Boredom's Surprising Blessings

Life never seizes to amaze, and I often wonder why it is possible at all to be bored in a miraculous world that fires so many questions at us all the time. The amazing thing right now, is that I've just learned that my wondering about these things might very well be caused by the boredom I've never been able to understand...

_{source: Max Pixel}

Learning something new is always a good thing, and sometimes the things we learn about are surprising and amazing. But when we learn something new about our self, that's almost always surprising for obvious reasons. So, today I saw this short video entitled "Why Boredom is Good For You" and I was immediately interested because I almost never feel bored, and I'm perfectly happy to just think about trivial as well as deep philosophical questions. Sure, if I was to be locked in an empty room with only my thoughts as company, I think I'd eventually go mad, as I would suffer from sensory deprivation just like any other would, but under normal everyday circumstances I usually don't get bored when there's not immediately something to take my mind of things, or "just to have something to do."

Turns out that all that meaningless pondering, every time my mind wanders off to to ask itself unanswerable questions like "where do we go after we die" or "is there a meaning to all of this" or "why do people feel bored," I was actually bored... Me being a day-dreamer just means I'm bored more often than I've ever realized! Wow. This was starting out to be a surprise indeed, but an unpleasant one as I've always thought boredom is kind of silly. But I was surprised again, pleasantly this time, when later it's explained that boredom is useful BECAUSE it causes the mind to wander off! It's a surprise with a double bottom!

"In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and that many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts. Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative."
_{source: Just Think: The challenges of the disengaged mind}

In the video there's this experiment where they lock participants in a room with only a chair, a table and a red button which administers a shock to the subject when pressed. They were also told that the test would last 6 to 15 minutes. Shockingly (pun intended), the result was that 25% of the women and 76% of the men pressed the button. They preferred to find out what the shock would feel like, just to overcome the boredom. This is analogous to modern man reaching for a mobile phone, the moment there's "nothing to do."

In the video there are some more surprising things discussed and it's only 7 minutes short, so I invite you all to watch it. Just to include the links to the source material used for the video, I'll mention that there are also correlations between boredom and creativity and "Autobiographical Planning" as well.

_{Why Boredom is Good For You}

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