13: without purpose

de·hort
(archaic) to try to dissuade.

You'll notice that timescales here are considerably shorter. When there's nothing to do, you talk in days instead of weeks, months instead of years. What you would have had the patience to wait a decade for, you demand and expect to see in ten days. It's not so much the boredom as it is the lack of interruptions, the freedom from the banal necessities of life. Instead of cleaning your kitchen and going to bed after a long day of work, you go out every night, because you don't have to get up the next day. You meet girls, you date them - and you date them the next day, because your schedule is already clear. If you want to spend a weekend at the cottage, you don't plan it in advance, you just go. There's no waiting. There must always be something to do. But in paradise, all there is to do is live.

It's exponential in nature. Like extinction. You watch time shrink, slowly at first, then faster, until it tips - and suddenly, there's no conception of time anymore. You're drifting in a timeless waste, where nothing ever happens because it all happens at once. Suddenly there's nothing left to do, because it's all been done and you no longer have any desire to do it again. You find that without those banal necessities to highlight your free moments, everything becomes a banal necessity. Having sex, reading books, enjoying a meal, are all things you have no interest in but you suffer through out of pure inertia. It's as if we need to be bored by something. If we don't have work to be bored by, we become bored by living.

You slip into oblivion. Once the time is completely gone, there's no getting it back. Nothingness propagates itself. Soon you find yourself without any desires whatsoever, not for women, nor for joy or companionship. Motivation is a specter that haunts your memories, like a long dead grandparent, whose presence you can remember as a faceless sensation, a core of emotions and values and events. As a beautiful girl whose existence you remember but whose smile you've forgotten. You exist, suddenly, in a vacuum. You want the world back but can no longer remember how to attain it. The concept of getting out and doing seems so foreign as to be completely indecipherable.

And that's where the story ends. At the bottom of a spiral, of a potential well, after it tapers to one dimension. Traveling in a line, compelled by impetus, already moving so fast and so straight that any acceleration, backward or forward, seems inconsequential. You watch the world fly by in seconds, instead of years, and are amazed when, at the end of it, while you wonder where the time has gone, you still have nothing to show for the effort you never made.