I have begun working on this new work. “Ennui Au Jus.”
We’ve all heard about combining food with other pleasurable sensory experiences like cheese and art shows, prime rib and strippers, sex and pastrami, so why not combine delicious food with a debilitating existential crisis?
Nothing in the world is quite so awful as boredom…I’m talking about finding life itself not only uninteresting but also purposeless. Existential boredom defines an inability to find not just particular things but all of life interesting. It manifests itself as a mood in which, for no reason you can articulate, nothing seems to satisfy—even things that normally do.
Alex Lickerman, M.D.
Au jus is French for “with [its own] juice”. The boredom that comes from having not purpose, no pressing need to act, no vision in our head of a future state that we mush attain, like a carrot enticing a horse to keep moving forward, can have us stewing in our warmed-over juices. We can choose to focus on happy distractions or accept that even if we find a diversion to distract us from our boredom, all we’ll have is a temporary distraction from the inevitability of a meaningless life and an insignificant death.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – End 🤗
