BOREDOM IS A CRIME?

After all, why does staying in one place not bring peace or comfort, but most of the time creates a sense of boredom that urges us to do something?

1. Cause only our bored ancestors survived, so do we

Everyone knows what it’s like to feel bored, but so far there is no scientific consensus on what exactly boredom is [1]. However, like any other human behavior, the feeling of “lack of motivation, bland, loss of interest and desire to be relieved, to get rid of that boredom” can be explained through the lens of evolutionary scientists.

Back in the early days of mankind, when our ancestors were still hunter-gatherers, survival back then depends on social communication, analysis, information accumulation, and especially the ability to recognize whether danger is imminent, or in a normal state (so we won’t be confused between a hungry saber-toothed tiger with a harmless rabbit). To be able to quickly react to potential threats from the outside, the human brain must constantly scan its surroundings. If a snake suddenly appears, the amygdala in the brain responds immediately to warn of danger, or reassure with safety if it is a sparrow [2]. The way the brain labels stimuli from the environment has partly helped humans survive the preliterate period. Bird calls will be rated as “safe”, sugar cane as “sweet” or this mushroom is “edible”, while growling often creates a creepy feeling because it is rated as “dangerous”.

As for danger signals, of course we would immediately run away, but what will we do with safe and pleasant stimuli, will being captivated or lulled by them be beneficial to survival? People can’t just sit around and enjoy the melodious tunes from the birds, or forever immerse themselves in the sweet taste of the wild strawberry bushes. We can enjoy them at the moment, but if you keep on concentrating and are intrigued by these moments, the reaction of mankind against the danger will be slowed. In this way, the human senses aren’t developed to enjoy pleasure to the maximum, but for purposes of self-survival, for the tribe’s existence or broader, the species. Because if they are often in a state of happiness, it will reduce their ability to focus on important elements, become careless and vulnerable to danger. Therefore, man must self-develop the “indifferenceness” with pleasures, automatically cut off the momentum and avoid focusing too much on a few specific stimuli. As a result, bird calls, rustling leaves, or any other stimulus that prompts our attention in the first place, is soon ignored by the brain, sending them back to “background information” and centering our focus to watch out for other new stimuli. Indirectly, this mechanism also makes us bored when eating the same dish all the time, and bored when listening to the same tune over and over. This is the beginning of boredom. Out of boredom, we are driven to look for new things, and any new thing will eventually become old. This desire helps us to always learn, seek, experience and create.

Brain research has shown that humans are attracted to novel stimuli by releasing dopamine, which acts as a form of “reward” that provides a pleasant feeling of relaxation that helps us feel excited with the stimulation [3]. When we experience pleasure and excitement in a novel situation, it is dopamine that triggers these responses. This reward ensures that people are always curious, looking for and keeping an eye on new things, regardless of how dangerous the world is. Curiosity over tens of thousands of years has enabled mankind to discover new tools, create new foods, experiment and adapt widely in new environments. All of this, driven by curiosity — arises after people get bored. And this has been extremely favorable to us historically as a species. So from an evolutionary point of view, boredom is a necessary feeling for survival.

You can briefly think about the use of dangerous stimulants, which most have mechanisms to eliminate boredom and push people into a state of extreme euphoria, to dimly see the effects of not being bored. They put people in a state where they are no longer alert and prone to dangerous situations.

2. From negative to positive

If boredom has been a factor in human survival and evolution to date, then why is boredom understood in the general public as a negative psychological state? Because indeed, in terms of personal experience, boredom is like sadness, which is an uncomfortable feeling. On the other hand, today’s society sometimes associates the feeling of boredom with negativity (feeling worthless), or even a source of crime.

“I guess I was just bored,” said Keith Eugene Mann, explaining why he set off two fires in northwest Carolina that burned 16 acres of forest in 2016 [4]. A Russian steals an army tank and crashes it into a local supermarket [5], or two workers accidentally set off a £1.6 million fire by burning a rat [6] — all of them explained that they were bored. Stories of bored troublemakers have long abounded, and left the world perplexed as to why they did it. What’s behind the boredom that makes people steal military hardwares, burn rats for fun, or even set off a forest fire? To be sure, most people feel bored, and there is growing circumstantial evidence that boredom can lead to destructive or self-destructive behaviors [7].

Psychological classification has three types of boredom, including: (1) when people are not allowed to engage in desirable activities, (2) when people are forced to engage in undesirable activities, and (3) when people simply cannot sustain participation for some other reason [8]. And all three of these types of boredom arise from a perception of inadequacy: the difference between the desired level of stimulation and the status quo. In monotonous activities, we get bored because we want more variety. In familiar situations, we get bored because we crave novelty. And when we engage in mandatory work, we get bored because we want to do something different instead of what we are doing. This state of mental discomfort caused by a lack of stimulation produces a longing for relief, with a range of behavioral, medical, and social consequences.

In a study on distraction using a driving simulator, people who were easily bored drove at higher speeds than other participants, taking longer to react to unexpected dangers and more often going out of lane. As reported by Scientific American [9], people who find themselves easily bored are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, drug addiction & alcohol abuse, gambling addiction, eating disorders, and incontinence, poor social skills, low academic performance, and reduced work productivity. From this deviance, they are more likely to engage in risky behaviors in search of thrills because they cannot find variety and vibrancy in the environment they live in. These efforts are in fact manic defenses that prevent feelings of helplessness and despair from entering the mind, by performing a series of activities that produce the opposite mania, regardless of whether the brain knows exactly how that works or not [10]. In the boredom experiment, which asked candidates to endure 15 minutes of sitting still in a room, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to press their hands on the self-shock switch just to get rid of the boredom from sitting still [11]. This shows that people actually hate the feeling of boredom, more than the feeling of pain. They want to crave something more than feeling nothing. Usually, to avoid feeling bored, we will do many things from reading books, listening to music, watching movies, and surfing the web. Because the world is diverse with people and contexts, some may even find ways to deal with negative boredom such as street racing, arson and robbery.

However, is boredom really all negative? Let’s look at another kind of feeling that has also been important to human evolution: pain. Although we fear pain, it is this fear that makes us sensitive to reliable signals that the body has reached its threshold of tolerance to external forces or signs of internal instability, and motivates people to change their behavior to take defensive measures. It helps the brain to label “danger,” warning us to avoid re-infringing on recognized real-life hazards. If there is no feeling of pain, a person can be fine with putting their hand in the fire for as long as they like, even until it is no longer a hand.

Now imagine a life without boredom, which at first glance seems like a desirable ideal scenario. We can experience any life situation no matter how boring and monotonous they may be, a food that will always be delicious, a piece of music that never gets boring, and the feeling of waiting at the airport suddenly not that bad anymore. Apart from the fact that this is basically impossible, since it’s impossible for the body to continuously stimulate excitement; We also know that we feel happy and euphoric because we can compare it to feeling bored, restless, or at least “normal”. Therefore, if the “happily ever after” occurs in such a way that the body continuously secretes happiness stimulants, it will be very short-lived because in order to maintain this state continuously, it is necessary for the secretion to continuously escalate until the body can’t take it anymore. In short, this assumption is absurd, and any attempt to make it absurd is also… absurd.

The most important thing, however, is that the world without boredom is certainly not the world we live in, which could potentially be a lot worse. Boredom itself stems from unfulfilled desires, and to alleviate that feeling, we need to satisfy those desires. In other words, to get rid of boredom, people need to find activities that match their desires. If pain is said to be the mechanism responsible for transmitting signals related to the physical state of the body, then feeling boredom would be like an alarm system for the presence of undesirable situations. This system will create uncomfortable restlessness, prompting people to pursue other, more suitable goals. If you never get bored, then the world will never change.

Marcel Proust wrote in his “Remembrance of Things Past” that, “Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning”, and suggested that boredom is an emotional storm in the face of unflinching creativity. Writers and composers are probably the people who often feel bored the most, and they consider this a great motivating feeling. The word “boredom” itself is still quite new and only appeared in the English language in 1766. It then became popular when it was introduced by Charles Dickens in the novel Bleak House published in 1853 (“boredom” previously appeared in The Albion in 1829).[12] The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of literature — tells the verse the story of King Uruk, who finds himself “suppressed by idleness.” The state of boredom is the premise for the entire epic, it spurs Uruk to embark on a quest to discover the meaning of life, and to leave behind a legacy worthy of his name. Boredom — seen by writers as not being able to properly use one’s own cognitive abilities — is like “the shriek of unused capacities” that Saul Bellow wrote in “Adventures of Augie March”, or “the desire for desires” like Tolstoy referred to.

It can be said that boredom has played an important role in many great breakthroughs in art and science. New opportunities, careers, and achievements often begin with the thought, “I’m bored.” There is an anecdote about 23-years-old Isaac Newton making important inventions when the Great Plague struck London. The Cambridge University where he attended sent the students home, and Newton returned to Woolsthorpe Manor. There he spent a year that would later become known as “annus mirabilis — Newton’s miracle year” when he developed his theories about optics [14]. And while the story of Newton sitting under a tree discovering gravity is largely a fabrication, in Woolsthorpe there is indeed an apple tree just outside Newton’s window. Returning to Cambridge in 1667 and bringing his discoveries, within six months Newton became a scholar, and attained the rank of professor only two years later. The story itself is referred to as how Newton used his boring isolation time to create groundbreaking scientific achievements. The explanation for boredom being associated with creativity can be seen as individuals had situational acceptance, not resistance or rejection, but assumed that this is a natural human emotion. They no longer feel like they are on a boring long train that they want to jump out. At this point, boredom is still boring, but the time in an emotional sense will lengthen when people are in a bored state, and become an opportunity for the mind to wander, immersed in fundamental problems and stimulate new perspectives. Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky in his speech “In Praise of Boredom” argued that this feeling “represents a time of purity, unadulterated in repeating its splendor, excess and monotony”.[16] Brodsky considers boredom a valuable experience, and encourages everyone to take advantage of it.

3. If you can’t beat ’em, join ‘em

In a state of boredom, the world is presented in a manner that is uninteresting, distant, and almost unconquerable. The world of boredom is not a world that matches our wants and desires. The fatigue experienced when depressed, combined with the perception of slower passage of time further worsens the mood. In this state, we are both stuck in a state of lingering dissatisfaction and the desire to do something to get rid of the boredom. When our minds wander, alternate goals or situations suddenly become clear and prominent. So boredom can pull a person into a vicious cycle of negative emotions, and at the same time can create motivations to push us out of that quagmire. Boredom pushes us to do something else, without necessarily telling us what to do.

Now it seems the importance and value of boredom has begun to become clearer. First of all, boredom is informative: it helps people see something in the relationship between themselves and the outside world. While bored, the situation will reveal that we are not satisfied, thereby indirectly informing us that we should change to reach a new threshold of stimulation — thereby leading to more satisfaction. And then, the negative experience of boredom acts as an impetus to pursue other goals that seem more stimulating, interesting, and challenging. It shows that the situation we are in at the moment is meaningless or unimportant, and helps push us to the point of awareness to strive for a different situation. Given these two functions, boredom should be understood in terms of a system that helps monitor and regulate our behavior. It notifies when one thing is no longer relevant, and pushes people to pursue another goal, leading to many unexpected creations. Perhaps it is also paradoxical that boredom now is what protects us from the endless emotional trap as well as the long-term boredom. But above all, boredom is a beneficial factor for evolution that humans have inherited and retained until now. Therefore, everything exists for a reason, even if it is difficult to determine whether the impact is positive or negative.

Accepting boredom as a natural emotion, is also when we know that something is wrong at this moment in some aspect of our life. Ideally, one should avoid translating it into an absolute message that it is necessary to run away from it immediately, using drugs or any other extreme options. But also realize that, when boredom occurs too often, change should be made. I think I can offer some personal safety advice, that it’s true that sometimes we should admit that something is wrong for the time being, but this recognition must be accompanied by a commitment to change in the future. There’s a huge difference between someone who knows he’s temporarily accepting that something is wrong, and someone who compromises with it.

You don’t have to immediately jump off the train, but stopping at the next station is necessary if your mind is telling you over and over that it craves it.

___________

References:

[1] “The phenomenon of boredom,” Qualitative Research in Psychology, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.tandfonline.com/.../10.../1478088706qrp066oa...&. [Accessed: 19-Aug-2021]

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‌[3] A. Pietrangelo, “How Does Dopamine Affect the Body?,” Healthline, 05-Nov-2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.healthline.com/health/dopamine-effects.... [Accessed: 19-Aug-2021]

‌[4] “Franklin, N.C. Man Sentenced To Five Years For Setting Forest Fires,” Justice.gov, 06-Jul-2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.justice.gov/.../franklin-nc-man-sentenced.... [Accessed: 19-Aug-2021]

‌[5] “‘Bored’ Russian man crashes armoured vehicle into shop,” BBC News, 10-Jan-2018 [Online]. Available: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-42634753. [Accessed: 19-Aug-2021]

[6] “Bored workers start shop fire by cremating a mouse,” The Independent, 20-May-2019 [Online]. Available: https://www.independent.co.uk/.../shop-fire-mouse-cremate.... [Accessed: 19-Aug-2021]

‌[7] L. Yan, Y. Gan, X. Ding, J. Wu, and H. Duan, “The relationship between perceived stress and emotional distress during the COVID-19 outbreak: Effects of boredom proneness and coping style,” Journal of Anxiety Disorders, vol. 77, p. 102328, Jan. 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.janxdis.2020.102328. [Online]. Available: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7598556/. [Accessed: 19-Aug-2021]

‌[8] J. A. Cheyne, J. S. A. Carriere, and D. Smilek, “Absent-mindedness: Lapses of conscious awareness and everyday cognitive failures,” Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 578–592, Sep. 2006, doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2005.11.009. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/.../abs/pii/S1053810005001571. [Accessed: 19-Aug-2021]

‌[9] A. Gosline, “Bored to Death: Chronically Bored People Exhibit Higher Risk-Taking Behavior,” Scientific American, 26-Feb-2007. [Online]. Available: https://www.scientificamerican.com/.../the-science-of.../. [Accessed: 19-Aug-2021]

‌[10] D. W. Winnicott, L. Caldwell, and Helen Taylor Robinson, The collected works of D.W. Winnicott. Volume 1, 1911–1938. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016 [Online]. Available: https://www.oxfordclinicalpsych.com/.../med-9780190271336.... [Accessed: 19-Aug-2021]

‌[11] People would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts, “People would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts,” Science | AAAS, 03-Jul-2014. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencemag.org/.../people-would-rather-be.... [Accessed: 19-Aug-2021]

‌[12] Dictionary.com, “You Didn’t Invent That: Charles Dickens and Boredom,” Dictionary.com, 15-Dec-2015. [Online]. Available: https://www.dictionary.com/e/charles-dickens-boredom/. [Accessed: 19-Aug-2021]

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‌[15] G. Brockell, “During a pandemic, Isaac Newton had to work from home, too. He used the time wisely.,” Washington Post, 12-Mar-2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../during-pandemic-isaac.../. [Accessed: 19-Aug-2021]

[16] J. Brodsky, “‘Praise boredom’ Joseph Brodsky — read the full text,” Joseph Brodsky, 30-Mar-2017. [Online]. Available: https://brodskiy.su/proza/pohvala-skuke/?lang=en. [Accessed: 19-Aug-2021]