Interlude: on boredom (or what goes through your head on a 10-hour flight, without sleeping)

“What to do when there’s nothing to do?” is a question that seems impossible to answer. By answering a question with an impossible answer, we strip it of meaning, rob it of its very existence. Thus, existing is the greatest value something or someone can have; more than life and more than death.

I think about this during the ten hours of flight, when boredom forces contemplations that daily life (and Wi-Fi) doesn’t allow. There’s something about altitude that makes existential questions more urgent. Perhaps it’s the proximity to clouds or the distance from everything that anchors us. Or simply the fact that we can’t escape from ourselves when we’re trapped in a metal can 10 kilometers high.

Not even death has the power to annul existence. It will only give it new meaning, not remove the condition of existing. Existence is, independent of life and death.

The people we loved who died continue to exist in our memories, in our decisions, in how we see the world. Sometimes they exist more intensely dead than when alive.

If this is so, the worst isn’t dying. The worst is not existing. So we’ve been fearing wrongly. More than death, the fundamental fear should be directed at indifference, at being unknown, at meaninglessness and absence of existence: at nothingness. On the other hand, all these fears, combined or separate, given significant or sufficient intensity, will make death more appetizing than life. In such circumstances, death and life become confused with existence.

The airplane is a perfect laboratory for these reflections. Suspended between sky and earth, between departure and arrival, we exist in a non-place. A secular purgatory. The other passengers sleep, watch movies, pretend to work. Each deals with the void in their own way. Some fill every second with stimuli. Others surrender to the void, let themselves float in it.

Perhaps boredom is just another name for the confrontation with pure existence, without distractions. That’s why we fear it so much, why we invent a thousand ways to avoid it. But here, in this pressurized tube, there’s no escape. Just us and the fundamental question: what to do when there’s nothing to do?

The answer, I suspect, isn’t to do something. It’s simply to be. To exist. Even if that means just sitting in an uncomfortable chair, thinking about unanswerable questions, while the world passes below, indifferent to our small altitude epiphany.