In my latest National Post column I say it is humans, not frogs, who fail to react as circumstances slowly change in terrible ways like governments piling up debt.
“Boredom can literally kill you, according to an excellent new little book on the subject, published this week… Lars Svendsen, author of A Philosophy of Boredom... was inspired to write the book by a friend who killed himself out of boredom, and Mr. Svendsen shows how boredom, or the escape from boredom, is a much greater incitement to action than is excitement. People get drunk out of boredom; people give up reading newspaper articles such as this one out of boredom; people contract unwise sexual encounters out of boredom. But the dreadful thing is that even sex ends up boring, according to Mr. Svendsen. There is, in fact, a psychological term for it, he says: taedium sexualitatis.... Humans seem to be unfairly picked out for boredom, as we are for drunkenness and suicide, lemmings notwithstanding. Animals, medical studies apparently show, can be understimulated, but not bored. And, even worse, modern humans seem to be particularly prey … The word ‘boring’ in the dreary sense, as opposed to the drilling water pipes sense was used for the first time in England only in the 1760s. That’s not to say that people weren’t bored before 1760, just that there was a European explosion of boredom at about that time. The Germans invented their word for boredom, Langeweile, at the same time. And it was only with late-18th-century Romanticism that the demand got going for life to be interesting. The obsession has boomed ever since. Nowadays, it is hard to think of a time when one is not subject to at least one of the four types … Mr. Svendsen comes up with: boredom of situation, such as being trapped on a train without a book; boredom of satiety, when you have too much of a good thing; existential boredom, where you’ve just had enough of the world; and creative boredom, when you’re forced to come up with something new such as, say, an interesting item in a newspaper article.”
An author whose name I did not record in the Ottawa Citizen March 12, 2005
In my latest Loonie Politics column I ask, with respect to Jordan Peterson and others, how cancellation of anyone who questions authority became the default option in our society.
“That which you most need to find will be found where you least wish to look.”
Jordan Peterson on Instagram July 3, 2022 [https://www.instagram.com/p/Cfjf3lxsP9l/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY%3D].
In my latest Loonie Politics column I urge all politicians to ponder, if their adversaries are as awful as they claim and they are so marvelous, why it is that voters do not elect them in a landslide at every opportunity.
“This girl reminds me of Dreyfus. The army does not believe in her innocence.”
A joke apparently from Sigmund Freud, quoted by Michael Potemra in a review of F.H. Buckley’s The Morality of Laughter in National Review June 30, 2003
“I thought I had been working my butt off these last 25 years, but a rear-view glance in the mirror proves otherwise.”
Jane Christmas in National Post March 8, 2001
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the Trudeau administration’s plan to fix the cost of living crisis by more government handouts is a classic case of trying to dig your way out of a hole