"Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored"

John Berger’s cryptic assertion, "Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored", invites playful consideration of temptation, self-discipline, and the necessity of boredom. The image of using sausages as a leash for hungry dogs is both literal and deeply metaphorical. Sausages, symbolic of immediate gratification and desire, are a weak, unsustainable link. Dogs chained together slip easily into chaotic disarray when their restraints are edible temptations. Translating this to human behavior, the advice is to avoid tethering one’s self, ambitions, or responsibilities with that which presents the greatest enticement to stray, and to implosion.

Berger’s wit highlights the human tendency to build systems or routines dependent upon fragile, irresistible distractions. In relationships, work, or habits, binding ourselves to discipline with what we most crave guarantees failure; temptation destroys restraint when it is incorporated into restraint itself. Self-control, then, cannot be secured by proximity to pleasure.

The second clause, “One must accustom one’s self to be bored,” completes the lesson. Deprivation, monotony, or the absence of stimulation is not only inevitable, but essential to learning discipline. Modern life abhors boredom, desperately filling gaps with entertainment, novelty, and distraction. Berger suggests that genuine control and stability arise from enduring and accepting boredom, not by eradicating it or masking it with stimulants, literal or metaphorical sausages. The capacity to withstand stillness or lack of excitement is tied to maturity and depth.

Berger’s adage, through its humor, critiques the modern insistence on constant engagement. It urges embracing the discomfort of boredom as a foundation for a more enduring satisfaction and a wiser form of self-restraint: do not sabotage your intentions by making self-discipline impossible; instead, tolerate what is slow and uneventful, for that is where real steadiness is forged.