D.H. Lawrence used to say that the answer to boredom was
sleep, alcohol and travel. However, that’s a pretty futile response. If you go
to sleep, you have to wake up; if you get drunk, you’ll eventually sober up;
and after you’ve travelled, you have to come home. A wise man said, ‘wherever
you travel, there you are’; meaning that wherever we try to escape to we take
the primary reason for our troubles – ourselves – with us. Carl Jung, one of the fathers of modern psychology, said that the central neurosis of our time is emptiness; and Victor
Frankl talked about how clinics are crowded with people suffering from what he
called a new kind of neurosis, a sense of total and ultimate meaninglessness of
life. Our real problem is that we’ve forgotten the most basic reality of who we
are; spiritual beings made to love God and enjoy Him forever.