Boredom is my dominant emotion. And how I think about boredom has changed a lot, over 35.7 years. A retrospective telling:
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- I am two-years-old. I am bored by how everyone insists on writing from left to right, so I write 'ikan' from right to left on a blackboard. It is captured on film. To-date, I make a point of not forgetting that left and right are arbitrarily assigned labels, and so in practice I almost never make a subconscious recognition of what left or right mean - I process these consciously.
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- Around the same time, I notice that if I demonstrate a superficial reaction (such as crying), other people's efforts to send me negative feedback (such as corporal punishment) are reduced. I am bored by how easy it is to manipulate this structure of psyche. To-date, I have been bored by my parents perhaps for more years than I have been bored of anyone else, in my life.
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- I am seven, or eight. I am bored by how a reading competition is played by declaring pages read, based on summary reports of what the books are about. I write reports without reading the books thoroughly. I also make a point not to over-play this, as I am morally conflicted about this. I lose the competition, to a white female, but I am granted the consolation of a co-winnership, I receive fifteen dollars, and I spend it on a skateboard. I lose the board a few years later in Taman Titiwangsa. Later in life, I deconstruct my sense of morality and make efforts to discard all moral intuitions in favour of conscious processings of law.
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- I am fourteen. I have been trained as a leader in the school Christian fellowship for over a year. Leading worship services where crowds sing, leading exegetical studies of Biblical texts, and counselling peers on their daily concerns, have all become predictable to me. I attend leadership camps at the national level, and learn that working a room to meet people is also rather predictable. I make a note that I have graduated from this class of training.
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- I am sixteen. I have been living in a town outside the city, for about a year. I am bored by my peers, and their games of splashing water on each other for fun. It does not feel like progress.
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- I am seventeen. I have been waiting to apply for a scholarship to return to studies in the United States since I was eight-years-old. I have become bored of the academic slog, and I diversify my acceptable paths to include other less sophisticated places for college.
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- I am eighteen. I arrive back in the United States, on scholarship, at a small liberal arts college. I notice that most of my college peers are unconcerned with the structure and definition of education, as the informational process of civilisation. I assign myself to solitary focus. After four semesters of digging about the structure of the university industry, I assign myself to self-guided studies outside the curriculum. By the end of my degree program, I realise that other people value the opportunities for class ascent offered by the university system, much more than I value them. I decide to take a hiatus from accepting scholarship monies. I am not interested in spending efforts to secure a visa for myself. I return to live in Malaysia because I am lazy (among other curiosities, such as having an interest in studying how commerce and politics work in Malaysia, areas which I avoided during secondary and tertiary schooling.)
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- I am twenty, and still in college. I decipher the geometric data structure of human experience in general. Zero mysteries remain to me, about how sense information is processed from individual consciousness, into the semantic cultures of society. But it is not easy to explain this to others, and since I cannot see any value of explaining it for the mere sake of explaining it, I allow myself to be contented by this knowledge, knowing that it allows me to discard all inconveniences of wondering about how consciousness works. I decide over a few years that the lazy way to explain how humans think, is to eventually build machines which cannot be distinguished from human beings. Meanwhile, I have been working in Malaysia.
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- I am thirty-five-point-seven-years-old. I have now spent most of my adult life simply existing. It has been a happy time. Joyous in its mundanity, startling in its simplicity, and enriching in the same way that the universe as a whole it lacks any objective definition of progress. I have been blessed with many partners over this time. Most of the challenges I have thrown at myself during these years have been technical, because I lack an engagement with the fragilities of many human cultures. I wonder, what I shall grow bored of next.
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- Always, I remind myself, neurological damage may disable my ability to appreciate life as I have for these decades past. One day, perhaps I will be as simple as you.
