The Cure For Boredom Is A Stalk
Or walking with the SOG in Vietnam
“Nor shall great Hector cease the rage of fight,
The navy flaming, and thy Greeks in flight,
Even till the day when certain fates ordain
That stern Achilles (his Patroclus slain)
Shall rise in vengeance, and lay waste the plain.” — Homer1
We can see boredom everywhere at present.
Schopenhauer described boredom as a “tame longing without any particular object” that feels like a “sensation of the worthlessness of existence.” Some say boredom is a result of industrialization or modernity, or even from living too slowly. My hunch, however, is that the root cause of boredom is neither a mindless job, modernity, nor even the speed of living — it is born of ease.
Let us turn to the Vietnam War and join a covert mission in the Cambodian jungle to flesh this theory out. The Studies and Observations Group (SOG) had one of the highest casualty rates in American military history, and for every SOG fighter on the ground, there were over six-hundred enemy soldiers.2
John L Plaster recalls a typical stalk: “In a full day, a team often advanced only 500 yards – that’s only 50 yards per hour, which translates to just one step per minute. During that minute, you scanned front and sides; carefully eyeballed anyplace an enemy soldier might lurk; trained your CAR-15 at the spot where contact might erupt; examined the ground where you’d next place your foot; paused; smelled; listened; delicately pushed aside a vine with your left hand; tested the ground ahead with one toe; slowly shifted your weight to the forward foot; eased the vine behind you and ensured it didn’t catch on your rucksack or web gear; paused; listened; looked around again; lifted your trailing foot and gently brought it up to your other foot. You repeated this process hour after hour, exactly; you become immersed in tiny, deliberate actions, patient acts that so occupied your mind that there was nothing but the present — this step, this minute, this place. Consciousness soared.”
It strikes me as deeply satisfying that consciousness “soars” while taking one wary step every sixty seconds for ten straight hours — seven warriors surrounded by thousands — but boredom “soars” when life is easy.
What, then, is the root of this differential? What is its cause? What carnage might a society of the bored bring about? What can we do about it?
Let us go back to our definition of boredom.
Why would a SOG man not feel a “tame longing without any particular object?” For one thing, he had a clear mission, but he was not merely chasing a long term goal. The nature of missions in war are different in that if we sacrifice life-at-this-second, we compromise the mission. This prevents the all too dangerous allure of dedicating life to a future goal we may never live to see, and wasting the present moment which is all we will ever have. This is why time slows in combat: existence depends on all five senses dialed up to their greatest intensity.
The significant point is that not only did our SOG man know what he wanted, but he wanted everything to be exactly as it was. He so desperately wanted to understand the fabric of reality woven around him that his “longing” was aligned to the bluish hues of an AK-47 barrel concealed in the bush ahead, the give of the black soil beneath his feet, the movements of monkeys and owls that might screech and flee and alert an enemy platoon, the smell of fish sauce and steaming rice wafting above an enemy patrol in a dell nearby, the faint rumble of diesel engines hauling weapons and warfighters. Why? Because war-logic flows as follows: if I do not “long” to know what is right in front of me, then I will die.
And why would our SOG man not feel the “sensation of the worthlessness of existence?” Well, how could he when he was more aware of each vine, root, leaf, owl, tiger, and droplet of rain than ever before in his life? When each snapped twig beneath an errant pinky toe meant a platoon of NVA slamming the bolts on their AK’s? When his reputation as masterful under duress — or “good in the woods” as the SOG would say — was being made by how calm he sounded on the radio when bullets were cracking so close he felt his hair move? When, if caught, he would be disavowed by his government since he was not “in” Cambodia, and then possibly tortured and killed, knowing his corpse would never make it back to his family for burial?
My experience is that the value of existence increases in direct proportion to the closeness of death. Even if we throw the most bored man alive on a Huey and drop him in elephant grass to scope out a freshly made enemy road, I imagine he would no longer feel bored. Death joins every stalk. It was the silent stalker on SOG war-parties heel-to-toeing through the jungle. Maybe death would pounce on the NVA; maybe the Americans; maybe their Montagnard brothers; maybe death would go wild and pounce on them all. A touch of death can make a glance at the veins of a leaf feel as though we were touched by God.
So in what might be thought of as a worst nightmare, we find some of the most engaged and vibrantly alive humans on earth.
What then? Why are our pupils circular? It seems that species with horizontal pupils are plant-eating prey, species with vertical pupils are predators that ambush prey, and species with circular pupils — like ours — are for hunters that run down their prey.3 I sense a deep wisdom here. The black pupils looking back at us in the mirror are telling us that we are born to run down not only a rabbit but the point of our existence, and my feeling is that we will satisfy this urge one way or another.
For the bored man or woman, there exists a gulf between what their world is and what their world can be. How might the chronically bored seek to fill this void? Will they cure their boredom on long hikes with family and friends, or donate their time to the local SPCA? Or might they fill this void with fentanyl? Or a zealous ideology? Or protests? Or a bit of vandalism? How much of the madness of the last decade of decadence is due to nothing more than chronic boredom?
And so we have just turned boredom inside out and learned what it is. Boredom is not so much an enemy soldier as it is an allied scout bearing a report from the battlefield: “Beware — the world you have inherited is not the world you are molded for. Beware — the disease of the modern world is ease.” It seems then that the negative experience of boredom is living death; the positive experience of boredom is realizing a change needs to be made; and the absence of boredom is to stalk with the SOG – where every second becomes a lifetime of attention.
What then? Is this a free pass to play the victim? Never. Eric Hoffer wrote, “When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.”4 My sense is that the environment allows boredom to be born, and only then can the individual choose to be bored.
How, then, might the bored access a stalking mode of mind without the stalk itself? This was a dilemma I myself had to solve. Having known stalking, I came to know a crippling, nagging boredom when it was over. I missed it. My cure was to add a bit of savagery back to civilization. We need a target for those circular pupils that can ground us in the second-to-second thrill of existence.
And so a book may be stalked.
A jiu-jitsu session on the floor may be stalked.
A meditation on the veins of a fig leaf, a run in the woods, an actual back and forth conversation on something that matters — it and everything else in life may be stalked, for stalking, in the end, is a mode of mind.
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See you for the next essay on Tuesday.
Alexander Pope’s excellent translation of the Iliad
Plaster, John L. SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Martin S. Banks et al. Why do animal eyes have pupils of different shapes? Sci. Adv.1e1500391(2015).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.1500391
Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer: Thoughts On the Nature of Mass Movements. [1st ed.]. New York, Harper and Row, 1951.
No, I've never been on a life or death patrol in the jungle. But like many, I have had to make decisions that in some cases were insignificant, but in others could be disastrous. Going slowly, stepping carefully, is what you do when you recognize the significance of the consequences. Other times you are more callous, because consequences are not so dire. So, before you decide what to do, determine how much it matters. I've seen large, established businesses go bankrupt over what seemed to be an inconsequential decision.
In the past, life was largely about survival. It didn't have to be life and death; it could merely be about bringing in enough crops and cutting enough firewood to get thru the winter. Mundane but essential.
Many people today have 'careers' that are essentially pointless. It doesn't matter if they're good at it. Sucess is largely indistinguishable from failure, and there is essentially no risk or reward beyond a steady paycheck and benefits. Out of that, some question their existence. They should.
My immediate response to the question of boredom is what I told my sons when they would claim to be bored. Boredom is the lack of application of imagination to you current situation. In effect, always be advancing, even one step a day, a week, or a year, and, be curious. I like this story because it has a domestic component to it. However, the further I read, my mind went to Jonathan Shay’s two books on Vietnam combat experience, seen through the lens of Homer. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, and, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. I end up thinking about the resilience of hope, brotherhood, and purpose as the measure of character as exhibited in the story of Admiral James Stockdale and his leadership as a POW in Vietnam, https://edbrenegar.substack.com/p/hope-that-is-real.