Boredom

Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently

trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having

fun. That's why he's so good.

To the extent that we can give a brief answer to the question of where novel ideas come from, it's curiosity. That's what people are usually feeling before having them.

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 w... 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."

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

Meaninglessness is boring. Boredom can be described as a meaning withdrawal, in analogy with drug withdrawal, as a discomfort that tells us that our need for meaning is not being met.

It's the same with people who

do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work,

and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks

to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over,

and discipline is no longer necessary.

The word "aptitude" is misleading,

because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of

aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests

are often acquired tastes.

"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."