Out of curiosity, how bored is everyone here in this thread? Besides work, gayiming and shitposting, how bored are you?
Rarely. When I was new to sobriety and anhedonic I had too much to fix to be bored, and too much to feel penitent about to not work on that stuff whenever I could. Now a few years in I have too many interests and too much I want to get done.
In my experience what a lot of people attribute to "boredom" is a developed tolerance to overstimulation, e.g. a lowered dopamine baseline from abusing dopaminergic substances like alcohol or stimulants or dopaminergic behaviors like gambling or video games or porn or tiktok, which makes everything else feel underwhelming in comparison. "Dopamine" gets misrepresented as "the happy chemical" which is an overly reductive concept of it but in the case of boredom it really is the issue, dopamine is responsible for motivation and reward, so contrary to popular conception a lack of dopamine doesn't feel like sadness, it feels like boredom. You want to be stimulated and you aren't, not because the things you're doing aren't stimulating, but because the things you're used to are
extra stimulating. The good news is that it works both ways; if you just let yourself be bored for a while without reaching for superstimuli to "fix" it, your baseline will recover and you'll start to enjoy the things you're meant to, like being productive or creative or social. Substances aside, a good rule of thumb is that behaviors that can be described as "frictionless foraging," i.e. behaviors where you're getting rewarded without effort, are something to be avoided because they'll always feel preferable to behaviors where you're rewarded for your efforts, which will make you avoid and resent behaviors where you have to put in effort.
I think I've sperged here about asceticism before, but that's basically what this is: avoiding bad things that feel good until good things feel good. It's uncomfortable at first but it works; now when I get bored I go build something or make music or exercise. In my experience you can quit one thing a month, so I just keep doing that, and my life keeps getting a little better each time. It's also a good bulwark against relapse, because instead of indulging in your drug of choice you can just work backwards and permit yourself to indulge in social media or orange chicken or fuckin... reading about celebrities on TMZ or whatever you're into. Lesser evils.
All that aside, the other thing I think people frequently attribute to "boredom" is just wanting stimulation or reward but not having the energy to work for it. To which the answer is just fucking go to bed. Rest, and then wake up with the energy to do the things you actually want to do, instead of sitting in a chair passively consuming bullshit. Sleeping feels fucking incredible and if you're putting it off outside of social situations there's probably something wrong with you and it's probably a dependence on some kind of overstimulation or frictionless foraging. Which then makes you tired, which has a demonstrable effect on willpower and decision making, which makes you do dumb shit for an easy fix, which makes you feel worse, which makes you reach for an easy fix, and so on. Just go to bed, without your phone or a TV on or whatever.
