The Definitive Guide to Fixing Your Boring Life

You live a regular life. You work an average job in a decent office, you’re in a stable-as-can-be relationship, you occasionally go out with your friends to complain about said job or relationship, and you less occasionally visit your parents. You sleep, eat, work, socialize and try to stay as informed and/or entertained as you feel the need to be. In short, you’re just like pretty much everyone else.

You, in other words, are bored out of your mind; incredibly, unfathomably, magnificently bored. If your boredom was a giant monster, it would take one look at the city it’s supposed to terrorize, then refuse to go near it because it’s too loud, too bright, and most of the people in it are douchebags anyway. You are so bored, a spontaneous colonoscopy is a valid option for filling up some of your free time this weekend. You are become boredom, destroyer of whatever.

However, as years of infomercials and self-help guides have already taught you, there is no way you can get out of this rut alone. You are powerless, confused and you probably smell funny. What you need, my friend, is some easily digestible advice, preferably in the form of a numbered list, to guide you through the sometimes-fatal process of staving off boredom. But be warned: what you face is a powerful force, which many claim to have conquered in other, inferior list-based articles. This guide does not aim to give you mere tools, but weapons that you can use to beat that bastard boredom into bloody submission.

 

Go on an adventure – Grievously injure yourself (by accident)

We’ll start off with something most people can do without even trying. You may try this at home, at work or in transit, but it is best to get accidentally injured during one of your infrequent visits to your parents. This way, you can at once successfully stave off boredom and any further questions about when you plan on having children.

Despite the fact that this method involves a high degree of uncertainty, there are a few things you can do yourself in order to maximize the probability of injuring yourself by accident. For example, you can actually train yourself to never drive before you’ve had a few drinks, or start a club for black feline enthusiasts. A very effective way of increasing your chances, however, is to have most or all of the following items on you at all times: small fireworks (in bundles of thirteen), a loaded Magnum, crocodile bait, a jar of fire ants, circus throwing knives, a positive pregnancy test, a positive gonorrhea test, an undie-sized electromagnet and a pair of scissors for when you feel like going for a run.

Armed with the above knowledge, a random, gruesome, exciting injury should befall on you faster than you can say “crushing medical fees”. Between the long and agonizing recovery process and the vivid hallucinations caused by painkiller-cocktails-supreme, you should have little difficulty feeling less bored, and also feeling less of anything that is not pain.

 

Find a hobby – Discover a true obsession

Ah, there is nothing quite as demanding of one’s attention as an honest-to-God obsession! However, you must never, ever underestimate the time and effort that goes into maintaining a truly unhealthy fixation. Whether it is for life, or just for the couple of years right after breaking up with your partner (who looks much happier now, the ungrateful asshole), it is a serious commitment.

Now that you understand this, I imagine you thinking: “OK, but how is this supposed to help with my soul-crushing boredom?”. To answer that, look no further than the busy street in the middle of your town. Can you see, or rather hear, the portly, middle-aged man broadcasting his thoughts about Hell and damnation through an old, crackling loudspeaker? Gaze into his eyes for a moment (the risk of his crazy rubbing off on you notwithstanding), and you will understand. There is no boredom there, and there hasn’t been since the moment he has made it his mission to loudly inform the ignorant masses that God thinks they suck. That is true conviction.

Now think of examples from your own life. Remember your twice-removed cousin, who got jail time for drop-kicking an old man whose sweater happened to be in his rival team’s colours? Or that quiet girl in your dorm, who used to send Channing Tatum letters containing grafts of her skin every Tuesday? Learn to channel your own potential into something truly deranged, and boredom will be an ailment of the past.

 

Join a club – Release your inner hatred (with friends)

This one follows on from the second point, as it works on the same principle of allowing yourself to be consu… uh, to focus on something to the point of having no time to even consider boredom… with a very important distinction. Whereas your obsession was meant to help you become a reclusive, yet largely harmless creep, hatred is designed to turn you into a bona fide, public asshole. What’s more, it is possible to engage in this particular activity with a group of like-minded people, though you shouldn’t expect this to mean that you have a healthy social life. If you want that, go join a book club or something.

The key to properly releasing your hatred is pacing. Start small: join a forum populated largely by people you consider to be beneath you; human rights advocates should do. Then, flood their message boards with as many vile, antagonistic and downright obscene posts as the darkest pits of your mind can manage to twist into existence. Deride their comebacks, mock their attempts at polite conversation, sneer at their facts and ‘yo mama’ their mothers. Before long, mere arrogance will become red, hot hatred.

Others will join you, though you will band together only out of convenience; after all, if you all think that you’re better than everyone else, camaraderie will be in short supply. Instead, you will barely tolerate each other for the sake of accomplishing your goals (though you will not call it that, because tolerance is for pussies). Slowly, your collective hatred boner will spill out of the online space and into the streets, where you will wreak actual havoc and yada yada/gnashing of teeth.

At this point, your quest for hatred is nearly complete. You need only send your pledge of allegiance to the Westboro Baptist Church chapter of your choice, and you can take the rest of the day off and furiously masturbate to the first half of American History X. You: 1, boredom: 0.

 

Learn something new – Find a source of crippling fear

Perhaps provoking uneasiness or distress in the hearts of others just doesn’t do it for you anymore, and you’ve already reached the absolute maximum days of medical leave that your boss is prepared to accept. Worry not, as there are still many ways to keep your mind off the boredom that even the best of us succumb to… namely, by thinking about how improbable it is for anyone to love you anymore.

I mean, what did you expect? You’re kind of a creep, definitely an asshole, and get randomly injured more often than a cartoon character in a slasher film. Who in their right mind would actually want to spend time around you? Who would ever want to be around you ever again, until the end of history? That cold feeling kind of sucks, doesn’t it? Makes you feel a little empty and alone, right? Well, learn to hold onto that feeling, because it just neutralized the shit out of your boredom!

Studies have proven that fear of everything is one of the most effective antidotes against boredom; real studies, with words and indexes and stuff. What’s more, unlike obsessions, fears demand little dedication; indeed, after a while you will find yourself focusing on them whether you want to or not. As long as you make a little effort to get the existential terror ball rolling, it will only get easier as time passes and life slowly drains out of the fragile husk of loneliness that is your new, not-bored self.

For best results, try to have multiple, overlapping fears at the same time. For example, you could combine the dread of breakup with a fear of abandonment, then splash in some doubts about your partner’s faithfulness and a dash of body image anxiety. If you do well, it’s just a matter of time until you turn from a simple worrywart to worrying that the wort on your genitals is nicknamed “terminal” in medical cliques. Voila: le boredom, it c’est begone.

 

Spend time with loved ones – Embrace how miserable your life is

This is a rather special case, in that it is advised to try one or more of the above methods before you attempt this one. You see, misery does not work well in a vacuum; well, if it’s a literal vacuum, I assume boiling bodily fluids may cause a fair bit of misery, but that’s beside the point. In general, misery works best if it has something to leech on, preferably dark thoughts, regrets and socially unacceptable fetishes. Fortunately, the four methods above will have yielded a plethora of stuff to be miserable about, so the work’s half done before you even know it!

At first, you may only feel a small discomfort, barely a speck in the eye of your monstrous boredom. As you nurture your inner anguish, however, it will grow (well, bloat) to such hyperbolical proportions that it will wring every last bit of lethargy out of your body, along with a bunch of other useless things like hope, faith and happiness. To achieve this, you must adhere to a strict cycle of destructive behaviour and long periods of intense self-loathing, repeating as necessary until one flows into the other as naturally as poisonous waste and pristine rivers.

Of course, sometimes you cannot afford the luxury of engaging in said toxic behaviours (see further above for examples), in which case you must maintain a prolonged sense of personal misery until such opportunities present themselves once more. For times like these, it would be helpful to repeat the following phrase as often as possible: “Life is meaningless, you are meaningless, your dreams are stupid, nobody likes you and you still smell funny.” A bit of a long one, isn’t it? Don’t worry, though. You can instead try to commit it to memory by its much simpler acronym, LIMYAMYDASNLYAYSSF. This will, of course, be much easier to remember because it’s the exact sound a unicorn makes when it dies.

 

Volunteer/Support a cause you believe in – Surrender yourself to the Powers of Darkness

You have tried everything and you’re at the end of your wits. You often hurt yourself, creep people out, beat people up and panic easily, and all of it is making you truly miserable. Yet somehow, by some cruel twist of fate, you are still bored out of your mind. Mundane negativism seems woefully insufficient in curing your ailment, and it’s starting to get on your bloody nerves.

Well, you will be pleased to know that I have one final, yet somewhat extreme piece of advice, a sure-fire way to inject some oomph back into your life. All you will need for this one is stuff you can find lying about in your house, like candles, mold, a box-cutter and the blood of sixty-nine virgins. Yes, you’ve guessed it, you are about to summon your first Force of Darkness and Evil inside your very own body! Of course, to nab yourself a greater F.D.E. from a higher echelon of the Hellfire Planes, you need to be willing to spend some cash. Luckily, all of the extra materials you require for an advanced summoning can be bought from your local pet shop. As for the incantation itself, anything your twisted mind can come up with will do; if uninspired, try to go for a combination of reversed Russell Crowe lyrics and the sound of fornicating seagulls.

Now, demonic possession is widely considered to be one of the top five most effective ways to counter boredom, but there may be some slightly unpleasant side-effects. For example, you may notice that the voices inside your head now sing black metal instead of telling you to kill people, or that you can pee streams of fire without having random, dirty sex behind the decrepit bar next to your aunt’s place. This is all normal and will quickly start to seem natural to you, just like the wails of man as his era comes to an end.

Congratulations! You have successfully defeated boredom, and doomed your entire race to the machinations of the otherworldly being infesting your mind and senses in the process! Starting this very moment, you will never be bored again! Now, dark one, venture forth and assist others in relinquishing their own boredom, along with any last traces of their bladder control.