Boredom

Is there a way to cultivate curiosity? To start with, you want to avoid situations that suppress it. How much does the work you're currently doing engage your curiosity? If the answer is "not much," maybe you should change something.

The problem is, of course, that you cannot simply decide to care about something. If you do not care about something, your will cannot simply establish a caring relationship to that thing. It is rather a question of being open to possibilities of caring

Curiosity seems to be more individual than fastidiousness about truth or resistance to being told what to think. To the degree people have the latter two, they're usually pretty general, whereas different people can be curious about very different things. So perhaps curiosity is the compass here. Perhaps, if your goal is to discover novel ideas,... See more

In the early 1900s, psychoanalytic theorists speculated that people became bored out of unfulfilled unconscious desire. Midcentury existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, by contrast, saw boredom as a fundamental philosophical crisis, what Schopenhauer once termed "the feeling of the emptiness of life."

When a friend of mine used to grumble because he had to write a

paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to make it

interesting. That's what you need to do: find a question that makes

the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same

world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's

compellingly mysterious.

"Boredom has at its core the desiring of satisfying engagement but not being able to achieve that," Eastwood said. "And attention is the cognitive process whereby we interface with both the external world and our internal thoughts and feelings. So it falls logically that attention must be at the core of the definition."

In a recent series of studies at Cornell University, psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Clayton Critcher asked participants to think about what they'd be doing if they weren't in the lab: Some were asked to think about leisure, others about obligations. Then, all participants completed a jigsaw puzzle. Afterward, they were asked if their minds had... See more

The most important active step you can take to cultivate your curiosity is probably to seek out the topics that engage it. Few adults are equally curious about everything, and it doesn't seem as if you can choose which topics interest you. So it's up to you to

find

them. Or invent them, if necessary.

In an ongoing study, Wilson observes college students who are left alone in a room, with no phone or other distractions, for 15 minutes. "They hate it," he said. "One would think we could spend that time mentally entertaining ourselves. But we can't. We've forgotten how."