Boredom is a Cancer in the Body of Nature

Or what we can learn from the honeyguide bird and the Hadza

Baobab tree. PC: Christopher Wilson. behance.net

This essay is focused on the Stoic decree of living in accordance with nature.

I write in the form of discourse because that is how we speak to ourselves in our heads.

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A Hadza man sits in thought beside a small campfire in Tanzania not far from the shores of Lake Eyasi.

The whistling of a bird interrupts his solitude. It flies overhead, chittering again and again. It is about a hands length, yellow-beaked, black-throated, white-bellied, with a small yellow shoulder patch.

The man whistles back. He stands up and picks up his bow, arrows, and fire drill. The bird beats its wings north and the man walks beneath and behind. They whistle to each other along the way.

After several miles of walking, the bird, Indicator indicator, hovers in a holding pattern over a large baobab tree. As the man approaches the trunk that would take ten men to reach around with both arms spread wide, the sound of buzzing grows.

The moment he places his ear against the smooth, pinkish-gray wood, the drone of bees magnifies tenfold; he can feel the vibration travel from his ear lobes to his toes. Nodding with a quick glance up at the honeyguide bird hovering overhead, he starts a small fire by placing his fire drill on a piece of scrap wood and rubbing his hands together around the drill from top to bottom until a coal is born. He drops the coal into a small bundle of dried grass which ignites in flame and then he cuts some wooden pegs. Climbing with his fiery torch, he hammers one peg at a time into the skin of the baobab until he reaches the hole that conceals the beehive two stories above the earth. He smokes the bees out of the hole and reaches his hand in for the honeycomb.

Back on the ground, he extracts the honey and tosses the wax comb to the side. He watches the honeyguide bird swoop in to enjoy the feast. The ancient coevolutionary cycle continues.¹

Of the many lessons that can be drawn from this symbiotic relationship between Homo sapiens and Indicator indicator, man and bird, ourselves and nature, one is the Stoic decree of living in accordance with nature.

When we ignore the honeyguide, she will be just fine. Just so with nature. She will find some other contemplative ape that is interested in harmonizing his rational faculty with the world around him. But what happens to us? Those who do not live according to nature are those who not only disrespect the self, but want to be rid of it. One response to this dilemma is existential boredom. The longshoreman philosopher lumps the bored among those who seek their happiness in the carnage wrought by “mass movements” for a reason.²  

Let us take one of the bored and attempt to learn his mind. We can refer to him as the Un-Hadza. He lives in the most privileged era in human history and as far as his life is concerned he has an infinite amount of honey. Nothing needs to be done: meat doesn’t require his hands to be bloodied, fire doesn’t require his forearms to burn, family doesn’t require his life to be risked, and false impressions don’t lead to knocked out teeth and the stunning realization that he has much to learn. The Hadza are happy with a dollop of honey in their calloused hands; the Un-Hadza are miserable with the world at their fingertips. 

The Un-Hadza man asks, “What is the use of a baobab and some stupid bird?” It is a matter of cause and effect: if we don’t follow nature, then we must follow something else. What then do we follow? If we are the Hadza, do we follow the neighboring tribe that has been trying to kill us for the last several hundred years? If we are college students, do we follow the social media influencer who monetizes our attention and our time and our calm? Should any single one of us follow a politician or a lobbyist? Well where would any of these characters lead us: to freedom or to slavery? When we deny nature and suffer the consequences, what then will we do? Scream? Steal someone else’s honey when they’re looking the other way? Massacre the neighboring tribe to haul away their honey, or salary, or property? Has the baobab and the bird led us to gas chambers and gulags, to struggle sessions and jihad? No, but crooked men have, and these men follow the “laws of the dead”³, not the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.”

It may be that the bored are to the tyrant what children are to the groomer. What is boredom but a lack of meaningful engagement – community, labor, sacrifice, hardship, love – that renders us ripe for exploitation? What else does a tyrant promise if not these exact sources of meaning?

Why not then turn this boredom around and learn what it is? Boredom is taking the honey (life) and refusing to leave the comb (gratitude). Animals cannot be bored – only the rational animal can weaponize its rationality against itself and disobey the natural order of things. It seems then that boredom is the erosion of what makes us human. What greater mutiny or ingratitude for the time we have been given can we commit than to utter the words, “I’m bored”?

The irony is that when the Un-Hadza is successful at burning society to ashes, he ends up just as wretched if not more so, and with no honey to show for it. When he is obsessed with what lies outside of his control, he is refusing to whistle with the honeyguide. When he thinks he is owed something simply because he exists, he is refusing to walk beneath the honeyguide. When he is affluent and decadent and bored out of his wits, he torches the baobab and dances around it. He has traded the soothing cycle of sun and moon for the unsoothing corruption of craving and aversion.

For my part, I do not believe boredom is a good enough reason to burn civilization to the ground. What then can we say to the Un-Hadza? Instead of burning it down, try walking up and down some steep hills for a while. No phone, no selfies, no social media posts. Don’t even tell anyone. Just walk up and down. And when you do, can you not be grateful for the breath that flows in and out of your lungs, so automatic and so powerful that you have to try not to do it? Can you not be grateful for the call of the red-shouldered hawk as it looks down on your effort from above, and for the moon beyond the hawk which makes you wonder about the rhythm of the earth and the moon and how it came to be? Can you not be grateful for the surge of acid building in your legs and the blood pumping through your heart? For the one solitary voice that remains within your skull that has now learned to find beauty in the small things: your sweat cooling in the breeze, your wide awake eyes which are suddenly awestruck by the varied hues of green, brown, and blue that make up the world around you?

The hill will introduce you to yourself. How is this not enough for you to drop to your knees in gratitude for no other reason than that you are alive to experience these things? That you are one part of a greater design? Go study the flesh of a strawberry and then see if you can talk about how boring life is and how worthless it all is. If we do not do this, then the bird will calmly remind us with the force of a nuclear warhead that our existence entitles us to nothing but the option to orient our brains to nature or not. It follows that our suffering is a matter of opinion.

It is easy when nature leads us to a baobab tree buzzing with bees and dripping with honey. All we have to do is follow. What then when nature shows us her ungentle side and she tells us there is no honey and famine is now at hand? This is what philosophy is for – to find a bit of serenity in whatever comes our way. Epictetus would say, “ευροήσω”, or I will flow well, I will be serene. Why can we not do the same? What if nature has us fall from the baobab tree and break our bones as so many of our forebears have done? We can flow with it. What if nature plants us in the path of the bored who seek to bulldoze our bodies into a ditch? We can flow with it, and we can look to Socrates who was a war-fighter for a reason. His reputation for the sort of courage that applies equally to war-fighting and truth-seeking and hemlock-drinking is a reminder that philosophers were never meant to be mere academics, but men of this world; not merely neurons, but neurons and sinew; not merely thinkers, but thinkers and scrappy, bloody, bare-knuckle fighters.

And if, like Socrates, we find that our end is near? What is left but to drink the hemlock with a prayer of gratitude? What is left but to leave a bit of wax comb for the honeyguide bird? What is left but to leave this world behind with a sense of awe for the time we have had? What greater philosophy of life do we need than one that is in accordance with nature? What unrest of the mind isn’t cured by spending an hour in humanity’s first Stoa – the woods?

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1. (2010) The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania. University of California Press, Berkeley.

2. Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer: Thoughts On the Nature of Mass Movements. [1st ed.]. New York, Harper and Row, 1951.

3. Epictetus. Book 1, Discourse 13.