what have you done to my brain?

i’m trying to learn Old English, a noble but tricky enterprise. i relish the sound of the words, e.g. cu - cow, gicel – icicle; unfortunately, i’m also finding it almost impossible to properly memorize anything. i used to have a very good memory: when i was 19 i would walk the dog and memorise 50 French or Latin words with ease, and they would stick in my memory for months without fading. i assumed this was a permanent faculty.

i started learning German in 2006 but gave up after a few months: partly, i just didn’t have the energy to do anything after work; but i was also disheartened to find my old knack with vocabulary didn’t seem to apply to German. However, i found i had similar problems when i went back to Italian – whereas i could once glance at 10 words and retain their meaning for months, by 2006 i found words would fade within hours.

At the time i thought i was growing old and my brain was naturally in decline. But looking back now, i think this deterioration is the result of years of massive, sustained boredom at work. i began temping full time in October 2004 and thereafter specialised in minimum wage data entry, till i began this slightly better job in 2007. The overwhelming, unrelenting boredom of these jobs - from 0900 to 1700 5 days a week, casting a deathly shadow over each evening and weekend – had strange effects on my personality. Aside from the obvious and expected consequences: listlessness, self-pity, misery, occasional bouts of homicidal rage, i think it has also damaged my brain.

Boredom is the mental equivalent of cutting off the circulation to a limb. At first you feel strangely dopy and disconnected, light-headed; after a while it becomes almost painful, like a stress position; this becomes an odd sort of anguish, difficult to explain to anyone who has not suffered such colossal, inescapable boredom: it is the mental equivalent of gangrene setting into a limb. It is the pain of the mind dying.

Even when the proximate cause of the boredom is taken away, it takes hours to recover. What energy one experiences is of a volatile, unpredictable, and suddenly-collapsing kind, as if the organism is wildly and ineffectually rebelling against death. The more sensitive the mind the more it is thrown off balance by boredom.

If the brain’s operation can be affected by whether one has eaten breakfast, or slept properly, or even the weather or if music is playing, then i think it’s fair to say that years of nearly constant boredom will also leave their mark. In my case i think my years of temping have damaged my brain so i can no longer learn languages, or at least not without a disproportionately massive outlay of energy. If this seems exaggerated, i invite the reader to climb into a small box, have the lid nailed shut, and stay there for 8 hours a day for 3 years, and see how this effects your physical health. Why should the brain be any different?