Feeling bored is something that has caused a lot of problems for a lot of people but doesn't get talked about a lot. It's like it causes those issues and then refuses to take credit for it.
photo by Camila Quintero Franco
I have a friend who would always gamble on his phone whenever he was feeling bored. I never really got to understand what exactly was going on in his head because there were a million things you could do on your phone to help get rid of boredom, but he would prefer to open his gambling app and just spend as long as he could there. Sometimes, the only time he stops is when he runs out of cash in his bank account.
I have another friend who would just get out of the house and just walk aimlessly because he's bored. Personally, I would have preferred that so that I could turn this boredom into something good, but unfortunately I'm too lazy to get up and walk all the time.
When it comes to me, I don't think boredom has ever made me do something that huge that I ended up regretting, and this is probably because there really isn't much happening here for me to do. The most I've done because of boredom is go talk to someone I wasn't supposed to or didn't want to.
A few years ago, I used to be friends with this lady who had one of the most annoying characters known to man. And being the kind of guy that I am, I wouldn't let anything she did slide just because she was a lady. So we would constantly get into arguments with each other and not talk for days, sometimes even weeks.
The irony of it all was that she was one of the few people I spoke to on a regular basis. So on days when we weren't on speaking terms, it usually felt like hell for me because it felt like there was no one else to talk to. I would hold out, hoping she would come apologize or make an effort to try to talk to me, but that never happened.
After about a week of constant back to back boring days, I would march over to her room to talk to her. But because I'm mostly not the one at fault, or the reason for the quarrel, rather than apologize to her, I would scold her while also explaining to her why what she had done was wrong. And the crazy thing was that she never talked back at me during any of those scoldings.
I soon found out it was because she too was tired of us fighting but didn't know how to end it, so she was excited that I had come to speak to her. This repeated itself for a very long time, and every time I shamelessly walked into her room to scold her, I would tell myself that I was doing it because I was the bigger person who didn't want to hold a grudge against anyone else.
But in reality, I was just bored out of my mind and wanted my friend back.
