Absorbed by familiar tasks, I watch as the clock continues its endless march. I am not bored, I am not tired, I am stuck in a feeling of not feeling, comfortably numb. While often I do find something that can take me from this trance, whether something that brings me anger or brings me joy, the novelty of new content wears off and I fall back into a state where whatever content I am taking in, is simply a backdrop to being alive and without something to engage me I either become indifferent or I get bored. Indifference is easy, it is that comfortably numb feeling, not necessarily good, but not bad. Such a feeling can only come when I place myself in the situation, when I have agency. Boredom is different. It is obsessive.  I pay attention to small little details that do not matter and do not deserve any attention. With indifference, my attention feasts on a bounty that does not supply interest but is still satiating; with boredom my attention is starving and will go to any resort to fill its hunger. 

Monday through to Friday, I wake up, eat breakfast, brush my teeth, change and drive to school. It’s a habit I go through almost everyday, so it has become relatively mindless. Unsurprisingly, I quickly become bored. It feels that everything I do in school is simply me going through the motions, not thinking just doing. I need to find something to fill that boredom, in some capacity I always will find something, often times that comes in stress. The most common occurrence of this is I start to worry if I remembered to close my car door. It is such a mundane thing that I can never clearly recall whether or not I did it. My attention grasps onto this thought, desperate for nourishment and clawing to whatever it can, it hyper focuses on the one in a hundred odds that I forgot to close it and that idea sticks in the back of my mind for the rest of the day. I am sure that I closed the door, but I have no way to confirm it. It is stressful, it is annoying, but above all it keeps my attention which sadly matters more. For now the hunt is complete and my attention is sufficiently satisfied. This does not happen on the good days, and not on the stressful days. Only the days with nothing.

Anything to make me feel engaged, anything to get me to think, anything to prevent me from the such dreaded feeling of boredom. My attention fears the boredom that is inevitable in daily life. Stressing itself over that hunger it feasts on such stress and unintentionally makes my life just a bit more annoying. But the hunt never ends, I always need something.