I'm Bored

For the first time in a very long time, I am utterly and profoundly bored. I’ve been living in New York City for the last several weeks while we shoot the new season of Have I Got News For You and, while I love the show, it requires no more than half a day per week of my time, which leaves me six and a half days per week to fill as I see fit. So far, I’m having a difficult time filling those days. I mean, how many times can I go to the Met to stare at paintings? (So far, the answer is zero.)

Those of you wondering how one could get bored in New York City have never lived here. All cities are lonely places. To be surrounded by millions is not the same as connecting with millions. New York loneliness is, perhaps, especially acute because, unlike other American cities, here you are among people everywhere you go. Surrounded by, inundated with, absorbed into, and yet, always apart from. New Yorkers have made an art form of maintaining a sphere of privacy within public, like those old game shows in which somebody isolates themselves I in a plexiglass cube or something so they cannot hear the answer to a question. I feel like I’m in one of those cubes.

This happens a lot with actors. We go someplace for an extended amount of time, but not so long that we ever feel like we’re of a place. While I’ve lived here before and know New York well, I’m no longer at home here and I won’t be here long enough to make a home for myself here so I’m left in a kind of in-between place in which I’m not quite a tourist and not quite a local and I have nothing to do most of the time, which kind of sucks.

This is the cover of a book I wrote, with illustrations by the great Debbie Ridpath Ohi. I wrote it because my kids were always whining about being bored and I couldn’t find a kid’s book about boredom. It’s a very good book which you can purchase wherever fine books are sold, as the saying goes.

In my last book, I wrote about happiness, which seems to require three things: identity, community, and purpose. At the moment, I have identity – Michael Ian Black, very famous. I have purpose –make a TV show and an accompanying podcast. I’m lacking community, though, other than the fine folk with whom I make HIGNFY. But I only see them once a week. There a fourth ingredient, which may or may not relate directly to happiness, but I’m also lacking structure. Structure is the scaffolding upon which we build our days.

At home (wherever home happens to be), I’m very good at creating structure for myself but structure isn’t easily exported from place to place. What works for me in Savannah works less well for me in New York. Not sure why that is, other than structure works hand-in-hand with purpose and, if you have little purpose, you might find you have little structure. When you have more purpose, structure tends to emerge organically.

The irony of the situation is that having more free time actually makes me less productive. This is, no doubt, true for most people. Unstructured time, and lots of it, tends to dampen my creativity rather than enhance it. Long, idle days which could be spent conjuring new ideas are instead spent napping and watching YouTube. Didn’t we all experience this during the pandemic? How many of us said, “At last, I have time to write that novel or paint that picture or learn that instrument?” And then, how many of us actually went ahead and did those things? Damned few, at least compared to those of us who binged the entirety of Grey’s Anatomy.

I don’t mean to suggest that I’m not doing anything. Yesterday, for example, I went to see Oh, Mary! with my daughter, who’s also living here. (I see her often, thankfully, but don’t want to bother her too much because she’s 22 and what 22-year-old wants to hang out with her dad?) I didn’t know much about it going in, other than people seem to love it. Did I love it? I did. It’s an unabashedly stupid 90 minute joyride of lunacy. And, as a bonus, I didn’t know my friend Kumail was going to be in it. [Sidenote: there’s something wonderful about a 5’ 9” guy named Kumail playing Abraham Lincoln.]

New York is a tough place, though not for the reasons it was a tough place when I first moved here for college in 1988. Back then, “tough” meant I might get mugged. Now “tough” means I have to figure out what the hell to do with myself day in and day out without sinking too far into my own psychological bullshit.

Even back then, though, I remember many nights wandering the streets of Greenwich Village by myself. Looking into the windows of jazz clubs I couldn’t afford or browsing Bleecker St. Bob’s records. I remember feeling sometimes like I hardly existed on those streets. That I was just an extra in everybody else’s movie. When I dropped out of college a couple years later to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, it wasn’t only because I thought it would be a fun way to see the country and get paid for it. In fact, that wasn’t even the primary reason.

Mostly, although I wouldn’t have been able to articulate this at the time, it was because I was severely depressed and needed to get the hell out of New York for a little while. Thankfully, I’m not depressed this time around. At least not yet. I’m just bored and whiny. But at least I’m also very handsome.