At one point in the book, you write, “It seems that boredom is not really that removed from desire. It seems that they are, in fact, the same urge more or less: the urge to do something.” The two main characters both talk about this urge leading them to violence. How are boredom and violence related?
Bertrand Russell said that "all human activity is prompted by desire." As I see it, we possess a simple desire to acquire things and repel things. I think that violence is the product of our inability to repel boredom. When I think about violence, then boredom for me is a good place to start. When people are bored, not just the palpable sense, or the feeling of having nothing to do, but truly bored to the extent that it has become their entire being, then the roots of violence make perfect sense to me. Heidegger, in his lecture "What is Metaphysics?" (1929) argues that this state of boredom is like a "muffling fog" that swathes us, and boredom itself, in "indifference" causing us to slide further into the abyss of our existence. Heidegger argues that such indifference is a platform for us to rebuild, or revalue our being-in-the-world -- so, for Heidegger this slide into the abyss is a good thing, it gives us space to observe things in finer detail. Ultimately, it affords us more time. Something we naturally crave. But he also warns us that such a slide can also suspend us in a state of dread (the same sense of dread I mentioned in an earlier answer), because this slide into the abyss is often perceived by us to be a slide into nothingness, something which basically scares the shit out of us. It is here that our frustrations begin, and it is also here, in our inability to survey existence from a plateau of nothingness that our frictions and frustrations arise -- which, as I see it can only lead to one thing: violence in all its multiplicitous guises. I suppose the danger here is for me as a writer to avoid the trappings of Heideggerian, or even Nietzschean Heroics, I mean who am I to say there is something to be found in meaninglessness and nothingness when there is so much bad stuff happening to people in this world?
