As a local Fargo citizen, I’ve begun to realize that much of my surroundings bore me. Some days, I have this completely blind and insensitive belief that most of the people in Fargo are painfully vanilla. I know it’s not true, but on the surface, many people I’ve encountered haven’t proven otherwise. From what I’ve witnessed, most people here have pre-planned answers to questions everyone asks out of politeness, and there’s a certain sense of comfort to the ordinary. I would, depending on the day and the level of cynicism I carry, call Fargo the city of the safety net. It’s where jobs come fairly smoothly, multiple generations go through the same schools, and most people fall cleanly into their futures. As someone who highly favors life over comfort and absolute honesty in both words and character, this bothers me. But lately, I’ve been trying to see the value of opposite beliefs to my own. So this? This is my attempt at making friends with a word that has forever scared me.
Monotony (noun) : lack of variety\; tedious repetition and routine. The word itself is based in uniformness and comfort, words I often would make synonymous with unoriginal and soul-sucking. But I’m already getting sidetracked, so let’s bring it back. Monotony. If I’m thinking optimistically about this word (and it’s hard,) two main thoughts come to mind.
First, monotonies compose the majority of life. Appreciating their overbearing presence in our lives may be hard, but it’s a vital mental discipline that not many are willing to commit to. It’s hard for me, personally, to bite my tongue and continue to witness personalities who’ve succumbed to simplicity. I tend to replace the concept of “contentment with monotony” with “submission to a robotic mindset.” But if you can’t make daily life monotonies celebratory, you will be forever unhappy. People’s tendency towards comparison is detrimental to this concept, but if we were more accepting of our own average days, we would also be more willing to cheer for other people’s ability to temporarily break from them. While it’s important to see the value of routine, escape is naturally in high-demand, as it provides a well-earned breath of relief. This brings me to my next point.
Secondly, monotony provides the ability to do the non-monotonous. If you look back on your life, it’s likely that the times that stick out the most are the ones where the cycle of monotony was broken. Random, unexpected opportunities and spontaneous adventures that un-spool our tightly-wound lives: these are the things we live for. They would not likely exist with the same impact if we lived an eternal adventure. I don’t mean to get all inspirational, but what would happen if we started recognizing the small things that follow us day-to-day? It’s important to become better at living for the minute details that compose most of our lives. If we’re looking, there are countless mini-escapes from routine: getting all green lights on the way to work, finding a new “on-repeat” song, or coming home to the new book you ordered weeks ago. By recognizing the need for the ordinary, we can become better inventors of local escape and students of simple joy. Without the structure that monotony provides, it would be more difficult to recognize the times it’s broken on both large and small scales.
Philosopher Bertrand Russell speaks heavily on this topic and regards much of the craving for excitement to the teachings of parents to their children. Childhood, a time when imagination should thrive, is now being suffocated by excessive amusements. He says in his (highly recommendable) book, The Conquest of Happiness, “All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches… We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. We have come to know, or rather believe, that boredom is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement.” He compares this flaw to the nature of drugs, “What applies to drugs applies also, within limits, to every kind of excitement. A life too full of excitement is an exhausting life, in which continually stronger stimuli are needed to give the thrill that has come to be thought an essential part of pleasure… A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and one of the things that ought to be taught to the young.” We are addicted to the intake of adventure and yet progressively desensitized to its effects.
The reason why we fear boredom is because we become numb to it. If we accept it, we are no longer seeking life. This is my personal fear. But I now recognize the value of the normal, the silent flow of our small lives. Fargo citizens are not mind-numbingly boring, maybe they’re just better at the practice of contentment. I need to catch up on that concept, but I’ll get there.