Get Off the Grid! by Saul Goodman

Author:Saul Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Living a Life of Boredom and Paranoia

Picture this: there’s a full moon lighting the barren walls of your woodsy cottage. You’ve worked your way through 150 Ways to Play Solitaire. Twice. As you flip over that last King, you might be struck by the profound thought: death is it. A life full of gripping paranoia and unwavering boredom, leading up to an anticlimactic final expiration.

As it turns out, staying low-profile, maintaining a steady schedule, and working a job so mind-numbing that it would put an anesthesiologist to sleep—it’s not that interesting. And the paranoia? Who needs caffeine when you have an escalating series of poor choices to keep you up at night? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to discourage you. We’re already too deep in to backtrack now, so let’s see what we can do to encourage a bit of self-care:

With the boredom … it’s an understandable human tendency to get a little cuckoo-bananas without mental stimulation. It’s what makes solitary confinement so effective. It’s what separates astronauts from the rest of us philistines.

If your life prior to disappearing was as action-packed as a Steven Seagal movie, let’s be honest: it was probably pretty exhausting. But, it may have been the adrenaline rush that kept you going. Even if your life wasn’t a page-turning thriller before, the life of a khaki-clad drone isn’t for everyone. The intellectual withdrawal can start to grind at you.

There’s no need to get morose yet! Examine this stuff in terms of a balance sheet. Make lists of pros and cons. There’s a whole lot more in the plus column outweighing the cons of blowing your cover. Here’s an example …

Pro: behaving in a routine way draws little attention from others. No one will notice if you wear the same pair of pants two days in a row, and you can eat all the salad you want without obsessively checking your teeth.

Con: if attention is your bread and butter, not getting any could really drag you down. You extroverts are going to suffer, there’s no way around it. Hopefully we can find a way for you to cope with the lack of social stimulation that doesn’t start with a “d” and end with an “issociative disorder.”

Pro: Relinquishing a few of your social engagements will free up a sizable chunk of time for you to read all of the Great Books. I’m looking at you, Ulysses! Just say yes.

See? The boredom’s not all bad.

* * *

What I’m really into right now, though, is the paranoid part of the festivities. By now it’s got to be crystal clear to you that constant wariness is a necessary survival tactic. However, sometimes a logical paranoia can be overtaken by the slightly more unstable kind. The kind that tells you that you can’t fall asleep because there’s a monster in the closet shaped like an ICE agent with a really big Taser. That’s when you can really get into trouble, because irrational paranoia lets fear take the wheel in a way that will seriously draw too much attention.

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