Taking off from a quote from Schopenhauer, James Garvey has some thoughts about why mere existence doesn’t satisfy us – why we get bored if all we’ve got to go with is being alive. He writes:
I wonder why it is that boredom is such an unpleasant thing. If being alive, existing in and of itself, were wonderful, wouldn’t just being there be good enough? It isn’t, though, for most of us most of the time. Maybe a settled moment or two, a ‘Buddhist catnap’ as I think Vonnegut put it, is fine on the rare occasion, but much of our lives is spent fleeing the awful quiet of our own company. We have stamp collecting and iPods and movies and texting and newspapers and cards and a million shiny things to distract us. I wandered the length of a train a while ago, just taking in the many things people do instead of doing nothing – faces illuminated by laptops and phones, brows furrowed over crosswords, small talk, flirtation, Scrabble, and considerably more wine than I expected.
Maybe boredom is our default setting, the neutral gear of the human condition, for a very good reason… When we run away from it, at least we stand a chance of going som[e]where.
As I see it, this misstates the condition of boredom, and the human condition of which it is a part. The assumption that one could just exist without more ado doesn’t really make sense. For any finite being, such as we human beings are, to exist is to be in a set of relations to other finite things; and since we not only exist but are also, while awake, conscious, we are conscious of some of the relations in which we stand to other things, beings etc. So our choice is not between merely existing – just being alive – and being in various more or less active relations to other things while we exist. No, our choices are between different combinations of a whole range of relationships to bits of the rest of the world, whether these are outside us or mediated in our heads in the form of thoughts about the world. Being bored comes from being obliged to endure, for longer than you want to, a particular set of these relationships that doesn’t interest you enough.
In the case of people in reasonable health, just being alive (and nothing else) doesn’t happen, because it can’t. That, finally, people often want to expand their attention beyond themselves and their own thoughts is no more surprising than that they should want to turn their attention away from anything, anything you care to name, to some other thing. Boredom is being stuck with a focused relation to something else that isn’t of your choosing.