Boredom isn't the act of having nothing to do. That's idleness.
Boredom is a problem of a lack of satisfaction. There's various reasons for that but I believe having too much to do, and too much stress is what leads to boredom. People have an amount of attention they can pay to any topic before they need to rest. You can only listen to a song for so long before it stops being pleasant and starts being annoying. You can only hear the same story so many times before it gets boring.
When you are bored, sometimes idleness can even be a fine replacement. If you're bored, and you decide to go and sit in a chair in the sun with a nice cold drink, that's a nice response.
What boredom is, is when you're in class or at work, and you need to keep doing some routine behavior, but you need a break, you need a change, but you can't. Boredom is the feeling that you have to fight in order to keep doing something that your whole reward system of your brain has told you you've had enough of.
Boredom isn't something good. It's something damaging. It's a condition where your mind is tired of a particular action, but you don't have the agency to make a change in your situation to suit that.
Nicely said.
I'd add that this article appears to equal boredom with the kind of state achieved through introspection and/or meditation. I believe that is not the default response to boredom. I think the usual response is browsing reddit for funny stuff or playing mindless computer games. All while still being bored and not getting much out of it. I'm certainly in that state sometimes and hate it especially if I could have been sleeping instead
I don't know that it's good or bad, I think it's simply a signal, like hunger or tiredness that allows us to make an informed choice about what we can do to meet the needs of our body and mind.
fantastic comment! very well written. Can you share your thoughts on what to do when you're bored? Especially can you elaborate on the "your whole reward system of your brain has told you you've had enough of" part of your comment?
You might say that, but after several months of a form of Tibetan buddhist meditation, I extended my attention span to well over five hours. I found I could retrain my mind to be silent and do what I wanted.
The form of meditation is detailed in the book "Turning the Mind into an Ally" by Sakyong Mipham and Pema Chodron.
Well said. So perhaps it would be better codified as:
Idleness is not a problem to be solved. It's the last privilege of a free mind.
I have a 14 yr old and I rarely see him idle. I've had long conversations about this, but the lure of electronic devices is just so strong. I'm actively working to change his behavior, though.
Agreed, but it doesn't need to be routine behavior, it can be anything that doesn't suit you in particular moment. So, it's kind of unsolvable problem :-)
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.
After I sold my first company I went to an African Safari, and it was incredible seeing the same animals I had seen in captivity, because they looked different in the Wild. In particular, they were the same, but moved and behaved completely different. Their spirit is different.
In my opinion, the same happens to humans, only that we could create our own jail ourselves for paying the rent,raising our kids, advancing our career or having a successful business.
This. I don't regret the time I spend just thinking. I do however regret the time lost to boredom. They're not the same thing. Boredom to me is a state of wanting to do something but either not being able to or not knowing what that something is.
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.
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.
>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.
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 not doing something, then what's wrong with you, the modern world seems to say.
We were led to believe technology would eventually alleviate us of our ills. Instead I feel...tired.
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.
I've been struggling against boredom for the last 3 months. The reason for the constant context switching is to fight off boredom for a few minutes or a few hours to get something done, anything done at all.
Even when carving out time at work for what I want to do, it feels tiring.
When our time is owned by someone else or when our creativity is ignored by someone else we can feel boredom and we can feel tired. I thought it would be fun to hack on Python all day and to explore a new JavaScript web framework; instead I've felt tired and just waiting for 5 or 6pm to just leave and then come home and avoid computers completely.
Maybe we're just feeling like burnt out Colin Laney from All Tomorrow's Parties?
Not only "what's wrong with you", but I took his addiction to amphetamines as a response to his addiction to the instant gratification the Internet provides, which is 100% relevant today.
One thing that interrupts my moments of boredom is the thought of falling behind while the world makes progress.
That is precisely the same feeling you get when you move to a quieter town: "nothing goes on here while 'everything is going on' somewhere else".
This feeling of 'nothing doing' pushes me to do stuff, be it a hobby, reading, etc. I think the idea is pretty much associated to the 'time is money' or the 'time is flying, we're getting older, take advantage of your time' sort of thoughts.
A nice point made in the article is the fact that many people just can't stand live in peace with their own thoughts. Indeed.
The problem with that seems to be that if you're always trying to catch up with some overarching scheme of advancement and progress, you won't have a moment of peace until you retire...
An old Chinese hobo named Han-shan used to write strange poems on the cliffs and trees of the mountain where he lived. They're called the cold mountain poems. One of them goes like this:
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.”
>>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!
Solitary confinement for a few days isn't a problem. What people have an issue with, and is unfortunately a very common practice, is when a prisoner is placed into solitary confinement for weeks at a time, or indefinitely. That is a form of torture.
I'd like to observe that a course of training such as you describe seems outside the scope of the article. Perhaps it does some small good, anyway, by suggesting that acquiring such training oneself, from whatever source, is a good thing to do.
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.
I was looking for a definition of "boredom" that I agree with and "literally not know[ing] what to do because nothing excites you" is the one I most agree with and is the most succinct.
I could replace "excites" with "interests", "relaxes" or some other state changing term.
It kind of reminds me of my philosophy regarding programming - that it can never be boring. If it's boring, then something is done wrong. You can always automate the boring parts, and thinking about automation is less boring.
I love playing with and working on projects that transform code into different code and I love that you're drawn to meta-programming, but I have a few issues with a few of the ideas:
> If it's boring, then something is done wrong.
I have a problem with the tone of this statement, because I've seen it taken to an extreme and it can be a dangerous idea.
A better way of looking at it is: If something is boring, take it as a sign there might be an opportunity to improve the process, but you have to be acutely aware the problems that automation can introduce.
There's a phenomenon I like to call premature automation. When you work on a problem the boring way long enough, your brain learns the patterns. Premature automation happens when you skip learning about or experiencing the process and you shoot straight to automation. Often what happens is the automation fails to anticipate important edge cases.
> You can always automate the boring parts, and thinking about automation is less boring.
Thinking about automation is less boring because it's not trivial. Automation can be trivial if you're doing simple things like code generation, but often these simple things come at a cost. For example, code generation typically becomes more complex as the need for customizations and exceptions popup.
Libraries can automate things at runtime, but writing good libraries based on timeless/minimally leaky ideas takes time. Leaky libraries built on a poor foundation tends to introduce bugs or complexity. There is value in boring, predictable code with minimal dependencies. It's easier to audit and review with static analysis tools, it's harder to introduce cascading bugs and it.
TLDR: I'm all for automation, but saying "If it's boring, something is done wrong" and "you can always automate the boring parts" sounds like a cocktail of developer shaming for not doing something that's "simple".
Note that the inverse is not true: If it's exciting, you could still be doing something wrong. (Watch any junior hire with day-one ideas to "improve" the codebase.)
I had a similar experience (which I tried to "solve" in high school via World of Warcraft), and honestly I see this more in my case as a manifestation of depression, not pure boredom. Often the issue was that nothing SEEMED interesting/worth doing, and once I got started I'd be ok, but the initial push to get started was too much effort, or I'd stop too soon and wouldn't be able to get fully engaged with the activity.
I was just thinking about it last night: I went for a run, which is a little unusual for me, and I was similarly "time free" as most nights but a lot less bored. I felt my ideas/internal state was more interesting/entertaining, perhaps due to changes in my neurotransmitters caused by exercise.
HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM
~Terry Pratchett
Of course it's not just the privilege of a free mind, but also the privilege of relative freedom from stress, free time, and to an extent the education that leads you to aspire to more stimulation. A cure for boredom should probably sit atop Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Boredom is when your person wants to speak to you but the you is not conscious to notice it. In others, you just can't hear yourself for you don't know what it is speaking to you. In the same way, you don't know what to do next as a machine that works on motivation.
That's when you should reach out to Alan Watts, George Carlin,e.t.c. if they could help you.
I think what this author is getting at is similar to the concept of flow.
It's interesting, the article is based on "boredom" but I'm not sure that's the right word. Boredom is a state of "I want to do something but there's nothing to do," and I think what the author is really arguing for is finding time for quiet contemplation, letting your mind wander, personal reflection or, if you will, meditation.
A lot of those books on creativity espouse the benefit of quiet time without distracting yourself with Facebook (or Hacker News). So it's a similar idea here. Allow yourself free self-reflective time in order to be happier and more creative.
This article is basically just a different definition of the word "boredom" than is being used by most people. It's trying to communicate something insightful (that we should be okay with being alone and undistracted with our own thoughts). But I don't think that's what most people mean when they say "boredom", and there's plenty of deeper discussion on this topic in literature about mindfulness.
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.
It's been a long time for me since experiencing boredom per se. There is so very much to do, to think about, to create, to investigate. Boredom is about choosing (or not) to engage thinking/curiosity/activity. So yes, as the author says, the solution to boredom (when perceived as a problem to solve) is to THINK. The problem is too many people have learned to not care, to not be interested, in their circumstances. At this point, should I be actually bored (which would probably require a willful act of situational deprivation imposed on me by others), and which the author addresses, the very state of being bored would & should become a point of intense fascination.
After reading this article I feel more confused about the point it's making than anything else. Of course there are plenty of things written about how to avoid boredom, it's a symptom of not having anything to do.
The article does attempt to touch on how low-cpu tasks are not often mentally enriching tasks, but that point is more about how to get more out of the time that you aren't bored, not what the title suggests.
Boredom hits hard for me, I find it physically uncomfortable, I get an ache in my stomach that grows and grows. For me, boredom is certainly a problem to be solved, by doing things that are stimulating, not by dwelling on it.
[+] [-] zeidrich|10 years ago|reply
Boredom is a problem of a lack of satisfaction. There's various reasons for that but I believe having too much to do, and too much stress is what leads to boredom. People have an amount of attention they can pay to any topic before they need to rest. You can only listen to a song for so long before it stops being pleasant and starts being annoying. You can only hear the same story so many times before it gets boring.
When you are bored, sometimes idleness can even be a fine replacement. If you're bored, and you decide to go and sit in a chair in the sun with a nice cold drink, that's a nice response.
What boredom is, is when you're in class or at work, and you need to keep doing some routine behavior, but you need a break, you need a change, but you can't. Boredom is the feeling that you have to fight in order to keep doing something that your whole reward system of your brain has told you you've had enough of.
Boredom isn't something good. It's something damaging. It's a condition where your mind is tired of a particular action, but you don't have the agency to make a change in your situation to suit that.
[+] [-] SonicSoul|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrevorJ|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wnm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fjolsvith|10 years ago|reply
The form of meditation is detailed in the book "Turning the Mind into an Ally" by Sakyong Mipham and Pema Chodron.
[+] [-] e40|10 years ago|reply
Idleness is not a problem to be solved. It's the last privilege of a free mind.
I have a 14 yr old and I rarely see him idle. I've had long conversations about this, but the lure of electronic devices is just so strong. I'm actively working to change his behavior, though.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] popee|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Htsthbjig|10 years ago|reply
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.
After I sold my first company I went to an African Safari, and it was incredible seeing the same animals I had seen in captivity, because they looked different in the Wild. In particular, they were the same, but moved and behaved completely different. Their spirit is different.
In my opinion, the same happens to humans, only that we could create our own jail ourselves for paying the rent,raising our kids, advancing our career or having a successful business.
[+] [-] flogic|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madaxe_again|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jasim|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] maroonblazer|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rm_-rf_slash|10 years ago|reply
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 not doing something, then what's wrong with you, the modern world seems to say.
We were led to believe technology would eventually alleviate us of our ills. Instead I feel...tired.
[+] [-] cryoshon|10 years ago|reply
Of course, you could argue that existential and philosophical questions are critical to a studied life that is worth living, but meh.
[+] [-] omouse|10 years ago|reply
Even when carving out time at work for what I want to do, it feels tiring.
When our time is owned by someone else or when our creativity is ignored by someone else we can feel boredom and we can feel tired. I thought it would be fun to hack on Python all day and to explore a new JavaScript web framework; instead I've felt tired and just waiting for 5 or 6pm to just leave and then come home and avoid computers completely.
Maybe we're just feeling like burnt out Colin Laney from All Tomorrow's Parties?
[+] [-] cwilson|10 years ago|reply
Now I want to read Neuromancer again. Great book.
[+] [-] manaskarekar|10 years ago|reply
Creativity: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102881562226/creativity
Possibly paywalled WSJ article titled 'The Heady Thrill of Having Nothing to Do': http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240531119034545045764864...
Googling for the article should help.
[+] [-] willhinsa|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] prophet_|10 years ago|reply
That is precisely the same feeling you get when you move to a quieter town: "nothing goes on here while 'everything is going on' somewhere else".
This feeling of 'nothing doing' pushes me to do stuff, be it a hobby, reading, etc. I think the idea is pretty much associated to the 'time is money' or the 'time is flying, we're getting older, take advantage of your time' sort of thoughts.
A nice point made in the article is the fact that many people just can't stand live in peace with their own thoughts. Indeed.
[+] [-] mbrock|10 years ago|reply
An old Chinese hobo named Han-shan used to write strange poems on the cliffs and trees of the mountain where he lived. They're called the cold mountain poems. One of them goes like this:
Han-shan has his critics too:
‘Your poems, there’s nothing in them!’
I think of men of ancient times,
Poor, humble, but not ashamed.
Let him laugh at me and say:
‘It’s all foolishness, your work!’
Let him go on as he is,
All his life lost making money.
[+] [-] Disruptive_Dave|10 years ago|reply
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.”
[+] [-] enraged_camel|10 years ago|reply
Solitary confinement for a few days isn't a problem. What people have an issue with, and is unfortunately a very common practice, is when a prisoner is placed into solitary confinement for weeks at a time, or indefinitely. That is a form of torture.
[+] [-] borkabrak|10 years ago|reply
I'd like to observe that a course of training such as you describe seems outside the scope of the article. Perhaps it does some small good, anyway, by suggesting that acquiring such training oneself, from whatever source, is a good thing to do.
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ebt|10 years ago|reply
I could replace "excites" with "interests", "relaxes" or some other state changing term.
[+] [-] asgard1024|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steego|10 years ago|reply
> If it's boring, then something is done wrong.
I have a problem with the tone of this statement, because I've seen it taken to an extreme and it can be a dangerous idea.
A better way of looking at it is: If something is boring, take it as a sign there might be an opportunity to improve the process, but you have to be acutely aware the problems that automation can introduce.
There's a phenomenon I like to call premature automation. When you work on a problem the boring way long enough, your brain learns the patterns. Premature automation happens when you skip learning about or experiencing the process and you shoot straight to automation. Often what happens is the automation fails to anticipate important edge cases.
> You can always automate the boring parts, and thinking about automation is less boring.
Thinking about automation is less boring because it's not trivial. Automation can be trivial if you're doing simple things like code generation, but often these simple things come at a cost. For example, code generation typically becomes more complex as the need for customizations and exceptions popup.
Libraries can automate things at runtime, but writing good libraries based on timeless/minimally leaky ideas takes time. Leaky libraries built on a poor foundation tends to introduce bugs or complexity. There is value in boring, predictable code with minimal dependencies. It's easier to audit and review with static analysis tools, it's harder to introduce cascading bugs and it.
TLDR: I'm all for automation, but saying "If it's boring, something is done wrong" and "you can always automate the boring parts" sounds like a cocktail of developer shaming for not doing something that's "simple".
[+] [-] Terr_|10 years ago|reply
Note that the inverse is not true: If it's exciting, you could still be doing something wrong. (Watch any junior hire with day-one ideas to "improve" the codebase.)
[+] [-] hudell|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nav_Panel|10 years ago|reply
I was just thinking about it last night: I went for a run, which is a little unusual for me, and I was similarly "time free" as most nights but a lot less bored. I felt my ideas/internal state was more interesting/entertaining, perhaps due to changes in my neurotransmitters caused by exercise.
[+] [-] notahacker|10 years ago|reply
~Terry Pratchett
Of course it's not just the privilege of a free mind, but also the privilege of relative freedom from stress, free time, and to an extent the education that leads you to aspire to more stimulation. A cure for boredom should probably sit atop Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
[+] [-] pjc50|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drethemadrapper|10 years ago|reply
That's when you should reach out to Alan Watts, George Carlin,e.t.c. if they could help you.
[+] [-] justaman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yfj211|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allencoin|10 years ago|reply
It's interesting, the article is based on "boredom" but I'm not sure that's the right word. Boredom is a state of "I want to do something but there's nothing to do," and I think what the author is really arguing for is finding time for quiet contemplation, letting your mind wander, personal reflection or, if you will, meditation.
A lot of those books on creativity espouse the benefit of quiet time without distracting yourself with Facebook (or Hacker News). So it's a similar idea here. Allow yourself free self-reflective time in order to be happier and more creative.
[+] [-] copsarebastards|10 years ago|reply
Louis C.K. also talks about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c
[+] [-] lemevi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] black_knight|10 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
[+] [-] ctdonath|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MarcusP|10 years ago|reply
The article does attempt to touch on how low-cpu tasks are not often mentally enriching tasks, but that point is more about how to get more out of the time that you aren't bored, not what the title suggests.
Boredom hits hard for me, I find it physically uncomfortable, I get an ache in my stomach that grows and grows. For me, boredom is certainly a problem to be solved, by doing things that are stimulating, not by dwelling on it.