Tips for dealing with boredom?

Society wasn't doing anything to him, crystal. Society wasn't out to get him, nor did it care about him in particular. Not when he was living in Montana and doing what he wished to do.

What occurred, it appears, is that slowly the land around him began to be developed in some way, and that brought change as it always does. Development started happening to his wilderness.

If he wanted nothing to do with society and whatever expectations he felt society was attempting to place on him, he could have chosen to move to an even more remote place, or to return to civilization and use his brilliance of a sort to persuade others to join him in his ideas about the evils of technology.

Instead, he decided to hide his identity, and blow people up for many years, while still living in the place that angered him.

Society isn't to blame for his anger over technology nor for his methods to try to resolve his anger. He chose his methods, though I understand that he was under internal pressure and, he felt, external pressure, to take extreme measures to capture attention for his ideas.

I have sympathy for him as a child - his brilliance led those who cared for him to make several missteps iin guiding his childhood development and his education. He was also mistreated at Harvard as a young man by his participation in the inhumane psychological experiments conducted there at the time. His childhood, as well as his natural inclinations and intelligence, set him up.

But it was not Society (sometimes that word is used as if it's a person, an entity) that tried to turn him into a robot.

He could have carved his own way, either within society or without. He could have been a maverick professor if he wished, publishing papers that flew in the face of whatever structure he felt opposed to. He could have had influence on countless students if he'd remained a professor, and used his job to sow the seeds of his ideas in young minds. He could have accepted a paycheck from whatever employment, biding his time til he had enough money to retreat to some tropical island for the rest of his days. He could have legitimately felt his anger at the way that people were choosing to live, and still not made a personal choice to take matters in his own hands and kill people.

He could have...

But instead he's living in a metal cell for the rest of his life.

That's often what happens when Society is blamed for one's own poor choices. I see it all the time, and it makes me sad mostly.

no one including the op is saying society is out to get anyone like some kind of paranoid delusion. it's not personal. op was speaking figuratively. and of course society is not a person, nor is it separate from you and i. we are all society.

the unabomber went away to be alone, society would not figuratively leave him alone. that was his experience when they encroached on his cabin. i doubt they even knew he was there, nor did he believe they were targeting him personally.

it is unrealistic to expect him to move further away, he was close enough to keep in regular contact with his brother who knew about the cabin.

you are mixing up the order of things eight. he never sought to spread his ideas initially, and may have had none until the bulldozers arrived. it appeared he just wanted to live in relative seclusion living off the land around him, etc, and did for nearly a decade without any problem with others or society.

encroaching development then ruined what he probably saw as his only escape - he couldn't move further because he would be away from family. so development probably left him with no other options, and rather than try to marginalize himself further he decided to give up his lifestyle and instead attempt to make some impact that might benefit others or the cause or whatever.

he probably knew publishing papers in the mainstream wouldn't do anything. thousands of people write on these issues and intelligence alone rarely changes anything. the ideas are simply not fashionable.

so he acted accordingly.

Suffice it to say this: the Unabomber's inability to find a way to adapt to society, in a way that still met his needs to live a principled life, landed him in prison for the rest of his life. He not only lost the wilderness and the animals but also his very freedom of movement.

Blaming society for a person's inability to find a way to exist in society is futile. It just doesn't serve a person well.

All I was saying in regards to the OP was to advise him to find a way to adapt... not to become a robot or a sheeple or serve the master or whatever catchphrases we want to put to it, but to find some way to make it work for yourself without harming yourself or harming others.

If he's chronically bored, he needs to find ways to manage his own boredom. You, crystal, had some good suggestions in that regard in an earlier post.

If he must quit a job quickly because it's killing him inside, then find some other way to support himself that isn't such a strain.

Find ways to manage his own anger and frustration when things don't go his way. Trashing his own bike, and then b/e to steal another bike is a recipe for disaster if that's his chosen solution - eventually, that stuff catches up to you.

We all need to find our own ways to adapt to our situation and our environment. If we don't, we will hurt ourselves and/or hurt others. Be that harm in the form of legal troubles, or fines/financial difficulties, or loss of relationships, or narrowing of available options due to bad behavior... whatever form it takes, unless a person can find a way to adapt to their society, life will be difficult.

For the Unabomber, it resulted in lifelong prison. Even if I agreed with every word of his Manifesto, and even if I agreed that the encroachment of development was the cause of his actions (it was not - it perhaps was the trigger, but it was not the cause), the reality is that he still was unable to find a way to adapt, and he continued in that inability until he finally snapped.

What I hear the OP asking is how he can keep from snapping. My answer is: find a way to adapt without becoming a robot.

I 100% agree with you crystal, but I don't have the patience to explain it like you do.
The cattle cannot be helped, and they will, until their last breaths, defend the system.

I'm not a man of words, but actions. Really, I would prefer to go on a rampage killing than trying to talk and explain, because I simply don't have the patience to do so.

I'm sorry, but this topic has moved beyond its purpose and there is no point for me to keep trying to make the cattle realize that they are imprisoned. Not that I care, but society pressures me to become part of it, and I won't accept it.

Maybe someday you guys will see me on the news.

I do feel the need to escape but if others like the imprisonment ,why kill them?
Revenge for keeping you in prison?
if they want to stay is their choice.

Oh yeah ''society'' just care when a young fellow pick some big guns and go to a school, shopping center and ###$ with everything, but as we know the next day society forget.


Because humans these days are like that, have no respect about life or about death, people don't care if they live or not, that's why everyone talk and do $#%^ ALL the time, in real life or in internet.


This is the real thing, because Europe is ###$ by ''Terrorism'' and what do the europeans and the authorities?


They keeping talking $#%^, keeping living and having fun, they most concern is about making new things, buy that, buy this, to build new things, new football stadiums, to make jokes about the culture and religion of '' enemies '', to make jokes about the neighbor who died in an accident, so... No one cares about anything!


I don't know what will make people become better, more human, because some people are called ''monsters'' but some monsters is in they right, but these sadistic ''good people''... The way is torture them, burn some bodies in public square, buried them alive.

aghost wrote:Nothing stimulates me enough. Eventually I will get bored again and will look for more interesting things to do. The problem is that I can't find none.

I have done many things that would put me in jail. That is the only thing that makes me feel like I'm living, not just existing, like a robot or the cattle.

it seems to me, often on this forum, that boredom is not the sort due to lack of stimulation as is more conventional, but some kind of need...i don't know how to put it...to be deviant?

like how you described what you did that you found quelled it. it's the feeling of not being a robot or a sheep, right?

going against the grain in order validate and experience that you are a person.

and i mean when you were doing whatever, did you not become more self-aware, did you not experience a higher degree of selfhood, a sense of your own identity and person, rather than just a robot doing what they are told?

i think when people get too used to the robot thing, they lose themselves. they lose their sense of themselves. and with this comes a particular kind of boredom where you become numb to stimulation because you've lost the ability to connect with experience due to dissociating yourself constantly in order to do what society asks of you

so in order to reconnect with experience, and the stimulation around you, you need to reconnect with yourself!

no more dissociated workdays. or if you do have to do that, don't let it carry over into your off time. your off time should involve you bringing your self out of submersion in order to reconnect with experience and appreciate all sorts of stimulation.

I tend to think that the problem with most who say that nothing stimulates them is that they are looking for pleasure or stimulation as the goal. Pleasure is had while pursuing a goal and, if it's sought as the goal, will only lead to frustration and lack of satisfaction.

For example: You decide to go out to have a good time. You focus on the fact that you're enjoying yourself and so everything will be measured with that in mind. Is this the bar I like the most? Is this the food I like the best? Are these my best friends? On it goes. The chances of enjoying the evening reduces because your focus is the pleasure and there will always be things that make it "not perfect."

However, if you go out with the intention of catching up with friends or visiting somewhere you've not been before then pleasure becomes a by-product of what you're doing and happens spontaneously.

There is no longer a need to focus on the pleasure and measure its success; it will come naturally and will probably open up areas of pleasure that you didn't realise you'd encounter.

So, don't try to deal with boredom because that will focus you on how bored you are. Instead, ignore pleasure and stimulation and start to involve yourself in things (think about what you like and not how much fun it will be) and the situation will probably resolve itself.

well it's always good to explore and try new things, however to say trying anything will lead to more pleasure is probably not the case.

it's known that certain activities are more likely to elicit pleasure than others, and since we don't have all the time in the world, it's best to at least move in the vicinity of pleasure if you will if that is your goal...

also, trying something new is a known pleasurable activity if you're a novelty seeker, even if it turns out to suck. it's not like you'll regret trying it - or never try new things again - if you are a novelty seeker, and novelty seeking can override or take precedence over other known pleasurable things. it can be more important than pleasure itself.

The problem is that the more people seek pleasure as a goal the more elusive it is and the more it needs to be chased to have the same effect. Drug taking is a good example of this.

The less we seek pleasure directly and look for stuff that's, to coin a phrase, more 'fulfilling', the more we find pleasure in things that we'd otherwise dismiss as not stimulating enough.

As an example: You go out for a drink with a friend. Surprisingly, another friend turns up and finally you find yourself out with a group, not planned, and end up having a memorable time. Months later, you meet the same friend and discuss how great that evening was and plan to do it again, hoping to recreate the same effect. However, when you do it it turns out to be not quite the same.

The difference is that the pleasure came as a by-product of your activity in the first instance. In the second, your goal was to recreate the pleasure of the first time. As a result, it would be disappointing by comparison.

The less we seek pleasure as a goal the more opportunities for it appear and opportunity to find it in unexpected places arises.

However, this only works if you know yourself well enough to understand what it is that you're really interested in.

"Know thyself" is the phrase that keeps popping up and whenever I see someone who says "I'm just out for pleasure" then I find myself looking at someone who either doesn't know themselves very well or is extremely one-dimensional and dull.