Why You're Bored Everywhere - Even in Paradise

We are the most overstimulated humans who have ever lived, which is why you can travel to the most beautiful cities on earth and feel nothing. A dispatch from Prague.

I was standing in one of the most fairytale-coded cities on earth, and I was bored, and this is an essay about how obscene that is.

I’d crossed an ocean to get to Prague. People save their whole lives for the afternoon I was pissing away. And I was alone for it, because I travel the way I do everything (as an introverted fuck with almost no capacity for spontaneous human contact) which means I walk. Twenty-five thousand steps a day, according to the iPhone that will later become the villain of this essay. That kind of walking gets you far in Prague: the winding alleys of Old Town, up to Prague Castle, down through Letná, into the held-breath stillness of the Jewish Quarter, and, inevitably, onto the Charles Bridge.

This city works on you with everything it has. The light coming off the Vltava the color of a forgery, gold and clean. Prague Castle stacked up on the hill like something a child would build if the child were playing make-believe as a mad king. Thirty baroque saints lining the bridge in mid-swoon, frozen at the exact instant of being pierced by God. And I was standing in the middle of all of it, six hundred years of engineered transcendence under my feet, rubbing my thumb across a pane of glass, instead of the bridge’s own stone balustrade, worn smooth and cool by the hands of six centuries of kings and queens and pilgrims and plague-survivors and the genuinely desperate, to check whether anything had happened on the internet in the last four minutes.

Nothing had, but I checked anyway, like a gambler compulsively pulling a slot machine lever that has never once paid out.

I scanned the saints of the bridge like my feed.

St. Vitus, St. Wenceslas, the big black Crucifix, and St. John of Nepomuk, who was thrown off this very bridge in 1393 for refusing to tell a paranoid king what the queen had confessed to him (suspected infidelity), tortured and bound and dropped into the river for the crime of keeping the confessional seal and keeping his mouth shut. His brass plaque is now the most-touched metal in the city, rubbed to a mirror by three centuries of hands hunting just a little luck.

My eyes slid over all of it and registered nothing, the smooth nothing of a thumb crossing forty photographs of strangers’ acai bowls and cats.

Seen it. Seen it. Seen it. Seen something like it.

Somewhere nearby a mustached street vendor was selling trdelník, the cinnamon-and-charcoal smell of it thick in the air; a busker two arches down was sawing through the same four bars of Vivaldi he’d clearly been sawing through all day; a tour guide’s umbrella went by trailed by twenty obedient phones held up like communion wafers. And I lifted my own phone to photograph a setting I was standing directly inside of, so that I could look at it later, smaller, alone, on a screen, or more likely never look at it at all, instead of looking at it now, when it was real and in front of me and free.

And some animal in me, crouched in the shadows of my psyche, knew exactly how grotesque this was.

This memory is an indictment, and I am the defendant. You can put a person inside the corridors of a dreamlike city, and if you have spent enough years letting a small glowing rectangle drip-feed his pleasure to him, a hamster bottle refilled, every few minutes, with a thin warm trickle of morphine, he will stand in the middle of the beautiful fantasy and feel the soft gray nothing of a man waiting for a webpage to load.

The city is perfect. The problem is the man, and the man is me.

---

I had come because of a dead novelist who also happens to be my favorite.

Milan Kundera (rest in peace) built a Prague in my head many years before I stood on the cobblestone streets of the real one. Communist gray, erotic philosophy, the unbearable weight of history pressing down on people trying to live light. The Unbearable Lightness of Being was the city in words; Tomáš, the womanizing surgeon who can hold a hundred lovers precisely because he refuses to let any of them mean anything; Tereza showing up at his door with one heavy suitcase and the whole crushing weight of actually loving somebody; Sabina in the bowler hat, betraying everyone she meets on principle, mistaking weightlessness for freedom; the Soviet tanks rolling over the Prague Spring in ‘68 while these three try to figure out whether a life means more when it’s light enough to float away or heavy enough to break you. Kundera opened the whole thing on Nietzsche (einmal ist keinmal, once is never, a thing that happens only once might as well not have happened at all) and then spent four hundred-ish pages asking whether that’s a mercy or a horror. I had read it at nineteen and decided, with total certainty, that the man who wrote it had access to some frequency of being that I wanted tuned into my own skull.

I wanted that Prague. More than that, I wanted to be the kind of man who could feel it, or better yet, channel it.

I’d been running a version of this fantasy since I was a teenager.

The scholar-adventurer circling the globe toward some ancient buried meaning, all candlelight and water-stained maps and significance humming under every cobblestone. A real-life Robert Langdon, as cringe as that is to type into a document I intend to let other people read.

And here was the actual man that fantasy had finally assembled, standing on the most storied bridge in Central Europe: checking his TikTok notifications.

That is when I first saw the giant cat.

---

At the far end of the bridge, where the crowd thinned toward the Old Town tower, something was moving along the stone parapet that was not an obnoxious tourist and was not a flapping pigeon.

It was up on the balustrade, level with the saints, walking the narrow ledge with a low muscled patience; black, or the absence of color that reads as black against bright stone, unhurried, enormous.

A panther, I thought and then quickly checked my sanity.

It paced the parapet beside St. John of Nepomuk, the drowned saint and the big cat sharing a plinth, and it was not looking at the river or the Castle or the light.

It was looking at me.

I blinked, and then it was nothing but a shadow thrown by a streetlamp that wasn’t lit, because it was afternoon and because there was no panther on the Charles Bridge.

A German family edged past with a selfie stick chattering in efficient German.

The busker kept butchering his song.

Why did I hallucinate a great cat watching me from the saints’ ledge? I found out a few weeks later, when I read the story it had walked out of, and understood that it had been pacing toward me for quite some time.

---

A fact that should frighten us: we are the most stimulated human beings who have ever lived, and we are forever and always bored to the bone.

I never once heard my father say the words “I’m bored.” I don’t think his father had the phrase available to him at all. But my whole generation carries boredom around like a chronic fever, and we carry it while holding a glass slab that contains every song ever recorded, from Beethoven to Bieber; every film ever shot, from the Lumière brothers’ train pulling into a station in 1896 to whatever Christopher Nolan is about to do to the Odyssey; every painting from the Lascaux cave wall to Warhol’s soup cans; every person we have ever loved or wanted, reachable in seconds. It makes no sense until you look at the wiring, and then it makes a sick kind of sense.

Dopamine gets sold, in the podcast-industrial complex, as the chemical of pleasure, but really it’s the chemical of pursuit. It is the molecule that walked our ancestors across a dangerous valley toward a stand of berries or the back end of a gazelle, the molecule that says go, get, chase, more. We get the same hit now (much smaller, but the same circuit lighting up) from a thumb-swipe. A meme. Porn. A new subscriber. A speared antelope’s worth of reward, chopped into ten thousand microdoses and dispensed one swipe at a time, a thousand times a day. And the brain has one iron rule nobody warned us about as children tinkering with these devices: after every spike, you don’t just gracefully float back to zero. You drop below it. You go into deficit, and the deficit has a texture, and the texture is gray, and the gray is boredom.

So modern boredom is, quite literally, a constant low-grade state of withdrawal.

We have wrung ourselves out so thoroughly on the drip that a man could wake up transformed into a monstrous insect in the bed beside us and we would glance over, feel almost nothing, and go back to the screen. Kafka wrote that sentence (“Gregor Samsa, changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin”) in this city, a few streets from where I stood checking my phone. It is arguably the most famous opening line in modern literature, and it was composed by a deeply bored Prague insurance clerk who spent his days pushing paper and his nights turning his own alienation into the defining image of the century. The man who gave us the bug was, by every account, profoundly, chronically, magnificently bored.

But the science here is only a glance at the mechanics. It tells you how the gray gets in, but cannot tell you what the gray is.

For that you have to travel somewhere worse.

---

Heidegger called this profound boredom.

It is a brand of boredom beyond the sterile waiting room drawl while you flip through a four-month-old magazine advertising the health benefits of Brazilian butt lifts and wonder whether the doctor is about to tell you something has gone wrong inside you, or just thump your back with a cold stethoscope or sweaty palm and say “you’ll be fine.”

That boredom has an object; it’s waiting-for. Profound boredom is without an object.

It descends for no reason and on no schedule, and it flattens the whole world to a single gray tone; the saints and the river and the woman you love and the bodega sandwich in your hand all leveled to the same nothing, all equally unable to reach you.

But Heidegger thought this was one of the rare fundamental moods, one that reveals something. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, he describes how, in profound boredom, “each and every thing at once becomes indifferent,” not one thing at a time, but “all of a sudden everything is enveloped and embraced by this indifference.” It is the saint, the river, the sandwich, all of it leveled at once. But these things do not vanish. “Beings as a whole do not disappear,” he writes, “but show themselves precisely as such in their indifference.” The world stays, fully present, and goes silent. He calls this the “telling refusal” of things; they refuse you, and the refusal itself is trying to tell you something.

Here is my gloss on what that means: the meaning was never in the bridge or the castle. You were bringing it. Enchantment is something you do to the world, continuously, without noticing, just as you breathe. And profound boredom is the mood in which you catch yourself having stopped the breath of enchantment. The world withdraws. The objects go inert. The castle flattens into a postcard. The dozen languages Czech, Hungarian, French, Turkish, braiding past you on the bridge stop being music and become noise, just air being pushed around by jostling mouths and tongues. And you understand, with dismay, that all of it was always capable of going inert, that the glow was on loan from you the entire time, and the loan has just been called in.

So, I was ontologically vacant on the Charles Bridge, not under-stimulated. I had stopped being the kind of creature that hands meaning to an object by attending to it, and so the most meaning-saturated city on earth (at least to me, the city of Kundera and Kafka) hit my eye and slid off it like the yellow pigments of a crushed moth off a windshield, because meaning is not a property of the thing. St. Vitus Cathedral holds no awe the way it contains pews. Awe is something a living animal performs in front of it, and I had stopped performing it, and Prague was simply the enormous bright screen onto which my own absence was being projected.

A city, it turns out, cannot wake a dead man. It can only show him, in very high resolution, exactly how dead he is.

---

Prague will help you see this, because Prague is a city of made matter straining to be alive, and once you notice it you cannot stop.

Down in the Jewish Quarter they sell the Golem in every window. These are little clay men, keychains, fridge magnets, the medieval legend of a body built from river mud and animated by a word in its mouth, a boulder shaped like a man with no soul inside it. I bought one. Of course I did. I photographed it and felt nothing and put it in my bag. Across the river, David Černý’s chrome bust of Kafka stands forty-two motorized steel layers high, the writer’s whole face endlessly disassembling and rotating and reassembling itself, a man perpetually coming apart and pulling back together and never once arriving at a face, which is either a monument to Kafka or a monument to the modern self, and I could not tell you which. On the television tower across town, Černý’s giant bronze babies crawl up the side, their faces blank but for a slot, an inset barcode where the features should be. Enormous faceless infants climbing forever toward nothing. And down by the river the Dancing House leans and twists as if caught mid-step, a building Gehry designed to look like two lovers dancing, a structure doing the one act I could not: moving, swaying with life.

I walked through all of it. A living man among animated objects, in a city full of soulless things mimicking life, the mud man, the rotating head, the crawling babies, the dancing building, and I was, by a wide margin, the most inert object in it.

The Golem at least had a word in its mouth once. The statues had appetite. I had a phone and Airpods.

And the panther kept pace with me the whole way. On chrome face, a black shape sliding between the turning plates. Lurking between headstones in The Old Jewish Cemetery, behind my own dead reflection. Always at the edge, always patient, always watching the one thing in Prague that was alive and could not feel the blood, the heart, the rush.

---

I read Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” after I got home, which is the kind of joke Prague would play, given that his face is printed on every bookmark in the Old Town artisan gift shops.

The story is simple.

A man starves himself for a living. It is a circus spectacle. The entire act is public fasting, in a cage, for crowds who come to marvel at how long he can go. In his prime, it is so serious that they literally post guards to make sure he isn’t sneaking food. Then the crowds thin, because wonder is a resource and it runs dry, and the impresario caps his fast at forty days because no audience can be made to care past forty days, and the artist is demoted to a cage on the path to the real attraction, the menagerie, where the people stream past him toward the animals without slowing down. The little sign tracking his days stops getting updated. He starves down toward actual death now, genuinely, unwatched.

And when they finally find him near the end of his life and ask him why, why the hell do this to yourself, he gives the answer that turns the whole thing inside out. He says he had no choice in it. He says that if he had ever once found a food he liked, he would have eaten it, and made no fuss, and stuffed himself like anyone else.

He never fasted out of discipline. He fasted because nothing ever tasted like anything.

Then he dies, and they rake out the straw, and they put a young panther in his cage. And the panther is everything the hunger artist was not. It eats whatever it’s given without hesitation. Its body is full to the bursting point with the thing it needs. It does not seem to miss its freedom. It carries freedom around with it, Kafka says, somewhere down in its jaws. And the same crowds who could not be bothered to stop for a dying man now press against the bars to feel the heat coming off a creature that is simply, violently, alive, and they can hardly bear the joy of it, and they will not walk away.

That panther was the great cat stalking me in Prague. The beast perched on the parapet. It had walked out of a cage in a story I hadn’t read yet and stationed itself on the Charles Bridge to show me which animal I was.

Because I am, sadly, not the panther. I am the hunger artist in the other cage, the one who can no longer find a food he likes. The man who crosses an ocean flying towards his fantasy and stands there feeling the sign on his cage quietly stop being updated, day by day, in a font only he can read. The hunger artist is not a fable about willpower, but a diagnosis, and the diagnosis is mine, and maybe yours:

this is what a person becomes when the receptors are sanded down so far that nothing reaches them and he keeps performing the hunger anyway, keeps refreshing the empty act, because the performance is what’s left when the appetite is gone.

We are a civilization of minor hunger artists. We fast in plain sight, for an audience already drifting toward the menagerie, and we tell ourselves it’s taste, or standards, or being hard to impress. It isn’t. We just can’t find a food we like. The panther could and always will. That was the entire difference between them, and it was the whole of our current, boring tragedy.

---

So Heidegger provides a diagnosis; but Søren Kierkegaard, eighty years earlier and from inside a completely different faith in a completely different century, provides a prognosis and it implicates the trip to Prague itself.

Kierkegaard called boredom the root of all evil and he meant it as engine more than sin: “the principle of motion,” the infinitely repulsive force we are all forever fleeing. And he watched people flee it exactly the way we still do. He had a name for the way we do it badly: the vulgar, inartistic rotation, the method “based on an illusion.” He even spelled out the illusion, and when you read what he wrote in 1843 it is hard not to feel personally indicted across two centuries: “One is weary of living in the country and moves to the city; one is weary of one’s native land and goes abroad; one is weary of Europe and goes to America etc.; one indulges in the fanatical hope of an endless journey from star to star.” You change the soil. Then you change it again. He called this “the spurious infinity,” and he said the thing that should have stopped me cold at the airport:

“This method cancels itself.”

Because the boredom was and is never in the soil.

Earlier in the same passage he locates it precisely.

When the nations grew bored they built the Tower of Babel and were “dispersed around the world, just as people now travel abroad, but they continued to be bored.” The fix he actually prescribed is the reverse of flight. You do not change the field itself; you change how you cultivate it. “The principle of limitation,” he calls it, “the sole saving principle in the world. The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.” And then the image I have not been able to shake since I understood what he was doing to me with it:

“A solitary prisoner for life is extremely resourceful; to him a spider can be a source of great amusement.”

Do you see what that makes me on the Charles Bridge?

I had run his vulgar rotation to the letter. Weary of my country, I went abroad; weary of the ordinary, I crossed an ocean for the fairy-tale city; the spurious infinity, one more field, certain this soil would finally feed a man who had forgotten how to cultivate. And the one thing he said actually works, limit yourself, attend harder, find the whole world in the spider in your cell, was available to me for free, at home, the entire time.

The prisoner found a universe in a spider.

I stood on a six-hundred-year-old bridge and couldn’t find one in a cathedral.

---

Kierkegaard provides the discipline; flee less, attend harder, find the universe in the spider.

But he didn’t really show me a person doing it out in the world.

For that I revisited the writer who offered me the only way out I’ve ever believed, and who, with what I can only call contempt for my comfort, built that way out inside the worst man he could invent.

Anton Chekhov wrote “The Lady with the Dog“ in 1899, from Yalta, where he was slowly dying of tuberculosis and, by his own account, dying of boredom besides (which means he made this thing, like Kafka made his, out of the gray). The man at the center of it is Dmitri Gurov: married, middling, a serial adulterer who thinks of women as “the lower race” and moves through them to break the monotony of a Moscow life he finds unbearable. He is, in the plainest available terms, a tool and, perhaps, the 1800s’ most famous fuckboy. At a seaside resort he meets a young woman walking a little white dog and does what he always does, starts an affair to kill the boredom, fully intending to file her with the others when the season ends.

And then he can’t.

That’s the whole pivot, and it is almost nothing. He goes home and she will not file. She keeps surfacing in him, unbidden, a pang in the middle of gray afternoons. Moscow, which he used to tolerate, now feels to him (Chekhov’s words) like a “madhouse,” like “penal servitude.” Notice the language. The man has woken up just enough to feel the bars. Something has gotten in, something real enough to haunt him, and so he does the single un-bored thing he has done in his life: he gets on a train, goes to her town, and the secret affair becomes the truest center of a man who never had one.

Chekhov refuses to clean any of it up. Dmitri stays an ass. A liar. The affair stays an affair. Nobody is redeemed, nobody is punished, nothing is resolved. There is only a man who catches his own gray hair in a hotel mirror and understands that he has, for the first time and far too late, actually fallen in love and the story simply stops there, on the two of them realizing that “the most complicated and difficult part” was “only just beginning.”

I used to read that ending as a tragedy of incompleteness, as Chekhov simply running out of road and time. Now I read it as a fundamental truth. He is not withholding the cure. He is telling you there isn’t one, and that this is good news for you and for me, because the absence of a cure is the only thing that makes the aliveness real.

The way back into the panther’s body is not more, not a sharper stimulus or a more beautiful city. It is letting something real in far enough to wreck the comfortable gray, knowing it will cost you, decimate you, throw you around, roundhouse kick you in the throat, knowing it will not last, knowing the boredom is already regrowing its relentless weeds in the field behind it. Dmitri does not get to stay awake. He gets to be awake now, at ruinous cost, with the entire hard part still in front of him. He is still in the cell, but he has done the only thing Kierkegaard’s prisoner could do: he has found, in a single ordinary woman, the whole world he kept crossing continents to look for.

That is the most anyone is offered. There is no such food that ends hunger, and waiting for it was the hunger artist’s whole fatal career, fasting in protest of a meal that was never coming.

There is only the eating, and then the hunger again, and the eating again.

---

So put them on the Charles Bridge together, all three, where they belong (in my head, and now yours): the hunger artist, the panther, and the bored Russian tool and notice they are all in cages.

The hunger artist is what the drip makes of you. A performer of appetite with no appetite left, refreshing an empty act in a cage the crowd has already drifted past, starving in protest of a meal he was sure existed and never came. The panther is the animal underneath the floorboards of you, the one that wants and eats and goes briefly, violently full and then, the part the whole modern machine is built to hide, gets hungry again by evening. And Dmitri is the man who found the latch. Not the exit (because there is no exit, he is still married, still lying, still pacing the same Moscow) but the latch, the one real thing let in far enough to wreck the gray, at a cost that decimated his comfortable life and was worth it anyway.

Three cages, then. And the only difference between them is not freedom, because none of them gets free.

The difference is appetite.

The hunger artist has lost it and performs its corpse. The panther has it and will have it again tomorrow and the day after, endlessly, which looks like torment and is actually the whole of being alive. And Dmitri claws his way from the first cage toward the second, on no promise that he’ll even arrive.

The wellness industry will not sell you this, because there is no product in it. It sells presence as serenity; a candle, a calming CBD oil to rub on your thighs, a cushion, a cured and final calm. But the panther is not calm. It is hungry, alert, a little dangerous, and will be empty again by evening. That is presence, not a failure of it.

---

So I go back, in memory, to the Charles Bridge.

I can see myself there, petrified mid-fidget, the saints swooning overhead in their permanent ecstasy, the whole shuffling planet pressing past, my fingers gripping the computer in my pocket on their own. The hunger artist in embryo, standing inside the fantasy he crossed an ocean to inhabit. The panther watching, full, briefly, then hungry again, the way it always was, the way it always will be.

I don’t know if I can get back into that body. I don’t think anyone gets to stay the panther. That was never the offer, and believing it was the offer is the precise sickness that had me checking my phone on the most beautiful bridge on earth.

What I think now is this: boredom is the cost of having the kind of mind that can also, on its good afternoons, be brought to its knees by a bridge. You do not get the awe without the gray underneath it; they are the same organ, caught at different hours. Pascal saw it three hundred years before the rectangle: all of human misery, he said, comes from a man’s inability to sit alone in a quiet room. So modern technology did not invent the void. It only learned to sell us, very efficiently, a way to never have to look at it.

Prague will bore me again. It bored me there, inside the dream, with all of God’s men watching. The rectangle will win on a Thursday, and on the Thursday after that. And some afternoon, between the gray ones, I will let the real get far enough under the skin to cost me something.

And then I will be bored again. And I will have to do it again. And again. And again.

Until I don’t.