To be alive is to be in perpetual conflict. We are always lacking something, we always desire things.
When we LACK the lacking, when we are comfortable and have no desire, when there is no conflict, we become bored.
So, if we were in a story, our writer would add some complication to the story, on one of three levels of conflict:
Internal (thoughts and emotions)
Relational (relationships with others)
External (external places and activity)
*read more about multi-level conflict in Robert McKee's epic book "Story: substance, structure, style, and the principles of screenwriting (1997)
And that's a brilliant thing to do, because conflict infuses meaning into stories. The writer must introduce some conflict into our story, or nothing meaningful can happen.
But where should the conflict go? Internal? Relational? External? (spoiler: I'm encouraging all three, simultaneously...)
If the writer chooses to only work on one of these conflict levels, she would need to employ a big cast of extra characters, or have a huge amount of locations, just to keep the boredom at bay. To keep it interesting for our audience.
Our Internal conflict would need so many people to populate memories and imagination.
Our Relational conflicts would require a soap opera full of different relationships, in different places.
Our External conflicts would look like a big action movie, full of travel and movement, but with nothing happening internally.
It’s story, and there is conflict, but it’s still a huge struggle against boredom.
Let's be honest, we do this in our lives, don't we? To avoid the boredom. We dive into multiple relationships, surround ourselves with friends, facebook, community. We try desperately to keep the excitement strong with spicy romantic upsets and best-friend fallouts. This is the soap opera of our lives, and we are scrambling to keep our lives interesting.
Or, we make up our own huge stories in our head - all the others who love us/hate us/have hurt us/deserve to be with us. All the locations we’ve been in or want to be in. Real or imagined, we just keep it all going, to avoid the boredom.
Or we live out the action movie and just get out there and DO. Go all the places, do all the physical things, stay busy, all the while avoiding any internal conflict negotiation. We become high-functioning robots. We look good on the outside, but to keep anyone’s attention we have to move even faster, do even more, keep performing. Our greatest fear is that if we stop, then we’ll be bored with ourselves. And others will be bored with us.
*Please know that I write this as someone who has often directed such a boring life scene for myself that I want to walk out of my own movie. It's common, and it's okay. But I'm learning to create better scenes in my life, hence these articles.
To truly write a meaningful story, that engages our audience and destroys boredom completely, we have to design our conflict better. We need to make things simpler, and more complex, at the same time. And that involves working with all three of the levels of conflict simultaneously:
Internal conflict - We courageously negotiate feelings of self-worth, love, compassion, mindfulness.
Relational conflict - We build relationships with a few great people, and don’t shy away from conversations and moments that are uncomfortable, and allow a deepening of the bonds of friendship and love.
External conflict - We exercise our internal beliefs and personal relationships in an external physical way - to do work that matters, actions with purpose and meaning.
If we aim to reduce all those extra characters, reduce all those locations, and simply concentrate on the richness of multi-level conflict , then our lives will fall into something deep and meaningful, where boredom can’t touch us.