It fascinates and frustrates me that our nature is to always be doing something. Even pointless things. As a species we get bored very quickly and easily. Why is that?
Why can’t we just sit and stare and do nothing until such time as we need to do something (eat, sleep, urinate, answer a phone, do some research, type an email etc…)
unlike asimov’s house robots who stand in alcoves until they are needed. Humans MUST be doing something or looking at something every second of every day.
Imagine a drug that could switch off the feeling of boredom, not replace it with something pleasant, just turn off the impulse to feel bored.
I suppose the critical answer is that if that could be achieved, we’d never do anything.
Sorry I’m… welll… bored.
Sorry you feel that way; I am very, very rarely bored just because of not having something specific to do. I’m more likely to be bored if I’m required to do something tedious, like cleaning or listening to an incompetent lecturer. Or to my mother-in-law. Even then, I usually just let my mind drift to thoughts that *are * interesting.
Did you know that if a place is very, very quiet, and you pay very, very close attention, you can hear your own eyelids blink? Or that you can close your eyes and you can see little patterns floating around? If there are other people around, you can watch them and make up stories about them. (“We said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy. She said ‘Be careful, his bow tie is really a camera…’”)
Also, sometimes we believe that other animals are able to just sit and do nothing, whereas in fact they are doing something very important: observing. Whether prey or predator, watching and studying its environment is one way an animal improves its survival chances.
There is such a drug. It’s called weed. You could stare out the window just watching the wind blow the clouds around and think of nothing but, “mmmmm white” or so I’ve been told.
Weed replaces boredom with something else. I’m talking about a drug that simply switches off boredom. Or rather switches off the impulse to do or think things.
And sleep doesn’t really count, because you can’t really sleep between periods of activity, such as in the fifteen minute gap between two phonecalls (unless yuo’re particularly good at falling asleep)
I am talking about a mode where you are awake, but you’re not doing or thinking anything.
Think carefully about what I’m trying to get across: I mean switch off the activity of thinking, not the ability to think. Why does a human need to be in constant activity, be it thinking or doing? A car doesn’t. A TV doesn’t. Why should we be cursed with filling our seconds with mental or physical activity even when it’s not beneficial to our survival or continuation in our jobs?
I know I’m not explaining it well, but it’s hard to explain anyway. I just mean the ability to switch off.
If we sit still and empty our head of thoughts and be idle in the truest sense of the word, we soon get the overwhelming urge to resume physical or mental activirty.