Notes on Boredom

Last Friday, I was able to attend a talk by Kevin Hood Gary about his book, Why Boredom Matters. The talk was sponsored by the Alcuin Study Center in Muncie. My wife was interested but unable to attend the presentation, so I took some notes to share with her. A colleague also told me they were unable to attend, so I decided I'd turn my notes into this post, which I can then share with anyone who is interested. Keep in mind that these are extrapolations of my notes from the presentation and should not be taken as a summary of the book. He acknowledged that the talk was designed for a general audience while the book goes into more technical detail. I'm sure any inaccuracies or misrepresentations in this post are my own.

The thesis of the book—as explained by Dr. Hood—is that we avoid boredom and thereby miss out on leisure. There are different ways to react to boredom, but they fall on a spectrum from avoidance to resignation. We can avoid boredom through amusements. I appreciate that, from early in the presentation, Dr. Hood clearly and explicitly distinguished between amusement and leisure, the former being a distraction and the latter being life-giving. This is a classical distinction that is clear to me, although from the discussion, I think that he has sometimes received pushback on these terms.

After acknowledging that the smart phone is a boredom avoidance device, Dr. Hood mentioned that he offers extra credit to his students if they put their phones in a box during class meetings. He said they happily take him up on this. I am not a fan of "extra credit" since it leads to inflation, and I wonder what differences would occur in making this simply for credit instead of extra credit. 

Dr. Hood referenced Wilson's shock test experiment. I think I had heard of this before, but I did not have it ready in memory. It's an amazing study from about ten years ago in which people were put in an empty room to be alone with their thoughts... except they could also opt to give themselves a mild electrical shock. Interested readers should learn about the actual experiment, and although I hesitate to spoil some results here, I will, in the name of having these data later for my own purposes. The study showed that 25% of women and 67% of men would rather give themselves painful shocks than be alone with their thoughts. I echo the response of one of the audience members who wondered how this broke down by age. Dr. Hood drew a comparison between this study and Pascal's quotation, that all human evil comes from the same cause: our inability to sit still in a room.

He also brought up a nice quotation from T. S. Eliot that I don't remembering hearing before. It comes from "Four Quarters" and states that we are "distracted from distraction by distraction." An unsurprisingly poetic interpretation of the theme from Mr. Eliot.

Dr. Hood briefly mentioned how Kierkegaard described human agency as being balanced between the despair of possibility and the despair of necessity. The former describes, for example, infatuation with celebrity, as well as the hesitation one experiences at trying something at which one might fail. During the Q&A, Dr. Hood confirmed that my understanding of this end of the spectrum was correct when I likened it to meeting incoming students who want to become game developers but who then do not do any of the actual hard work required to succeed in the field: imagining oneself as an ideal is easy, but reifying that ideal takes real effort.

Rather than eliminating boredom with amusements, we should instead pursue focal practices. These draw upon the classical notions of leisure, and these were connected to historical understanding of scholé. He illustrated the concept by referencing Groundhog Day, which everyone in the audience had seen. (Both he and I were surprised at this, given the range of ages present.) In the movie, Bill Murray's character eventually replaces his amusements and his despair with focal practices such as good conversations, walking, making music, and reading a good book. Dr. Hood talked a little about these as being done for their own sake and being driven by intrinsic motivation. 

Crucial to understanding focal practices is that they always involve a moral threshold. That is, focal practices are preferable to amusements, but they involve making a conscious decision. His example was that he could go home after work and watch sports highlights or he could go for a walk with his wife. The latter is clearly the more life-giving of the two, but it requires a decision to be made. This and several other parts of the presentation got me thinking about the virtues, both as habits of being and as choosing a medium between extremes.

He contrasted focal practices in an interesting way against videogames, describing how some will claim that videogames are their leisure. He explained that he himself had played a lot of videogames and that he knows that they work by producing a steady stream of delicious, delicious dopamine. He was a little reductive here but not inaccurate. There are hooks here for a scholar to explore the amusement vs. leisure elements of play. (Coincidentally, I was recently in conversation with a colleague about how it's almost certainly better to make videogames as a leisure activity rather than as a job. A "regular" job in software development will pay the bills more reliably.)

It may be worth noting that throughout the presentation, Dr. Hood never insulted amusement and acknowledged that they play a role in a healthy life. It is the absence of leisure that is the serious detriment.

Toward the end of the presentation, he offered some suggestions on what we can do about boredom. The first of these is a "boredom audit," in which one tracks how much time is spent avoiding boredom. This raises awareness. I think that sounds like a great challenge and perhaps even an achievement for my CS222 class. The second of his suggestions was to identify two focal practices that you enjoy and one you would like to enjoy. Again, this seems to me to be about foregrounding thoughts that one might be avoiding. The third was to pursue friendships of excellence, drawing on Aristotle's understanding of the different kinds of friendship. Here, he pulled in one of my favorite quotations from G. K. Chesterton, that "if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." (The line has been used and misused, but The Society of G. K. Chesterton has a helpful article explaining its context and interpretation.)

I enjoyed the presentation, and I look forward to reading the book. The Tower of Unread Books has spawned two or three additional piles throughout my home and office, so it may be a while before I get to it.