Bored in Paradise
Jasper slid open the glass door, walking out onto the balcony where Ellie was standing in silence. Her glass of wine dangled loosely from her fingers as she leaned over the railing, gazing at the twinkling lights, both of the midnight cityscape and the stars up above.
He set his own glass on the table and approached, wrapping his arms around her from the back. She started before relaxing and placing her own hands over his. “Hey,” he murmured.
“Hey yourself.”
“What’s on your mind?” he asked, nuzzling into her neck.
“I…” she trailed off. “Never mind.”
He stood up straight and joined her at the railing. He playfully leaned into her shoulder. “Oh come on. Don’t tease me like this.”
She gave him a nudge back but didn’t continue. Jasper waited patiently beside her. “Life’s pretty great, isn’t it?” she said at last.
“Phew,” he said. Ellie shot him a look. “I thought it was something bad.”
“Well,” she sighed. “It kind of is.”
He raised his eyebrow at that.
She sank, bending her knees as she rested her head between her elbows on the railing. “We live in a perfect world. ‘Post scarcity,’ they call it. We’ve never been hungry. We’ve never really feared for our lives.”
“I fail to see how this is something bad.”
“We’ve never felt real… thrill? That’s not the right word.” She paused. “That sort of carnal sense of living. Life is too easy.”
“Too easy,” he echoed as if he were testing how the words felt on his lips.
“Look around us,” she said, lazily gesturing with her free hand at the city beneath them. The tall structures stood as solemn monuments scattered across the horizon, but despite the many vehicles slipping along the roads snaking through the forest of glass, the only sound that could be heard was the quiet rustling of trees. “We have ships that can sail across the galaxy in an instant. Humanity has colonies on all sorts of planets. Infinite space for infinite resources. Humanity will never struggle again.”
“But?” Jasper asked when she fell silent.
She took a sip of her wine. “But it means life loses that… that aching for danger. What was the scariest moment of your life?” she asked suddenly.
He thought for a moment. “Once I left my ship with an exosuit I forgot to charge. I was just floating free in orbit above the planet. That was terrifying.”
“Okay, but your friends were on the ship too. They quickly saved you, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So you were never in any real danger. There are always safeguards. You’ve never, I don’t know, had to fight off some big beast to save your life, or have to wonder where your next meal was going to come from. Humanity fought through all those torments to get us here, but now we’re just stagnant. Cradled in the safety of civilization.”
“So you’re bored? We can go asteroid hopping or skydiving if you want.”
“No,” she said in a huff. “You’re not getting it. Those are just simulated thrills. Those only exist to satisfy that ache I’m talking about, but in the back of my mind I would always know I’m safe.”
Jasper scratched his chin for a moment before fetching his glass from the table.
“Life is too easy,” she repeated. “I don’t even know what to do with my life, now that people don’t even need jobs anymore. Everything is supplied for us.”
“But doesn’t that afford us so many opportunities?” he said. “I get to spend all day working on my drawing or biking or whatever. I love it.”
She shrugged. “I don’t have any real passions like that. I feel like I’m floating through life. With every need taken care of, it’s like I’m trapped in this annoyingly perfect prison. Honestly, what’s the point of living, now? Just survive and indulge. We don’t even die anymore.”
She threw back the rest of her wine. “Forget prison. This is purgatory.”
Jasper rest his arm across her shoulders, pulling her in. “You’ve been thinking a lot about this.”
She nodded into his chest. “I kind of envy our ancestors, in a way. I’ve heard all about the horrors they had to deal with: dying at, like, 80, droughts… They used to ride across the country on horseback.”
“You can still ride horses,” he cut in.
“Yes, thank you,” she said sarcastically. “We don’t have to, though. They didn’t have spaceships or even cars.”
“I shudder at the thought,” he said, cracking a smile. “You know they used to have to kill animals to eat meat?”
She scrunched her nose. “I can’t imagine.”
A gust of breeze trickled past them. Jasper chuckled as Ellie’s hair sailed up, tickling his face.
“I dream about an apocalypse, sometimes. The sensible part of me knows I would probably not actually prefer that, but some instinct deep within me yearns for it. I like the idea of shaking up the system and seeing where things settle in the chaos—to see who really matters in your life and who’s just bound by social obligation.” She sighed. “I feel like some people don’t deserve paradise, but, then again, why do I? I was just lucky enough to be born now instead of when they were scratching in the dirt for bugs. We all were.”
Jasper sighed. “I get what you mean. I occasionally have these intrusive thoughts, too, like what if I were to just go up and punch someone in the face on the street, or what if I crashed my ship into someone’s house.”
“…to break from order? Do something of real meaning, for once?” she prodded.
“Exactly. I am happy, though. I wouldn’t trade all these luxuries our ancestors have fought so hard to provide for us. They experienced what you craved, but they looked to the future and dreamed of something better.”
“I know. I tell myself it’s senseless, but at the same time, I don’t know what I’m doing with myself except drifting through routine to maintain an ‘ordinary life.’ But there’s no such thing as ‘ordinary life.’ We think of civilization as stable. We think of it as almost an inevitability, but it’s not. Civilization is just a tenuous agreement.”
Neither spoke for a long while, both mulling over her words. Ellie gazed up at the constellation of stars that her parents taught her to look for. It looked like an upside-down triangle with its point intersecting a long band of stars parallel to the horizon and, in the center, she knew, was Earth, softly twinkling in the warmth of its own star with light that had yet to reach their planet.
“I want to help you, but I don’t know how,” Jasper said at last. “Do you want to talk to someone about this? These almost sound like symptoms of depression.”
“Here’s the really screwed up part,” she said. “If there were something wrong with me, if I were to be depressed, I wouldn’t want it fixed. I’m scared to dull the pain with drugs and treatments; I feel like these sorts of existential thoughts are the only things keeping me from being another mindless zombie blindly enjoying utopia.”
“No,” he said firmly. “Suffering isn’t a prerequisite to living a meaningful life. Anywhere along the line, our ancestors could have laid back from their progress and said, ‘Alright, we’re in a good place, now.’ But they didn’t. They kept toiling, striving for a better future by building on the achievements of those before them. This.” He stoically swept his arm across the horizon. “This is not the end of progress. There’s no predefined limit to human advancement. That feeling you have? Hold it very dear. Channel it. That same feeling of restlessness—of dissatisfaction with the way things are—is what drove humanity to this point.”
Ellie wrapped her arms around him, drying her cheeks on his sweater.
“There is still so much left undone,” he continued. “Is this utopia, like you said? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do better. After each major breakthrough—lightspeed travel, automation, immortality—there came another, heaping them on, because of people like you who saw a need and filled it. Imagine how incredible it’ll be if we invent time travel. Or find aliens!”
He playfully tickled Ellie as he said the last idea. She laughed, standing up to wipe her tears with her own sleeve. She stood on her toes to give him a kiss on the cheek.
“That was beautiful. Thank you.”
He responded with a kiss of his own.
“I’ve never seen this side of you,” she said.
He shrugged. “I almost have the opposite problem as you. I think life is so great, I’m afraid I won’t be able to experience it all.”
“Hey now,” she said. “We have all the time in the world.”
He gave her one last kiss before walking back inside, leaving Ellie standing alone on the balcony once more. Another breeze waved past her, and she deeply breathed in the fresh air. Staring up at the glimmering cosmos, she was filled with a new sense of resolve.
She contemplated her empty wine glass for a moment before hurling it over the balcony into the bushes far below and joined Jasper inside with a smile.