Boredom is fatal.

There is much made of lonliness in our lives, as if it is somehow a profound failure of character.  I hear advice to those who are lonely—if their lonliness is not judged to be their fault to begin with—that they should 'do' something about it.  Join a bridge club.  Start a knitting circle.  Find a church and have supper in its basement.  If their lonliness results from their own actions (i.e.; they are cranky, miserable or arrogant) then they are spared the suggested cures, and it is enough to simply remind the culpably alone of their own misery—as if they needed to be re-introduced to their own pain. 

In the film, Seven Years in Tibet, the always arrogant and newly bitter Heinrich Harrer (played by Brad Pitt) is pitied by the woman he loved, the seamstress, whom he lost to another man.  After he insults the marriage of this woman to his friend, she says to him with great compassion, 'You must be very lonely.'  Of course, her statement was true.  But lonliness was, at that time, a familiar way of life for Harrer. 

The lonlies around us express their suffering, and somehow we think it helps to remind them of their lonliness.  But around us all the time are people bored to death; bored in their jobs, bored in their social lives, bored with the same overworked and static routines of their family lives.  We do not customarily say with great compassion to these unfortunates, 'You must be very bored.'  We don't say it, usually, because we are bored in similar ways.  And we are trying to deny it. 

Break something; a law, a convention, a habit.  Step out of something; a dull routine, your clothes, or a plane.  Become something which you do not think you can be: A child again; an adult, finally; a lonely writer; or a lover.  Once there you might see that you are the driver, and you can go anywhere you want to be.  Might be exciting.