Bored but creative

"What are you doing?"

"What?"

"What are you doing, I asked."

"Are you stupid?"

"What? No!"

"I think you're either lying or you're blind."

"..."

"Which one is it?"

"Do I have only two options?"

"Yes."

"I'm blind."

"No you're not."

"How do you know?"

"Because you wouldn't have started this conversation had you not seen me stare the clock for twenty minutes straight."

---

I came up with the dialog above. It was a result that followed a very counterintuitive thing to do: staring a clock on the wall for 20 minutes. Seems like an activity only senile people would do.

The point behind this was to be intentionally bored, because boredom supposedly stimulates creativity.

You can judge for yourself, but I would say it sort of works.

People tend to avoid boredom, and smartphones have taken this habit to the extreme; you can now fill your head with, most of the time useless information by scrolling whatever feed of a given social media site that was designed to be as hooking as a drug with its endless feed. This was not supposed to be a critique of social media, however, it certainly plays a role with distracting people.

With increased distraction everywhere, people have also become less able to tolerate boredom. Instead, consumption is encouraged, and it's no wonder – that is how money is made. Harnessing your attention. Attention economy. Have you heard of it? I am pretty sure not in Facebook at least, because it's your attention Facebook is profiting from.

Anyway, being bored enables your unconscious mind to work – or rather noticing it easier – when the working memory isn't constantly occupied. The mind isn't a computer, but you could think of it as freeing some bandwidth for another purpose. That's my theory anyway.

The great thing with Steem is that I've come to value consumption less. I obviously haven't cut it to zero, but I would say I'm much more careful where I direct my attention. I still don't have a laser-like zen focus, but I still have managed to put a fair bit of time with productive activities associated with Steem.

Seven months ago I got a DSLR camera. The thing is that I got it from a friend, because he knew I'm writing here on Steem and using pictures to illustrate my posts. I have ended up growing fond with photography with it and I quickly got into editing and have learned how big a difference post-processing can make to enhance or change the story in the picture. It is a creative process that I really like and I'm still discovering new ways of editing in Darktable (the editing software I use).

Steem seems to be a social media that encourages creativity and improving skills, which is pretty cool, in my opinion. Contrary to the very consumption heavy model of typical social media.

I'm again in Lieksa, for the third time this year. My aunt is having a birthday in a week, but also my dad's cousin's mother passed away some time ago, so he invited me and my dad to the funeral and to carry the coffin. First time carrying the dead for me. I asked if I could take photographs. He said it was okay. Actually more than ok, as he seemed glad that there was someone to take pictures (with something else than a smartphone) – as glad as one can be in a funeral.

My dad's cousin hasn't actually seen any pictures I have taken. I'm still considering myself an amateur, though an amateur that can make some magic on the editing table, so I have a feeling he and his family are going to be happy the least for the pictures when they see them.

That was one shot I took and edited, though it was one of the three only I got to finish with my dad's laptop that doesn't seem to run the editing software very well – it suddenly started crashing and lagging when I was trying to export a picture. A bit frustrating, because I'm having a full week of holiday where I would have bunch of time on my hands to do some editing for the remaining Norway pics also.

At least there's always the clock to stare at.