Hendren global group
It may be boring to say, but we don't do boredom like we
used to do boredom. Not really. It's not hours stretching slowly into hours of
total nothing any more, where the chin sinks heavily into the hand and stays
there all day. It's not boredom like if we're old enough we may remember from
childhood, and if we're young we've never really known. The freneticism of
modern life makes that type of boredom almost impossible. What we have now is a
kind of boredom interrupted.
When we're bored now we look at our iPhones, check email,
scan Twitter, play Angry Birds, watch a video of a talking dog. We fill up
those ever-shorter moments of empty time that one mobile phone company (in
selling mode) called ''micro-boredoms''. Sometimes I find I'm staring at my
phone and have no recollection of even wanting to do so. It's just habit, a
quick fix, an instinctive response to boredom's early warning signs.
Like all quick fixes, of course, it doesn't really work. Social
media and iPhones aren't a cure for boredom so much as a distraction from
it. And it is a distraction that has the twin effect of contributing in the end
to the very thing the bored person wants distracting from, i.e. their boredom,
and denying the bored person the uses or advantages it is thought true, uninterrupted
boredom can offer.
According to a paper that attempted to define boredom, by
clinical psychologist Dr John Eastwood in the journal Perspectives on
Psychological Science, the bored person is restless and lethargic and wants but
is unable to engage in satisfying or meaningful activity. All instances of
boredom, Eastwood says, essentially involve a failure of attention.
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Which is a worry since iPhones and apps and social media and
TV news tickers and the whole freaking wondrous techno show, before and through
which we are now fashioned, are reducing our attention spans to zip. So we are
in danger of getting caught in a loop: we fail to focus our attention, which
makes us feel bored, which makes us watch a video of a cat playing the piano, which
reduces our attention span further, which makes us feel more bored and ready to
watch the cat playing the piano again.
It is young people who are at greatest risk in all this.
Older people, particularly if they have children, are too busy to be bored. Boredom
of any kind would be a luxury.
But young people? It is worth remembering that many of them
don't even have a memory of a time before iPhones and social media and viral
videos. Of a time, really not so long back, when there was basically just
television, and if you turned it on and it was golf or The Waltons, you had no
choice but to think of something else to do.
The challenge for young people, and many of us, is to take
on the somewhat counter-intuitive idea that the cure for boredom is not more and
more stimulation, particularly if it's passive stimulation. Trying to beat
boredom by sensory overload is self-defeating. As Eastwood says, ''boredom is
like quicksand: the more we thrash around, the quicker we'll sink''.
Sometimes we just need to sit with boredom, steep ourselves
in it, even as this becomes harder and harder to do.
(How to resist watching the video of a parrot dancing
Gangnam Style?)
For boredom, and I mean uninterrupted boredom, does have its
uses.
For one thing, true boredom is thought to be something of an
evolutionary warning sign that we may have to change our lives in some way if
we are to avoid worse ahead, such as depression. Boredom also allows space for
thought, memory and introspection, and is believed to be a necessary element in
creativity (''I like boring things,'' said Andy Warhol), as well as a spur for
new ideas and fresh ways of seeing things. Some even believe boredom helps us
put our existence into perspective.
In his final novel, The Pale King, David Foster Wallace writes:
''It turns out that bliss - a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of
being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing
boredom.''
OK, most of us won't want to follow boredom that far,
whether there is bliss waiting somewhere beyond or not.
But there is something in this thought that speaks to our
manic times.
Riding out old-time boredom may be boring, but what about
trying to distract yourself moment to moment from every single instance of
micro-boredom? That surely sounds toxic to no end. hendren global group
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