Are you bored (and is that why you're reading this)...?

I have an assignment to complete for the 8-Week Blogging Workshop I'm taking & teaching with Bob Yeager. When the teacher is ready, the student appears. Quite the schizophrenic deal I've gotten myself into. <smile>
 
Our "homework" is to write a weblog entry and— I think I've got this right— to post it on our blog as well. I'm not sure, because Bob gave us the assignment (he didn't ask me about it). We have to complete the following sentence:
 
I believe most people are __________________ and off a-writing we go. 350 words worth. So...

I believe most people are (dramatic pause here) bored.

Bored. NOT as to have made a hole in something, except perhaps the empty gap in their lives.
 
Bored, as in; feeling weary because one is unoccupied or lacks interest in one's current activity.
 
Even though its got an "ed" on the end, the word bored isn't only past tense.

Okay, everything spoken about or written is always in the past. It's not happening now. It's only remembered now. The moment of creation is short-gone, but gone none the less.

That said, bored is in its greatest hoary glory when it's right here, right now, in your space & face bored.
 
I was chatting with the afore-mentioned Yägermeister a few days ago on this very subject. Being the Internet maven he be, Bob let loose with some Social media metrics.

"69% of all Facebook users," he said have said, "they post updates, likes & comment, because they are bored." That's 345 million people who have nothing compelling enough in their off-line lives to occupy and/or interest them. So for the sake of satisfaction & fulfillment they engage in drive-by postings on Facebook.
 
"May you live in interesting times," the Irish bless us. Indeed.
 
What does it— 100's of millions of bored people on-line— mean... really?
 
"Most men [and women, presumably]," Thoreau wrote in Walden, "lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."
 
That was 147 years before Facebook.
 
What did all the bored people do then...?

____________________________

Thanks.
I appreciate you!

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