Bored With Life.

Not my writing, but a good read. Generally relevant to my current state...

Bored With Life?

Bored with Life? How the Notion of “Sloth” Can Help Us Today ~ Dr. Andrew Swafford ~ www.emotionalvirtue.com

As we’ve all experienced, the life of any given person is filled with moments of exuberant joy, as well as frustrating defeat, not to mention anguish and despair. Much of this, of course, concerns what happens to us—moments of good fortune, and all too often, tragedy; but there is also an aspect which flows from our interior life, an aspect which we have much more control of than we typically realize.

So here’s my wager: the human person can fall into deep despair only because the human person is first “made for more.” So often, we journey through life with prolonged periods of stagnation, moments where the lust for life runs dry—moments where we turn inward, falling into patterns of self-pity.

Here the notion of “sloth” can help us: sloth is a kind of “spiritual sadness,” a sorrow in the face of a spiritual good; it is a subtle awareness that I should be pursuing something greater, but it just appears too daunting—too far beyond my reach. Hence, sloth only makes sense because we are truly made for more; if we are made for more—if we are made for greatness, for the true, the good, and the beautiful, for something beyond what can be seen, touched, and heard—then it shouldn’t surprise us if we are left unfulfilled by the pursuit of pleasure, honor, social status, success or anything else that all too often determines the ebb and flow of our daily mood and happiness.  

Inevitably, we cannot remain in this state of sadness for long, so—as most of us know all too well—we turn to comforting “props,” often some kind of pleasure (such as “comfort foods”). Even pornography, or the pursuit of sexual encounters, can be related back to sloth: if we are unfulfilled at the depth of our being, we will inevitably seek fulfillment in other ways. At these moments, we get even more depressed, causing us to feel even worse about ourselves, and so the cycle continues.  

But we must look beyond the symptom to the disease—beyond the slide from purity to the recognition of the genuine emptiness in our soul. If we are made for more, then only something “more” will bring us joy; if we are made for more, then an inevitable sadness must follow if we order our lives around the pursuit of success, popularity, or becoming the object of another’s sexual desire. The spiritual tradition’s reflection upon sloth directs us to engage our deepest desires and our deepest selves, to harness the full dynamic of our emotional and spiritual energy, with the aim of ordering it toward the pursuit of genuine greatness.

To see the truth of this, consider any endeavor that you’ve ever found worthwhile: we all know that “you get out what you put in”; when you go “hard” at practice, you feel good about it. If we find ourselves “bored with life,” perhaps we could ask ourselves how much we’re really putting in. If we play the “game of life” with excellence, we will end in joy; but if we engage life half-heartedly, we will at some point find ourselves “bored with life,” and we will then seek to distract ourselves in order to alleviate the depth of our pain. It is for this reason that a life filled with “activity” can often be a subtle covering for sloth, since distractions keep us from recognizing the true “hole” in our heart. In our quiet moments, however, we can see that—really and truly—we are made for more; our true joy is the fruit of a life well-lived, and this much we have control over.