“I’m leaving because I’m bored.”
-George Saunders, American author
Based on this quote, we were compelled to believe that George Saunders felt that he accomplished everything he was meant to do. After his goal was met, he grew bored with his lifestyle, and his time was through. He felt that a life full of boredom was meaningless.
This supports an argument by Shelly Kagan, a philosophy professor at Yale University. He presents the dilemma in which he describes immortality with two possible outcomes: 1) In living forever you keep all of your memories and remain the same person, inevitably leading to boredom, or 2) You don’t keep your memories or personality, and ultimately change so much so that you are an entirely different person with no attachment to your former self. This avoids the boredom aspect of the dilemma, but in the end, you’re technically not the same person.
We feel that Saunders would agree with Kagan in the sense that a boring life is a life not worth living. But it also leads to the question of how long is too long? How long can we live before we get tired of everything around us?