Boredom, Loneliness, and the Weight of Being
On the paralysis of purposelessness, the poison of permission-seeking, and remembering that we are nothing without each other.
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
When Everything Stops
Boredom and loneliness. When they hit together, everything stops. The dark moments return, and suddenly you’re standing still while the world continues without you.
Darkness means something different for everyone. Your darkness isn’t mine, and mine isn’t yours. Yet we share the same pain nowadays: the feeling of being simultaneously useless and indispensable, lost in a vast world that makes us wonder why we still continue.
I believe we continue because we hope. Day by day, we wake up hoping that tomorrow will come differently, or at least feel differently.
The Permission Trap
Someone said recently that if we want to continue to strive, we need to learn “vibe coding” and welding. Practical skills for an uncertain world.
I see it differently.
We need to rediscover the joy of learning. We need to stop asking permission.
Knowledge is accessible to everyone now. In a way, we stop ourselves from becoming something different, hopefully better, for our kin. We’ve built invisible barriers where none need to exist.
Marcus Aurelius wrote about how the mind can turn an impediment into material for action.
Yet we teach people the opposite. We teach dependence. We teach them to rely on the system until it gives up on you.
And it will eventually. Everything has an end, whether we like it or not.
The Interconnected Truth
We’re all trying to figure out the best way to live. In this scramble, we forgot something fundamental: we’re not alone in this world. Without everyone, we’re nothing.
Think about it.
The one planting the crop. The one healing you when you’re broken. The one driving you where you need to go. The one maintaining the infrastructure you depend on without thinking about it.
We are nodes in a network, interconnected and interdependent. Epictetus understood this when he described the duties that arise from our relationships with one another.
The Poison We Chase
We created this mess ourselves. By being greedy for something we cannot eat, cannot consume, cannot even burn because it’s toxic.
We kill for it. We destroy everything for it.
And it can’t even save us.
Money without value. Status without substance. Accumulation without purpose. We traded the meaningful for the measurable, and now we wonder why the metrics feel empty.
Seneca warned about this in Letter 2: “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”
We became poor by choice, addicted to things that provide no nourishment.
The Great Equalizer
Let me remind you of something we all know but conveniently forget:
We are all equal against death.
Every single one of us will face that final moment. No amount of money, status, or accumulated stuff changes this fundamental truth. Memento mori, as the Stoics say. Remember that you will die.
And when we reach the other end, we will face ourselves.
Will you be able to look at yourself?
Not at what you accumulated. Not at what you appeared to be. But at who you actually were. What you chose. How you treated others. Whether you built or destroyed. Whether you connected or isolated.
Finding the Way Forward
The answer isn’t in grand gestures or revolutionary manifestos. It’s simpler and harder than that.
Learn without asking permission. Build without waiting for approval. Connect without expecting reward.
Remember that you are nothing without others, and others are nothing without you. This isn’t weakness, it’s the fundamental architecture of human existence.
Stop chasing the poison. Start nourishing what matters.
The door is open. It always has been.
Le chemin commence ici.
“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10.16
The choice is yours.