I usually have other workday stimuli to keep my mind busy. I'm rarely bored, generally. There's too much stuff in the world to engage with to be bored imo.

Constitutionally, I am not built to withstand fear. I'm pretty much always managing at least low-grade anxiety and it takes a toll. Give me boring any goddamn day.

I love being bored

thread makes me think of solitary confinement/“the box”, etc :-(

I'll take bored any day. Scared is anxiety, not good for the health

Last several posts in favor of boredom as well as dell’s analysis otm.

Scared is anxiety, not good for the health

although, would you agree that boredom can also breed anxiety due to increase in unwanted thoughts?

Plus boredom may be ok or more manageable for the moments when you experience it, but when you look back on a prolonged period or stretch of boredom it can be “aaargh - my wasted life!”

I'm currently going through a very boring and scary procedure that is filling in my partners PIP renewal form. With the boredom being having to understand each tedious answer has to score points and will only score them if they are in the right place. And the scary being the looming deadline! I think being bored without anxiety or fear is perfectly good tbf.

The boredom that comes with exhausting drudgery is v. different from the boredom that comes with not being able to find anything on Netflix to hold your interest for >5 mins.

TS: watching the world through a storefront window vs. climbing up the walls of your apartment

dealing with bureaucracy is boring and scary enough all at once to call into question this whole opposition. but i have trouble distinguishing between anxiety and boredom a lot of the time anyway

At home being bored usually comes from depression, hence the anxiety that lurks around the corner - as in reality I have an infinite amount of tasks I could be getting on with. If I'm depressed, then fuck doing anything but for some reason my mind concludes that I have nothing to be doing and so lets just sit on the sofa browsing the internet not that I'm all that happy about it etc.

my boredom at work otoh, when things are too quiet, does not bring on the anxiety at all, as i'm far too distracted with trying new ways to try and look busy