Boredom’s got a new best friend
As the east-facing windows began glowing a warm pink, signaling 6:30am, an oppressive weight of boredom pressed upon me. Years ago, I’d taken up the role of a GM for a small laser cutting business. Sounds fun, right? Yet, no one tells you about the solitude that comes with days filled with CAD drawings, invoicing, and cold calls.
That overwhelming lack of stimuli set me on the path I tread today.
Starting a business without a plan is reckless, foolish, and/or ignorant. If you don’t know where you’re going, how are you going to get there?
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How about a road trip with your entire family to the sunshine state? It certainly won’t be a stressful drive. Why bother planning anything? Don’t even use GPS. Just wing it.
Your business might succeed and you will probably get to California at some point, but not without a lot of pain along the way. A treatment is a way to elevate as much pain as we can in the documentary’s journey.
To create a film treatment, one must assemble pieces like a jigsaw puzzle, borrowing from 30 different boxes. It’s a meticulous endeavor to curate those pieces into a cohesive, albeit occasionally abstract image. Yet, every time-consuming moment is worth it.
Why is a Treatment Essential?
It offers a snapshot of the film, helping readers visualize the final product.
It's a dynamic document, constantly evolving to reflect new ideas and insights.
It ensures everyone involved in the production shares a unified vision.
Every day, I'm flooded with ideas for this project. Having a dedicated space to document these thoughts is invaluable. The treatment serves as this repository, eliminating the pressure to remember every fleeting idea.
Neil Gaiman’s writing process allows him to either look out the window or write. Eventually, he gets bored and needs to entertain himself. Then, you and I get American Gods, Good Omens, Ocean at the End of the Lane, and countless other Gaiman classics.
Thank goodness he allows himself to get bored.
Scratching your own itch is something many of us outsource to social media. A relatively new solution. Something that might have more detrimental effects than we’ll ever know. We feel like creating, so we pull out our phone and watch someone create. We feel a little down and want a pick me up. Phone comes out. If you’re never bored, how are you gonna come up with something unique?
My kids love telling me when they’re bored and they inevitably roll their eyes when I say “Good!”
Audiobooks, podcasts, YouTube, and music fill our ears and eyes daily. Our culture pushes down what we need to deal with and distract ourselves with pleasure, learning, or nonsense. But it keeps us from that dreaded boredom.
It’s good to lack stimuli.
It’s hard to talk with your mouth full.
It’s hard to breathe in and out simultaneously.
It’s good to be alone.
Boredom is an unmistakable call to action. An empty room to be filled. The echoing silence screams for handcrafted furniture, but what if the room is filled with other people’s stuff? There won’t be any room for your creations. We have to lower our inputs to increase our outputs. That means boredom will be at an all-time high.
Boredom is were we’re forced to deal with the never-ending one sided conversation with self. It gives us a chance to talk back to the incessant onslaught of what ifs, worries, and pointlessness.
In my South Austin office, where I stared into the abyss of boredom daily, I found an unlikely muse. As I tackled mundane tasks, my mind put together the portrait of a life I yearned to manifest, puzzle piece by puzzle piece.
I think of my internal dialog as a slightly insane person or child (same difference). If ignored or suppressed for long enough, they’ll yell or throw something at you to get your attention. Boredom gives it a platform to express but also a place to be corrected and entertained.
When you decide to make a documentary, there are a lot of unknowns and it takes some spelunking to find the gems hidden deep in the caves of your mind. Mind spelunking is a bored man’s sport. Carl Jung did some real wild spelunking if you wanna explore this idea. The experience can get pretty intense, so be prepared.
Gaiman gave me the courage to explore the caves each time I sat down to write a newsletter or the ever evolving documentary treatment.
If you have any interest in seeing what my treatment looks like—at least this week—you can find it here. Where I’ll be continually be editing it.
This treatment paints my mental landscape, revealing the dreamlike visages I see for Wilco. We dive into filming some of these scenes this week—a thrilling yet daunting phase. But armed with this document, there’s a comforting peace that prevails. Treatments are my sandbox, a place to experiment before embarking on nationwide filming journeys. They’re a canvas where I, alongside friends, mold our collective creativity.
The next time you impulsively reach for your phone to fend off the dreariness, pause. Reflect. What is that boredom nudging you towards? Or away from?
Be well, do good work, stay disciplined,
