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> All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. —BP
Sitting quiety will make you self-reflect. Self reflection will reduce stress and fear. Reduction of stress and less fear is a reduction in problems caused by human error, and negativity towards eachother (due to fear).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could argue by providing those things you’re forcing them into perpetual stimulation. It’s a matter of perspective. The difference is that like sugar, unless we’re using our rationality to override the impulse, we’ll always pick stimulation though that’s not necessarily healthy.
Words means things. If I ask you for something again and again, you then provides it for me as a gift for christmas, using the word "forcing" is massively inappropriate. It is not just a question of perspective. It is quite literally a question of what word means.
There may be more obvious stimuli like established hobbies, or peer pressure, but ultimately a lot of the desire for a new belonging is likely driven by marketing from the companies selling it.
When my kid is bored he eventually figures out something to do. if he gets less tv or whatever, for a period, he gets deeply invested in lego or drawing or similar
I firmly believe that humans need seasons, i.e. periods of time that are different from each other, either summer, winter etc, or periods where a TV show is simply not accessible.
What almost always works to get away from TV, though, is if _I_ start a project, and within minutes my daughter will have picked up her own project, and we'll be companionably working on something.
In the past we had moments we were bored. Now, we always have a phone or other screen were we can indulge on dopamine.
> All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. —BP
This is absolutely true, though perhaps hard to understand just put simply like this. Sitting in silence is not the solution, but it will cause a solution to occur within you. Sitting quiety will make you self-reflect. Self reflection will reduce stress and fear. Reduction of stress and less fear is a reduction in problems caused by human error, and negativity towards eachother (due to fear).
People will say things like this, and then miss how many people immediately become uncomfortable with sitting quietly lest they face the risk of self-reflection, and how many social tools for avoiding it we have.
-Playing in storm drains. Inside the narrow tunnels I might add.
-Abandoned construction sites.
-Railway tracks. Putting things o the rails waiting for the train to see what happened. Everything from rocks to toys to coins.
-Dumpster diving in large dumpsters. There was a soap factory near us and wed dive for schampoo or hairgel.
-Jumping in the biohazard pond looking for frogs eggs.
-Throwing things off bridges.
-Climbing various constructions, houses and dubios trees.
-Competing in who could jump from the highest roof.
Kids not only could get hurt. We did. Legs were broken. No one died fortunately.
Bored kids outside is not really as romantic as many would have it. Not arguing against boredom, constant stimuli is not healthy.
That being said, unsupervised bored kids can lead to some very dangerous outcomes.
“should be allowed”, in practice, means “should be forced”, since it means saying no to the huge collection of devices (TVs, computers, tablets, nintendos etc) that prevent boredom.
Yeah, that's intuitively not a fate I would want to wish on my own kids. I'm just old enough to have spent the first ~14 years of my life without any personal computing devices, and I remember the boredom being agonizing . Now, the kind of device I would provide is another story. Unfettered access to the Internet at large, including social media, is probably not well advised - access to Wikipedia probably is. Questio…
There are adults that can’t handle slot machines. Many more seem to be unable to handle social media. I’m very seriously recommending friends and family to limit it. With children it’s more hands-on, so as a parent it wouldn’t just be recommendations.
I feel the destructive behaviour of bored kids is forgotten a bit. Growing up in the late 70s early 80s we were kicked out of the house until dinner. We did a lot of really dangerous things exploring. Among these, -Playing in storm drains. Inside the narrow tunnels I might add. -Abandoned construction sites. -Railway tracks. Putting things o the rails waiting for the train to see what happened. Everything from rocks…
Children vehemently disagree with expert (since times immemorial)
The problem is not that eventually kids/people will find a way to not be bored. The problem is how easy and effortless it is to find entertainment these days.
The situation is similar to food. It's not that eating and enjoying food is bad, but the way modern society makes food available (and the quality of it) enables some quote suboptimal behaviours (to put it mildly)