I am not a moviegoer, and I do not pay attention to the film industry in the slightest, but around the time of the SAG-AFTRA awards the talk of the town was Timothee Chalamet and his award speech. He says, and I quote: “The truth is I'm really in the pursuit of greatness. I know people don't usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats.” The speech was inspirational. As someone who is himself in pursuit of greatness (albeit this “greatness” being more of a delusion than a possibility for reasons too long for this blog post,) I resonated with his words. Timothee also starred in the recent “Marty Supreme”, a movie that explores Marty Mauser and his plight to be the best. Personal thoughts of the movie aside, I was reminded of a similar movie, “Whiplash”, a film of which I am a huge fan, where Andrew Neiman sheds literal blood, sweat, and tears to become, in his words, “one of the greats”.
This desire to be someone, become something, and reach the pinnacle of greatness is something I have been thinking a lot about recently in conjunction with Timothee’s words “I know people don't usually talk like that”. He is correct. Plenty of people who roam this earth with us are those people. People without passions, ambitions, or desires. That is fine, there is nothing inherently wrong with that, but I find in anecdotal experience that it is these people who push back on the idea of greatness. They take offence to the idea that they do not have visions of becoming the best, or that they live their life with no fire in their spirits. My theory is that these feelings manifest themselves from fear, a fear of being nerdy, bookish, different. This fear of being different results in a fear of being passionate, which results in being okay with being okay. This does not just apply to competition and being the champion of a sport or game, but also to how we create. Humans are artists, and art is what makes us human. We write, we paint, we produce, we create. But when you have an internalised fear of being different, you naturally become shy of the prose you write or the canvas you paint. The result? You become okay with just being okay. Most people would argue that they do not have time. That they cannot afford the luxury of pursuing something outside of their responsibilities such as families or careers. And while partly true simply due to the world we live in, I think it is also on ourselves to seize our own time. One way our time has been stolen from us is the elimination of boredom. Being bored is when we have ideas and when we think and when we plan. And yet, most of us have not felt boredom in so long. You simply do not need to anymore. Short-form content on our phones, endless series and movies to half-pay attention to while we watch that aforementioned short-form content, algorithms that are designed specifically to steal any passing minutes we may have alone with our thoughts. When was the last time you used a microwave? I would be mighty confident betting on you spending the few minutes it took to heat your food mindlessly staring at your phone. It is quite akin to the movie WALL-E, a movie in which humans have been pushed into space, where they spend their days putting on weight and staring into holographic screens before getting a good night’s sleep to ensure they have the energy to repeat the process tomorrow. Boredom is a lost art form. Not being bored, not having any downtime to let our minds wander, inhibits us from exploring, creating, and imagining. And of course, you might justify spending your half hour commute catching up on the news, but it is also about those precious minutes that add up throughout the day. The minutes you wait for your coffee to be done, the minutes you wait for the train to arrive, the minutes you wait for the microwave to snap you back to reality. The end result of all this is that we simply do not think. We do not have time to think, or rather we have substituted all those minutes with small bursts of dopamine. The minutes add up, and over the course of a day a week or a life, it is that lost time we could have spent becoming someone. Without boredom there is no passion. When nobody has a passion, passion becomes different. And when passion becomes different, you do not want to be part of that out-group. When that is the case, what type of human society are we really fostering? It is funny because we admire and love movies where people sacrifice everything to become the best, where lovers show undying yearning for each other with grand displays of affection, where artists discover themselves and reflect it in extraordinary pieces of music or art. These people used to be us. We look up to these characters akin to the way we look up at the stars: forever out of reach but beautiful in their existence. And yet, fifty years ago those people were me and you, all of us with passions and dreams and desires. But maybe I am wrong. Maybe not everyone is destined to be great. Maybe not all of our personality matrices are complex enough to allow for the level of discipline, ingenuity, and passion required to become someone. But to those of you who know you are, who know you have the capacity to truly rise among your peers, perhaps take some time to reflect on the role that technology and modern society play in dampening our thoughts and quieting our minds. Being bored is an outdated formula, but not a forgotten one, so maybe reconsider how you spend your time the next time you have a few microwave minutes to spare.