Well, hello HIVERS?
While reading one of Colin Wilson's book New Pathways in Psychology, I came across what he calls, "one of the most urgent problems for civilized man."
This is one of the most urgent problems for civilized man. He has created civilization to give himself security. Security for what? For boredom? His chief problem seems to be that most human beings need a certain amount of challenge, of external stimulus, to stop them from sinking into the blank stare and blank consciousness of the idiot.
Colin Wilson
With the onset of the Second Industrial Revolution and the rapid intensification of the division of labor that accompanied it, there occurred a Leisure Revolution.
With years passing, the fruits of civilization have become more plentiful, and leisure, more bountiful. The average individual today is free from the daily struggle for survival.
But with this newfound freedom, a crucial question confronts each of us: what are we free for? In other words, how are we going to use the time we have that is not devoted to the necessities of life?
As with many important questions regarding how to live, few contemplate the above question. Rather, many sink into conformity and implicitly assume that their free time is best spent resting, relaxing, and passively consuming.
Their lives assume a common mold and follow a course analogous to the one described by the 20th-century philosopher Richard Taylor.
Most people are, in the most ordinary sense, very limited. They pass their time, day after day, in idle, passive pursuits, just looking at things – at games, television, whatever. Or they fill the hours talking, mostly about nothing of significance – of comings and goings, of who is doing what, of the weather, of things forgotten almost as soon as they are mentioned. They have no aspirations for themselves beyond getting through another day doing more or less what they did yesterday. They walk across the stage of life, leaving everything about as it was when they entered, achieving nothing, aspiring to nothing, having never a profound or even original thought…This is what is common, usual, typical, indeed normal. Relatively few rise above such a plodding existence.
Richard Taylor
Some though may argue there is nothing wrong with this normal type of existence. Modern life can be high paced and stressful and with mental health problems on the rise, perhaps what is needed is more time spent resting and relaxing. But Colin Wilson disagreed with this sentiment.
Too much inactivity, rather than promoting mental health, tends to breed unhappiness and a plethora of psychological problems.
Wilson came to this conclusion early in his life. In his autobiography Dreaming To Some Purpose, he notes that as an adolescent he struggled with bouts of depression and sympathized with the wisdom contained in the book of Ecclesiastes:
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
Wilson, however, had an astute mind and was intent on discovering why he always felt so gloomy. He began to observe that his bouts of depression were typically preceded by prolonged periods of passivity. When he did not occupy his days with interesting tasks, challenges, and problems to solve, he discovered that depressive moods would soon wash over him, fog his perceptions, and cause him to become a pessimist of the human condition. As he later writes in New Pathways in Psychology
Boredom, passivity, stagnation: these are the beginning of a mental illness, which propagates itself like the scum on a stagnant pond.
If Wilson's discovery of the connection between passivity and mental illness has merit, then we are confronted with the following options:
We can waste our leisure in idle pursuits, leave our untapped potentials untouched, and render ourselves prone to mental illness. Or
We can strive to spend the majority of our free time creating, exploring, learning, doing - challenging our capacities, and improving our talents.
While the latter option entails perseverance, struggle, and the sacrifice of short-term pleasures and comfort, the pay off - personal growth and mental health - are worth the effort.
The mentally healthy individual is he who habitually calls upon fairly deep levels of vital reserves. An individual whose mind is allowed to become dormant – so that only the surface is disturbed – begins to suffer from ‘circulation problems’. Neurosis is the feeling of being cut off from your own powers.
What are your thoughts on this whole topic, do you too agree with Wilson's sentiment?
Anyways till next update,
