My Friend Ennui

Lately my usual faithful companion Ennui has upped its game.

Normally I would wake up as I always do - so happy for another day to do stuff - and then within a few minutes Ennui would poke me in the ribs and remind me that it was there to bland-ize* everything.

Then we would just sort of sit together throughout the day, mildly acknowledging each other's existence as I went about my business of creating art and writing as best I could.

Apparently that is no longer enough for Ennui.

Ennui is hungry.  Ennui wants more.

I started to notice the Ennui's amplification a few weeks back.  I was on Facebook and my eyerolls were coming even more fast and furious than usual.  This must have gotten Ennui's attention because it suddenly screamed in my ear, "thank you for boring yourself to death with this Facebook crap that you're force feeding your brain everyday! I'm thriving on it!".

I tried to ignore Ennui's outburst.  Later that day I posted my latest artwork to my Facebook business page and as usual it got the attention of about three people even though 650+ people follow my page.  This makes my eyes twitch.

Ennui said, "The way that you keep hoping that people are really going to pay attention to anything for longer than a nanosecond is my lifeblood. I'm thriving on your disappointment."

The same thing happened the next day.

Ennui said, "That you are a glutton for punishment is like manna from heaven to me."

I felt an ever-so-slight twinge when Ennui said that - the kind you feel when someone hits a nerve because they're right but you're denying it.

In an attempt to prove Ennui wrong (even though it was right), I upped my Facebook game. I scrolled and scrolled through my Facebook feed and kept reading different versions of the same thing on the feeds of the myriad of people and pages that I follow. Like I was searching frantically for something redeeming. Something intelligent.

But over and over and over I saw the same things: people trying so very hard to be cool or ironic or sarcastic; recipes for pumpkin spice everything; endless articles about how to win the social media game; boring posts about the minutiae of people's days ("today I cleaned out the linen closet"); political posts of one sort or another ad nauseum; happy horseshit ("Be The Best You That You Can Be, etc"); atheist types somehow gleaning pleasure on mocking the beliefs of others; recipe videos (I know how to mix, you don't need to show me!); ad hominem attacks so rife that no one even knows what it means to be civil and/or respectful anymore; posts about stuff that I would never in a million years want to learn about; and people liking liking liking anything and everything like the automatons everyone seems to be turning into.

Ennui was leaning back smirking, and rubbing its bloated belly when it said, "thanks for feeding me with this nonsense everyday."

And right then and there is when I decided to commit to changing Ennui's diet.

It'll put a fierce fight and I know I'll falter along the way...but ultimately I'll win.

 

(*Bland-ize is not a real word, it's another one of my made up words. It means to make things bland.)