Human Thoughts
Boredom: Distraction vs Slow Joy
Hi there,
Each week, the Human Thoughts newsletter brings you 3 links to articles/videos (some mine, some from others) on happiness and social progress. If you’re currently distracting yourself from work by reading this, well you’re in luck! This week is all about boredom and happiness. I hope it manages to keep your attention…
We begin with this short review of Bertrand Russell’s thoughts on “Boredom and Excitement” (courtesy of the wonderful Brain Pickings newsletter). Russell distinguishes between two kinds of boredom: one that motivates you to change something about your life, and the other that you need to learn how to live with.
Boredom can be informative. It can tell you something about yourself and your life. That you’re not currently engaged as much as you could be. That you’re uninterested, under-challenged, under-fulfilled. Boredom can motivate you to change your situation, even if change is scary. It can push you out of your familiar-yet-dull existence to a place you’d rather be. It says: “don’t just sit there, do something!”
However, Russell warned people to not get this kind of boredom confused with the boredom that comes from momentarily being under-stimulated or unexcited. We can’t be stimulated all the time. Russell argued that we need an amount of monotony and boredom in our lives. He claimed that, “a person accustomed to too much excitement is like a person with a morbid craving for pepper, who comes last to be unable even to taste a quantity of pepper which would cause anyone else to choke.” Sometimes you do need to just sit there and better understand where you’re at. Russell concludes that the “power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life”.
Or, at least, that’s what Bertrand Russell thought in the 1930s! We now live in a very very different world. We have the internet and smart phones at our fingertips. Maybe we can get away with being stimulated or excited most of the time? Maybe we can continuously cram our hours and minutes with media content and social interactions that previous generations could never have dreamed of? Why would you choose an amount of monotony and boredom over a constantly stimulated existence?
This video, by Theo Garcia and Zoe Almon Job, nicely illustrates these thoughts, and what happens if you take them to their natural conclusion. I wont say too much about it - it’s much more fun to watch. It even briefly mentions this study, which showed that most people would rather endure electric shocks than sit alone with their thoughts.
Video/Poem: The Peace of Wild Things
What I like about Russell’s reflections, in my own life, is the opportunity that eduring boredom creates for what I call moments of slow joy. When I let myself do nothing for a while, after a predictable period of feeling anxious over my lack of productivity, things start to slow down. A new perspective on life slowly emerges, and I soon forget about everything I was doing before. A sense of calm seems to diffuse out of the air. Ordinary things begin to pulsate with their own vitality. I too feel more alive.
The times when this has happened to me most have been when I was surrounded by nature - a feeling that Wendell Berry captures brilliantly in his poem, “The Peace of Wild Things”. It’s only by losing himself in the slow cycles and rhythms of the natural world that Berry could “come into the presence of still water” and feel the “day-blind stars waiting with their light”. As Bertrand Russell concurred: “A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.”
I hope you’ve enjoyed these 3 brief nuggets of wisdom to get you through your day. And well done on getting this far :-) See you next week!