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Boredom is not a problem to be solved, it's the privilege of a free mind

theguardian.com

31–40 of 97 posts

Re: Boredom is not a problem to be solved, it's the privilege of a free mind

#31
The author confuses a state of calm contentment with boredom. And despite the new-age rhetoric, she admits to trying to solve it - she asks us to think instead of doing things, in the hopes that thinking would help us stumble into profundity.

But thought can be worse than action - thinking quickly spirals into brooding. Pardon me for yet another misrepresentation of depression, but I confuse it with boredom, albeit in an existential sense.

Zazen encourages us to meditate on our breath and to observe our thoughts so that they hopefully melt away. It asks us to think less, not more; to shut down our internal monologue which is the biggest agent of human misery. The trope of the mad genius is true - there are three great books that touches on this subject: Hesse's Steppenwolf, Colin Wilson's The Outsider, and the amazing Logicomix. Also a recent research surfaced on HN on neuroticism and the dangers of self-generated thoughts - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661315....

There is however a kind of thought that _is_ action. The state of flow when deep in deliberate thought, trying to solve hard problems (hard is relative to the person thinking it) is amazing. That kind of thought is very different from thoughts about the self, or doing drugs looking for profound realizations - there unfortunately isn't anything deeper about life that we'll be able to figure out by random introspection. Science is our best bet for that; not LSD, not meditation, not boredom.

Re: Boredom is not a problem to be solved, it's the privilege of a free mind

#32
I think she is using the term boredom in a somewhat misguided way. In fact it seems like he is really talking about something else — laziness.

Boredom is to literally not know what to do because nothing excites you.

What she is talking about is that we have become so lazy that instead of taking up a hobby we just end up using cellphones to kill time. Which i would agree with but it's a quite different point.

Re: Boredom is not a problem to be solved, it's the privilege of a free mind

#33

Each day at work I put in headphones, code for a bit, read HN for a bit, then back to code. I don't know if I could describe it as boredom, maybe confused context switching. It brings to mind how the protagonist of Neuromancer gets hooked on amphetamines after being surgically banned from the Internet. We get so used to everything happening quickly and efficiently that our brains don't have time to rest. If you're no…

I think that one of the helpful side effects of being on the go constantly is avoidance of unanswerable philosophical or existential questions. If you're busy, you're not going to get kneecapped by these depressions-in-disguise. Having time to wallow can be detrimental, because it can build a habit out of wallowing. Capitalism/materalism does a very good job of disguising that even at its best it doesn't necessarily provide a life that everyone would agree is worth living.

Of course, you could argue that existential and philosophical questions are critical to a studied life that is worth living, but meh.

Re: Boredom is not a problem to be solved, it's the privilege of a free mind

#34
This feels a bit short-sighted to me. Maybe it's just use of terms at the end of the day. Telling a young person to "lean into boredom" is a recipe for disaster. And "thinking" as the antidote to boredom doesn't do much either. There's a quote that always stuck with me I ran into a while back that goes something like: "All day long we tell our children to 'Pay attention!' but we never actually teach them how." The premise of this article, IMO, would be much more valuable if it dovetailed into meditation practices.

It's always been my take that one of the main reasons many of us seek out typically unproductive distractions and noise (phones, TV, gossip, whatever) is to avoid quiet, personal, thinking. In jail, which is presumably the worst environment one could find themselves in, solitary confinement is viewed as a significant punishment for bad behavior. Being alone with your thoughts is worse than being around criminals all day or locked in a cell! I think "lean into your boredom/thoughts" is an empty provocation without training advice (again, meditation is the route I'd take this).

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Re: Boredom is not a problem to be solved, it's the privilege of a free mind

#35
This post is silly, just consider its premise reductio ad absurdum. I suppose prisoners in solitary confinement are the most privileged among us. Boredom creates real pain that over long enough time leads to psychological problems. The mind doesn't want to be idle. Kids could take more time to appreciate life away from their smartphones but to make an argument against boredom itself is absurd. Boredom is an incredibly unpleasant experience and there is nothing with wrong with wanting to avoid it.

Re: Boredom is not a problem to be solved, it's the privilege of a free mind

#36

For me boredom is the manifestation of a problem. I am introvert and could think on my own for days, but boredom never happens. Animals in the wild rarely get bored. I worked as an assistant in a zoo while teenager and you could see every single animal getting bored there. And today it is much better than in the past, because we are stating to understand them and we make them work for getting their food and so on. Af…

Agreed. Humans do not live in their natural state, and are so far removed from it that they do not know what they do not know that they lack. From this manifests much of the strife we experience.

We talk of boredom - because we have grown accustomed to the idea that we must fill our time, and society presents antipathy to those who are content to merely sit and think. "What's wrong?" "You look troubled" "Would you like to go do something?"

We talk of depression - and fail to understand that much of that which we place under the term originates from the soulless mechanisation of man, the systemisation of being, the bureaucracy of orthodoxy. I'm perfectly aware that depression is also a natural response to inflammation - but that's not what I'm talking about - rather, those who are classed as depressed simply because they are unhappy with their lacklustre existences.

We used to live in small communities, often on the move, frequently exposed to novelty, in a state of little security and high self-responsibility. Life was short, and older generations didn't end up entrenched, ruling the roost over several consecutive successive generations. There's far more that we don't know about how we once lived than we do know, however.

I am very rarely bored, as there's always something to observe or think about, and the only occasions on which I do end up bored are those on which it's too depressing to think about anything.

I am often depressed by the state in which we live, in our warrens, surrounded by our own filth, closeted and cosseted in hateful little boxes from cradle to grave.

I'm aware that this could be read as a "oh, the good old days were better", but it isn't - it's an assertion that in order to ensure our own psychological and therefore societal well-being, we have to recognise that we have failed to recognise some basic human needs in the structure in which we live - and we have failed to recognise these needs practically since the dawn of civilisation. It works, just about, but it doesn't mean that it's the best possible way of being.

There are two ways out, as I see it:

1) We force ourselves into adaptation, through continued indoctrination and potentially with the aid of technology to alter the very bedrock of human nature - this may be infeasible, and isn't a terribly palatable idea.

2) We address those elements which we lack. This can only arise through experimentation with different ways of living, or through a revelatory and profound re-understanding of the nature of human beings.

If we do neither, as we entrench ourselves deeper and deeper into systemised living, it becomes harder and harder to conceive of alternatives.

I expect I'll get some vengeful replies to this, if any at all - as these ideas are deeply discomfiting, and discomfiting ideas are usually received with hostility.

Re: Boredom is not a problem to be solved, it's the privilege of a free mind

#37
Great article although I think maybe the title could be a bit misleading.

The way I see it, boredom is not a state in which you want to be, but rather the initial condition that triggers the need of doing things. One word that I think is related to boredom is passivity, hence I wouldn't associate thinking and introspection to a state of boredom as they require quite an active engagement.

Re: Boredom is not a problem to be solved, it's the privilege of a free mind

#39

Each day at work I put in headphones, code for a bit, read HN for a bit, then back to code. I don't know if I could describe it as boredom, maybe confused context switching. It brings to mind how the protagonist of Neuromancer gets hooked on amphetamines after being surgically banned from the Internet. We get so used to everything happening quickly and efficiently that our brains don't have time to rest. If you're no…

I think that one of the helpful side effects of being on the go constantly is avoidance of unanswerable philosophical or existential questions. If you're busy, you're not going to get kneecapped by these depressions-in-disguise. Having time to wallow can be detrimental, because it can build a habit out of wallowing. Capitalism/materalism does a very good job of disguising that even at its best it doesn't necessarily…

I go back to the person above who mentioned mindfulness. That's what I really focus on in the attempt to stave off "boredom". Because ultimately I find that the existential and philosophical questions which have their place at times are ultimately just as much as a distraction as a cell phone. Spending too much time on those questions is just an avoidance of the present moment, the future and ultimately death. Like the delusion that if your were really smart, you could you think your way out of the human condition.

Re: Boredom is not a problem to be solved, it's the privilege of a free mind

#40
post #31

The author confuses a state of calm contentment with boredom. And despite the new-age rhetoric, she admits to trying to solve it - she asks us to think instead of doing things, in the hopes that thinking would help us stumble into profundity. But thought can be worse than action - thinking quickly spirals into brooding. Pardon me for yet another misrepresentation of depression, but I confuse it with boredom, albeit i…

>Zazen encourages us to meditate on our breath and to observe our thoughts so that they hopefully melt away. It asks us to think less, not more; to shut down our internal monologue which is the biggest agent of human misery.

I know this wasn't the thrust of your comment but having spent a lot of time studying meditation it's important to note that meditation isn't about "thinking less". Rather it's about developing the ability to see thoughts for what they are (they're just thoughts) and being able to respond (as opposed to react) to them. I can no more turn off my internal monologue than I can control when my blood cells regenerate or my skin cells slough off.

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