I had prepared an article on barefoot running this week and then things changed. I made the crazy decision to stop running barefoot in the city during the pandemic, so I am saving my article for better days. Today we are all in confinement. For most of us this means nearly not going outside, a completely new situation.
Boredom in sight
In a previous article , I wrote about boredom. Boredom is a more or less intense form of irritation linked to a lack of activity, meaning or entertainment. In our contemporary society, we generally try to avoid boredom. More broadly, it is widely shown that a human being has a natural aversion to boredom. In fact, a human being, if he has nothing to do for a few dozen minutes, can go as far as inflicting himself a painful electro-shock to kill time. Isolation can even traumatise an individual who is confronted with it for a prolonged period of time.
Several philosophical traditions (Buddhists, Essentists, Cynics...) have come to the conclusion that human fulfilment comes precisely from the confrontation with boredom. For even a king without entertainment is a man full of misery. Gaining wisdom means learning to overcome boredom through contemplation, meditation and reflection. This is how many hermits, whether they are the starets , the fathers of the desert or the cynics chose a life far from society and devoid of material goods (a dog's life), and I also think that this is the ideal to achieve in order to live a happy life.
The emergency
As for solitude, I don't think it is indispensable. Hendy David Thoreau, one of the great names of the hermitage, wrote : "I had three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society."and I think that this sums up the right attitude to adopt in order to move towards wisdom. Relationships are very important, but I think we need to focus on pure relationships. The ones where you reveal and share yourself intimately with a person so that you can draw sincere emotions from them and see yourself grow. In my experience, these moments more often take place between two people.
The problem is that this week we are forcibly plunged into a forced solitude. Even if we live as a couple or in a shared flat, we have been excluded from society. And this isolation is bound to generate a form of boredom. Unfortunately it is too late to become a wise meditator by the time the confinement begins. For that we would need several more years. So we have several ways of dealing with this event. We can: let ourselves go to a life of debauchery by consuming series, food and other entertainment / be flexible by trying as much as possible to maintain our professional activity / multiply distant social links to break the isolation... I don't know what the best life in confinement is, and I haven't found a book on the subject.
But one thing is certain: one should not be too optimistic.
The trap of optimism
James Bond Stockdale (this is his real name) is one of the most decorated American soldiers in history. In Vietnam, he was a prisoner of war for seven years, during which time he showed extraordinary willpower. He coached his cell mates to teach them how to deal with the torture that he himself frequently endured. And, the day before a Vietnamese TV appearance, he deliberately disfigured himself with a razor blade so that he could not be presented as evidence of the proper treatment of prisoners of war. He is a model of perseverance, and the American author Jim Collins used his story to highlight the Stockdale's paradox..
In life it is obviously very important to be as positive as possible and to seek to build a happy life. But in prison, Stockdale found that the prisoners who suffered the most were the most optimistic prisoners. And for a simple reason. An optimistic prisoner relies on his hopes to keep his mood up. At the start, he will be able to cope with thoughts such as : "I'll get out of here by Christmas, everything will be okay". But hopes have a limit, and by having their hopes constantly shattered, morale also ends up being shattered. Lucidity is a better ally.
Fortunately we are not prisoners of war. But the confinement that we are living requires us to prepare ourselves properly. Because in practice, nobody really knows how long we will remain confined. To be happy in this period, we must avoid basing our hopes on our own hopes. Let's not be in a hurry, because the confinement may last longer than we think. It is better to concentrate on the present moment and start from the fact that this confinement will last indefinitely. Being positive means learning to rely on what you have to be happy. To be optimistic is to borrow from our future happiness.