it's difficult for me to speak about things easily because the christian perspective that I have had will be very different to yours (and that is important whatever people like to say) but I need to tell you that this doesnt look like a shallow post at all - quite the opposite - because what you are addressing here is absolutely central to all of us in our search for God.
My own experience is very similar to yours but, instead of doing what rainboy did and sticking with it, I more or less gave up on my faith: partly because I just wanted to be 'like everyone else' - people all around me who didnt worry about whether God was there or not and just got on with their lives and seemed to be doing a far better job than I was anyway. I tried (quite subconsciously I should add) to shake God out of my life. I decided that I'd tried all that and got nothing but darkness and pain. "My brother doesnt have a faith and he's doing ok." I thought.
Psalm 72: (according to the numbering in the Grail version)
'I was filled with envy of the proud when I saw how the wicked prosper.. . . . . .
They have no share in men's sorrows; they are not stricken like others.. . . . untroubled they grow in wealth!"
(By the 'wicked' here he simply means people who do not sustain a life of faith rather than people who do wrong things I think.)
I think this is something that all christians must face at one time or another and some people face it far more than others I think, [although how can we tell?]
When we are children we depend on our parents for everything and we look to them for all our comfort and protection but as we grow up we learn to reciprocate and to give them comfort and protection in return.
When I was a young Christian I was super-active in the church and spent hours in prayer etc but I soon came up against what I could only call 'the Wall' beyond which I could not go and which drove all my prayer and Christian activities to nothing and despair, and whenever I wanted to get closer to God again (I frequently tried to 'bounce back') I came up against this same bleak empty deserted place which seemed to bar my way to ever knowing God. Even reading the Gospel became immensely difficult because it all seemed so utterly impossible and demanding. This wall is something that seemed to run alongside me all through those years -an impenetrable barrier stopping me from getting closer to God and sending me back into the same old struggle and strife: this awful place of darkness and emptiness.
It was only after much tribulation and difficulty with sin too (and finally arrest for child porn and rejection by society and friends) that I was finally able to realise (mostly through the psalms, which anyone struggling with their faith should read over and over)that this awful Wall that was the curse of my life and stopped me from getting closer to God and being a better person - that this hideous Wall, this Chasm between me and God was actually none other than God Himself.
My problem was my obsession with Control. I always needed to keep control of my life and that included my spiritual life too. I could never really trust anyone else enough (and certainly not God either) to let go of that last vestige of ME that I thought was something intrinsic: something that I was supposed to do. I could never believe that anyone else knew me as well as I did. But in this I was completely mistaken. This terrible place of blankness and darkness and apparent despair was actually the place I had to go in order to find God. I had to learn to trust and I was only driven to doing that when all my other options had gone. God took away all my other options not in order to torment and punish me (though that is how it felt) but in order to teach me the way I needed to go in order to discover Him . . . . . this is perhaps what Jesus means when he says 'taking up your cross' - that's how it seemed to me anyhow: the cross is not a way of suffering necessarily [and certainly not suffering for its own sake which is the way it tends to sound] but it's the way of trusting that God knows what He is about and does not take us into seemingly dark unpleasant places because He wants us to suffer but because He wants to show us Himself, as He is, in His givingness and we can only do that if we can learn to trust and then to give as He does. He calls us to be like Him so that we can experience Him, which is all any of us want if we only but knew it . . . . .
sorry this is too long but I hope you understand what I'm driving at: if you are suffering this dark place spiritually, a place of desert and emptiness and boredom and apparent despair know one thing for sure: this is NOT what it seems! This is the Wall and it is God who is taking you there: all you have to do (and I know how difficult this is) is to TRUST even when everything seems unbearable. Go back to the psalms and see how the psalmists live this. All the best and PERSEVERE!