"Boredom: that state of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire."
- Adam Phillips in his book On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (1993)
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Boredom, that melancholy mood and that subject dear to the hearts and minds of philosophers and poets, is suddenly in the news because of Mark Parton's now famous and blush-making-for-him text.
During a recent budget estimates hearing the leader of the Liberal opposition in the ACT Assembly texted someone (perhaps a sex worker, but perhaps not) that "f--k my job is boring." (Here, for this family column, I will imitate the Canberra Times' responsible style for reporting Parton's f-word.)
There has been lots of unkind criticism of Parton, with the bristling fogeys of this newspaper's Letters page bristling that he has no right to be bored, even for a moment, when he is being paid $300,000 a year to be 24/7 thrilled to serve the people.
This is a bit much, coming from Canberra's most notorious bores, the same two dozen unrepresentative octogenarians who write 99.9 per cent of all the letters, making that page a bottomless quagmire of boredom.
But I digress, and want to say here that wise thinkers galore have written of the nuanced complexity of boredom and of its importance to a full and thoughtfully led life.
In one of my favourite blogs, the Marginalian, its blogtrix Maria Popova has a ripper recent post titled 200 Years of Great Minds on the Creative and Spiritual Value of Boredom.
Ms Popova's surveyed works include revered philosopher Bertrand Russell's Boredom and Excitement and psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips' bewitchingly-titled On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life.
One recurring theme Ms Popova finds and agrees with is the opinion that it is only the shallowest flibbertigibbets among us who are immune to boredom and/or who desperately resist it by living artificially frenzied lives.
"Today, amid our cult of productivity," wise Popova divines, "we've come to see boredom as utterly inexcusable - the secular equivalent of a mortal sin. We run from it as if to be caught in our own unproductive company were a profound personal failure. We are no longer able, let alone willing, to do nothing all alone with ourselves."
"And yet," she insists, "boredom is a vital emotion - with its related faculties of contemplation, solitude, and stillness, it is essential for the life of the mind and the life of the spirit, for art and science in equal measure."
These great thinkers would say that Parton's capacity for boredom reflects some credit on him. For it suggests he may, being boredom-prone and so having a contemplative side to him, have an above average mind - surely an admirable and all-too-rare quality in a Canberra Liberal. What if he is his unhappy party's only living treasure?
But of course what poor Parton identified as his sense of being bored by his job was probably really his sense of despair.
Boredom and despair can overlap a little and are easily confused with one another. But as a leader of a charisma-impoverished Canberra Liberals party that he and everyone knows has no chance of ever winning government, his job (and so perhaps with it, his whole life) must seem tragically meaningless and pointless to him.
Those of us who have meaningful, fulfilling employment and so have lives filled with joy and purpose should feel humane pity for him, for his plight, and should forgive him the occasional heartfelt "f--k!" of ennui and melancholy.
With a talent for doing nothing all alone with myself (and anyway finding almost everything about Life innately exciting), boredom is not a major issue for your columnist.
And on those rare occasions when unwelcome boredom does come and sit with me, I'm too refined to moan that "f--k I'm bored". Only vulgar, uneducated people ever exclaim "f--k". Instead I resort to Shakespeare (none of his characters ever exclaims an unpoetic "f--k!") and in moments of boredom tend to sigh or gasp "Alack!" or "Fie!" or "Pish!" or "Woe is me!" and, my personal favourite, a deeply sighed "Heigh-ho!".
In my long, fulfilling career in journalism I almost never had cause to complain "heigh-ho my job is boring!" (let alone say "f--k my job is boring!" - conduct unbecoming in a journalist). But the one journalistic job so boring that it always did get me heigh-hoing was vox popping.
I mention this because one Canberra Times reporter-commentator in one of last week's f-wordgate stories made gleeful hay from the fact that several Tuggeranong people he tried to talk to about Mark Parton (Parton's electorate is in Tuggeranong) didn't know who Mark Parton is. He, the journalist, hinted that this was somehow Mark Parton's fault, perhaps for being too uncharismatic for Canberrans to notice him.
But I am a journalistic veteran of futile vox pop attempts and know just how higgerant the man and woman in the street can be. It's possible that the same people who didn't know who Mark Parton is are incurious thickos who consume no news (finding The Canberra Times too intellectually demanding) and so wouldn't have been able to answer any general knowledge questions about anything or anyone in Australian public life, other than, perhaps, who is presently starring in Married At First Sight.
