Boredom

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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

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.