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We enter the virtual world because we are bored and want to escape the body (dissociate). The virtual world gives us what we want, but it does not eliminate the feeling of boredom that is inside the body: the feeling is suspended in a digital space of non-time. When we exit the virtual world, we realize that the feeling (boredom) hasn’t gone away, so we cyclically return to the machine. The Japanese writer, Izumi Suzuki, wrote Terminal Boredom, just before she killed herself in 1986. The subversive and dystopian short story is set in the future where feeling good and pleasure are the pathos of the culture described. The main character is a misanthropic young female who is unemployed and living with her mother (who is divorced from her father). The tale begins as she meets her ex-boyfriend at the subway. Neither she or the ex-boyfriend have a sense of smell or taste, which is why the narrator believes that kids these days do not care to eat and why their “everyday lives feel like a scene from a TV show.” Franco Berardi (2015) writes about the extended exposure to virtual flows of information in the context of mass murderers and suicide. The virtual world stimulation “produces the effect of desensitization to the bodily experience of suffering and of pleasure” (47) Therefore, like the individuals in Terminal Boredom, the “virtualization of lived experience” or the virtual world both assuages the pain “resulting from rejection, isolation and mockery” and also, exaggerates “the inability to relate to others, and to distinguish between fantasy and reality in the social sphere.”
References:
Berardi, F. (2015). Heroes: Mass murder and suicide. London: Verso.
Suzuki, I. (2021). Terminal boredom: Stories. Verso: London.
Han, B.C. (2018). The expulsion of the other. Polity Press: Medford, MA.
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