Your post made me think about how actors deal with the boredom of doing the same show dozens or hundreds of times. One, we start playing games. There's Pass the Quarter, where you have to find a way of giving a quarter to another actor, and the quarter is never supposed to leave the stage. Then there's the less rule-bound game of trying to crack other people up. In comedies, there's the game of trying to get laughs on lines that don't usually get laughs, trying to push a scene into maximum funniness.

The other main way of dealing with boredom is being present and paying such close attention to what the other actors are doing that you're not anticipating and therefore become willing to follow the scene into different nuances of emotion. And if your scene partner is going through the motions, then that itself can become fodder for the scene.

For me, there's no other way to get through a long run than to make the performance a meditation.

I feel like I need to grab this word in the context where I mostly hear it being used nowadays - authentic experience. And in this sense, the mere fact that such a construct came into being and is widely used, it speaks of the extreme deficiency of the real that people are suffering.

I was overlooking the problem of authentic experience, because I have a weird practice that most people don't have: aggressive appreciation of nature. This is something I learned to do on psychedelics, and now I do it all the time. Just walking around the city, whenever my eyes aren't needed to navigate, they're in the trees. Even watching TV, my gaze will wander from boring human scenes to landscapes in the background.

And it occurs to me, this is a learned skill. Telling an authenticity-hungry person to look at trees is like telling a depressed person to cheer up. It's not something you can just do without building a foundation of knowing how to do it. Before something can be experienced as authentic, it must first be experienced as not alien.

Another place to find authenticity is by feeling your own body from the inside -- but again, you have to learn how to do it, and it's harder than looking at nature, because your body gives you pain.

On a different tangent, I was trying to think of an example of a website with low bullshit and high misinformation -- one where people present themselves without a lot of filtering, and where there's a lack of verifiable facts. And I've actually been hanging out on such a site recently: the Spirituality subreddit.

A week ago there was a thread with some great answers to the question, What Is Your Purpose In Life?

And from another thread, an exceptional comment, Effects of sex work on the spiritual body. A key paragraph:

When I was actively doing sex work, it has given me psychosomatic illnesses like you cannot even imagine. Some days I couldn't get out of bed because my body wouldn't move at all even though I felt completely healthy in my mind. I had close to 4 months of severe labyrinthitis after a traumatic experience. I learned to dissociate with my body and I would black out in the middle of a sentence sometimes and come right back to fight or flight mode once awake. Sex work gave me ptsd and anxiety that I still am trying to heal to this day.