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posted by martyb on Friday November 03 2017, @04:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the brought-to-you-by-Elon-Musk's-Boring-Company dept.

Is boredom necessary to our survival?

Every emotion has a purpose—an evolutionary benefit," says Sandi Mann, a psychologist and the author of The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good. "I wanted to know why we have this emotion of boredom, which seems like such a negative, pointless emotion."

That's how Mann got started in her specialty: boredom. While researching emotions in the workplace in the 1990s, she discovered the second most commonly suppressed emotion after anger was—you guessed it—boredom. "It gets such bad press," she said. "Almost everything seems to be blamed on boredom."

As Mann dived into the topic of boredom, she found that it was actually "very interesting." It's certainly not pointless. Wijnand van Tilburg from the University of Southampton explained the important evolutionary function of that uneasy, awful feeling this way: "Boredom makes people keen to engage in activities that they find more meaningful than those at hand."

"Imagine a world where we didn't get bored," Mann said. "We'd be perpetually excited by everything—raindrops falling, the cornflakes at breakfast time." Once past boredom's evolutionary purpose, Mann became curious about whether there might be benefits beyond its contribution to survival. "Instinctively," she said, "I felt that we all need a little boredom in our lives."

Precede creative tasks with the most intensely boring activities you can devise if you want to have the best ideas.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Mike on Friday November 03 2017, @05:23PM

    by Mike (823) on Friday November 03 2017, @05:23PM (#591754)

    "Imagine a world where we didn't get bored," Mann said. "We'd be perpetually excited by everything—raindrops falling, the cornflakes at breakfast time."

    She says this like it's a bad thing. It doesn't sound all that bad to me*.

    *Raindrops are still exciting, I'm not sure cornflakes ever were.

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