Lifestyle Choices

Lack of stimulation in life, with day following day in endless repetition, eventually leads towards apathy, a feeling of pointlessness and, ultimately, a desire to give up. A boring job or a boring home environment often lead to a feeling of hopelessness. On top of this, loneliness may create despair. Although it can be tempting to stick to the security of a well-known path, endlessly retreading that path creates a rut; the rut can sometimes become so deep you can no longer see over the edges or believe you can get out of it.

Loneliness

For those who live with others but with little real contact, life can also become very meaningless. You may not be aware of being lonely and yet somehow you do not feel emotionally fed by those around you, so that you feel a sense of dissatisfaction and emptiness which may be with you most of the time. Others seem distant, or else they do not seem to really understand, or perhaps you feel they do not like you. The causes of this problem can lie either with you or with them. You may be a person who has difficulty making warm human contact, in which case you feel somewhat alone in any situation. Perhaps the person or people you live with are different from you and, through no fault of their own, relate to you on a level that simply does not satisfy you.

Boredom at Home

We are primarily social beings and our pleasures in life are nearly always connected with other people. What use is all the money and success in the world if, when you sit down to an exquisitely cooked meal, you have no-one to share it with? Loneliness is a large problem in our society: many people live completely alone and come home to an empty room or an empty house, while others live amongst people, but have so little genuine contact that they too are lonely and isolated.

Living alone

For most people, living alone is almost impossible to sustain without some degree of depression. An empty room seems to have an infinite capacity to soak up whatever you give out till you feel depleted. People, on the other hand, if they are not energy-suckers, reflect back thoughts, feelings and human energy so that the energy stays alive, bouncing from person to person, feeding all who are there who want to partake. In this way we are all dependent on people. When you are alone, almost everything that you do takes on less and less meaning: the meal that you used to cook for yourself seems a waste of effort, keeping your home clean seems to lose its point, and before you know it you are just sitting there doing nothing, feeling low and wondering what the point of life can be: without friends there seems to be little purpose. If you go out to work, the situation may be bearable, but if you do not and you are alone most of the time, life may become intolerable and you may even wish to end it: suicide is most common amongst unemployed older men living alone.

Lack of contact

For husband and wife, or any other long-term living relationships of people, it is only too easy for life to settle into a depressing routine of predictable action and response. If you always know exactly how your partner is going to respond, he or she will be boring to you. While weekly routines can be useful to get chores done, as soon as they become absolutely fixed, they can act as a trap which imprisons spontaneityand good feeling. When the patterns of life are rigid and you know exactly what is going to happen, the future ceases to be interesting.

In the situation of a man who works outside the home married to a woman who does not, the man is often less interested to challenge the home routines because he already has a change of atmosphere to escape to. For the woman at home most of the time, life can indeed become very dull. Housework is not very stimulating when done most of the day, every day, and the lack of stimulus at home may be compounded by a lack of variety of atmosphere if you do not get out. If you have young children, you are that much more restricted, and the work and the conversation can be mind- numbingly repetitive. Many women find that being with children all day and responding to their level of conversation really does affect their mental capacity. You find your intellect levelled to the lowest common denominator — the children’s — and although this effect is not permanent, it sometimes feels as though you’ve lost your senses; you wonder if you would ever be capable again of going out and earning a living, and that thought may affect your confidence and make you feel more dependent. This may be another route toward_sdepression, besides the suppression of any anger against the trap of motherhood. Confinement to the home is also one of the results of unemployment and, sometimes, retirement. If you have always had a place of work to go to, and you lose your job or retire, the restrictions of home life may well be a source of frustration and, ultimately, boredom.

Boredom at Work

If you are capable of doing much more than your job entails, you are likely to get frustrated and bored. A person I know was frustrated about his position but told himself: “Well, I’ll wait another year and see if they offer me something else . . . I don’t want to rock the boat … and if I left now I’m not sure if they would give me a good reference.” But while rationalization for safety was going on the surface, underneath he was feeling something like: “I’m not going to take orders from that cretin again . . . I can’t stand this place . . . I can do better than this.” So long as these feelings of frustration remained available to him, there was hope. But when he gave up and no longer felt his frustration, he declined into a kind of limp boredom that was very difficult to change. He had, through the expediency of safety, lost the incentive to change his lot and was in a permanent state of severe loss of sparkle.

Some people who work in large organizations are faced with the fact that they are required to be good and conscientious, but that initiative and creativity are poorly rewarded. If you have a lot of initiative and creativity, you may pay a price for the safety and perks that the big organization offers: that price is the curtailment of your talents and the repression of your self-expression.

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