Bored to death: ‘If it ain’t broke doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fix it’

Dan Antopolski recognises there is safety in the familiar but knows that risk is worth much more over the course of a lifetime

Illustration by Tom Ford

The South Indian Monkey Trap works like this: villagers make a small hole in a gourd and hollow out the insides. They put some sweet rice in the hollow gourd. They chain it to a stake. A monkey comes along and smells the rice. He puts his paw through the hole in the gourd and grabs a fistful.

His fist is now too big to fit back through the hole. The monkey lacks the smarts to reevaluate the rice relative to his liberty and cannot open his fist to release it, retrieve his empty paw and escape. He waits there until the trappers return. The best outcome for him is that the villagers will mock him for the rigidity of his value system.

As a metaphor for human inaction in the face of climate change, it is not extreme – we are so blindly devoted to economic growth that we may get our brains scooped out with a spoon. As a metaphor for Brexit it works also: we now know that even if we get the rice out it will be rotten, but we can’t let go. It really is a wonderfully useful metaphor for stuckness of all sorts, societal and individual.

I have a colleague on the stand-up circuit some years my senior who hasn’t changed his set for the 20 years I’ve been watching him from the back of the room. There are a few like this: they perform their material with commitment, take the cash and support a family – or a dealer, I don’t know.

In any case it’s not evil to make audiences laugh with honed material – many would say it’s the whole point – and most seem happy enough. But not this one, this one is sad. He looks jaded even by the standards of a road comic his age. His eyes, you might say, are the widows of his soul. He is a ringwraith.

Why does he tolerate being so deeply bored that he is scarcely of this world? He can create, he did once – why does he not change his set? Why has he chosen a career that allows for seasonal change and then built a walled garden around himself, with a stalled microclimate? Bill Bryson, writing in The Lost Continent, wonders which is worse, “to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored?”

Which is worse: to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored?

As a youth I craved enchantment. When I began stand-up in my mid-twenties, the density of experience coming at me every day ramped up sharply, especially when I started gigging nationally, which meant: travel, industry gossip with car companions, the venue, the gig in its many details and strategic decision nodes, the adrenaline of success or failure slowly leaching out of my physiology over the car journey home, a mental postmortem, more industry gossip with car companions, the talk perhaps turning personal in the night hours if the journey was long.

And then, after a few years, the sudden saturation: becoming aware of the above as a repeating pattern – all cognition now recognition – and being easily bored by the mosquito drone of constant stimulus. Jean-Paul Sartre, whom I studied for an entire afternoon at university, developed a taxonomy of “faits glissades” – sliding events that serve only to lead to other events, and “faits précipices” – cliff-edge events where one stares into the abyss – a useful distinction for the dramatist.

The idea of doing stand-up terrifies most non-practitioners with its threat of an abyssal plunge. Conversely, the promise of such a defining moment is what attracts people to it – outside Mexico that is, where they have the Day of the Dead to remind them that they are alive. What surprises you when you take up stand-up as a profession is how many sliding moments there are around the precipitous moments.

The days are not without mundanity – for which you have not braced. You start looking forward to the abyssal moments without dread, because your heart beats faster and you have learned the abyss’s little secret: when you do die on stage, when you do plunge into the depths of public opprobrium, all that happens is that the computer game level resets for the next round.

What surprises you when you take up stand-up as a profession is how many sliding moments there are around the precipitous moments

The stakes are low – why not try that new bit that’s funny in your head, see if you can sell it?

You are like a mountain climber, camped out on a narrow ledge next to the Chasm of Hurt Dignity. When a joke works reliably it becomes a piton to hammer into the rock – it can stop you falling more than a couple of feet. For my jaded colleague it has become so counterintuitive to disengage any of his pitons that he now lives in an iron maiden, built out of security pitons and with a view overlooking Hell. If only he could remember that a fall wouldn’t actually kill him.

Our love for risk diminishes with age – but that only means that it should be a discipline. Just because it ain’t broke doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fix it. Take a step back to go forward. Because if you don’t shed your protective skin and renew, you risk not just your gig or your quarterly presentation or asking that person out – whatever gives you the willies this week – you risk living death, soul death – planetary death. The security of predictable outcome is just a handful of rice. Let it go.