Boredom and its discontents
Erotic asphyxiation, extreme tourism, and the policing of empathy among other things
Death by boredom
It happens on September 2, 1791, in London. Czech violist and composer Frantisek Kotzwara visits a prostitute in Vine Street, just round the corner from Piccadilly Circus. They have dinner and he pays her two shillings and casually asks that she cuts off his balls. She doesn’t want to do it, so he has a better idea: why not tie a piece of cord to a doorknob and fasten the other end around his neck and then have sex? So that’s what they do and Kotzwara ends up becoming one of the first recorded deaths from erotic asphyxiation1. I wasn’t there so I can’t really say what Kotzwara might have been thinking. But as I’m well aware that musicians often suffer from bouts of ennui, I believe that it wasn’t kink but boredom that made him do it — boredom makes people do stupid things, all the time2.
Kotzawara’s death is the first thing that goes through my mind when I hear that five people went missing in a precarious submersible last week. The second thing that comes to mind is my mother, commenting decades ago on the accidental death of a rich man practising some extreme sports3: “if I was that rich I’d be careful not to slip and knock myself dead while on the bathtub!” My mother was of course thinking as herself and not as that rich man, with all the money in the world, with his life sorted — she wasn't taking into account the power of boredom.
But the CEOs of “extreme tourism” companies do take boredom into account, and this is now a booming industry. The risks are taken for granted — they are even part of the appeal. And you even get to be called an “adventurer” or an “explorer” instead of a “tourist”. Those in need of satisfying a morbid curiosity born out of boredom don’t need to get their balls cut off or choke to death any more4.
Now they can die exploring the Titanic.
The policing of empathy
I swear that unlike some of my leftist peers I get no joy from the pointless death of these five men in a sardines tin. I’m not writing this out of spite, or getting any morbid satisfaction from their deaths. I don’t feel sorry for them either. I simply find their deaths pointless, lacking any sense, and am driven to write about the topic abstractly, because senselessness is literarily appealing, as long as it happens far away from you.
But there’s another thing I find senseless, and that is the policing of empathy. It doesn’t matter if it’s of the “how can you not empathise with these men just because they were rich?” or “how can you empathise with these men but not with migrants drowning in the Mediterranean?” What do we expect to achieve with nonsensical comments like these?
Sure, there was these days a huge overlap of people with pets in their profile pictures on Twitter speculating about the fate of these men, the same kind of people who regularly tweet about “sending the [migrant] boats back”, or “sinking the boats”, and so on. But can we convince these people to empathise with migrants escaping war and famine? Would that entail not empathising with someone else? Is empathy limited5? More importantly, can anyone be convinced to empathise in a certain way? And isn’t it more useful from a political point of view to accept that a vast majority of the population can only empathise aspirationally? Billionaires in submarines are more likely to generate empathy from the general public than migrants because most people would rather empathise with billionaires risking their lives, out of boredom, than people getting on boats to save their lives — simply because they’d rather be the former. This is harsh but it is what it is. We are stuck with the maniacs with pets in their profile pictures, so we better learn how to live in spite of them.
There’s also another fact, one that has nothing to do with empathy: stories of people trapped in confined spaces make good story-telling6.
To the rescue, here I am
On August 2000 Russian nuclear submarine Kursk sank in the Barents Sea. This is before social media (and before Russians were cancelled, for the kind of criminal invasion only the West is supposed to launch) but the world was gripped by the futile rescue efforts. Then in December 2010 thirty-three Chilean miners were miraculously rescued from a collapsed mine7, live on our screens. In 2017, Argentineans were hooked following the attempts to find and rescue a lost submarine, the ARA San Juan, which was found only a year later, imploded. The Thai cave rescue of 20188 similarly gripped everyone. To imply that the only reason people followed the Titan’s misadventures closely is because of the doomed passengers’ wealthy status misses a very clear point: the public loves a rescue story.
One has to feel sorry for film moguls in Hollywood who won’t get to shoot their own version of the Titan disaster. If the passengers had either drowned slowly or had been successfully rescued it is possible to imagine a tense script and a spectacular blockbuster dealing with the Human Condition™, starring whichever action star is favoured by audiences these days.
A story dealing with some mens’ boredom, lack of common-sense, a sudden implosion, and instant death would feel very anticlimactic. More Lars von Trier than James Cameron. And everyone knows von Trier is also cancelled.
The hills of Mount Everest are cluttered with the corpses of bored rich people
Is visiting one of the most explored marine sites — a mass underwater graveyard — “exploration” or simply morbid tourism made to look more interesting and ethical by the use of matching boiler suits?
I confess to envy people who feel there’s no part of the world — however far, deep, high, dangerous — they are not entitled to visit. Obviously this entitlement is related to power and power is related to money. You pay to become an “adventurer”, an “explorer”, and so on — if you can pay it’s your right to head anywhere. The rest of us mere mortals will have to do with taking a day tour in a roofless double-decker bus in central London or being fleeced by low-cost airlines as we make our way to Mediterranean Europe. And we will never comprehend those “brave souls”, as disgraced former PM Boris Johnson put it in a column I refuse to link to.
I guess the Titan’s disaster won’t be the last, as bored billionaires like Musk, Branson, et al, now eye the confines of outer space. There won’t be a shortage of wealthy “brave souls” willing to part with their hardly-hard-earned cash, in the stupidest possible way9.
You see, boredom is a terrible thing and money tends to burn in rich people’s pockets. At least that’s what I’ve heard.
Susannah Hill was the name of the sex worker. She was tried for manslaughter later that year and acquitted. There are no court records about the trial — allegedly they were destroyed to avoid a public scandal. But a very interesting anonymous pamphlet survives, published in the same year, 1791: Modern Propensities; or, an Essay on the Art of Strangling ... with Memoirs of Susannah Hill and a summary of her trial, etc. It can be yours for US$1,250. You can alternatively read it for free on Google Books. Just don’t try those modern propensities at home, kids.
There is of course a creative boredom, but that doesn’t interest me in this piece. I leave that to French authors.
I can’t remember who he was, nor what sports was he practising.
One of the best poets you’ve never heard about, South East London’s Garfield Potts, writes about boredom and self-mutilation brilliantly in his poem “Cocks #4”:
“Yesterday I wanted to go / to the Cock Tavern / but it was full of cocks. / So I went to the Yorkshire / Grey instead, overheard Oxford / graduates speak of colleges and / babies. / Suddenly it was 1997, and / I’d never been there, / I placed my cock, / in the bread slicer, / of a small town / bakery, in the Midlands, / smaller than Bicester. / And, / realised, it’s impossible, / to comprehend, feel, / really feel, multiple, / simultaneous / serrated, blades / cutting, at / once.”
Conversely, can empathy be unlimited? I’m thinking of “empaths”…
There’s also an interesting debate to be had about what Argentine critic Nicolás Mavrakis calls “#TheEndofJournalism” (hashtag intended). This is a type of digital journalism that doesn’t necessarily deal with “the event” but that nevertheless doesn’t stop churning out content live. In a way, we could say it is “post-eventual” (not as after the event but beyond it). I wrote a piece about this topic, back in 2014, reflecting on the coverage of flight MH370’s disappearance.
An aside. A Chilean friend — sociologist Tomás Peters — made a comment whilst watching the rescue with me, pertaining President Piñera's politicisation of the rescue, which I found to be accurate: Piñera — a conservative — made the working class appear; Pinochet, dictator from 1973 to 1990, had tried to disappear the working class. The miners' rescue was also an attempt to whitewash Chilean rightwing politics.
The Thai cave rescue event delivered one of the best moments of involuntary comedy ever recorded, with Elon Musk turning up with a useless mini-submarine. He then called a British diver a “pedo” and ended up in court in a defamation case. He won the case. But later ended up forcefully buying Twitter after talking through his arse once more, which means he didn’t learn anything from the Thai cave experience.
As I write this Darondo sings in my ear: “We got starvation, panic across the land, And here's a fool in a rocket ship, Tryina' be superman.” Feels wrong not to include it.
I remember reading that story as part of a Known History of Death by Erotic Asphyxiation. I can't stand public demonstrations of empathy, particularly to indicate your political bent. RIPs are a tedious side-show, but waving flags of empathic identity for migrants or rich people is so lame. Despite some of them being awful and oppressive, exploitative, etc. I have no hatred for the rich. I'm not prejudiced at all. I hate everyone equally.
Suspiciously quick to tell us you weren't there, but an excellent read apart from that.