Creative Boredom

A few days ago I was listening to a CBC Ideas program about boredom. It is called The Tedium is the Message and can be found at http://www.cbc.ca/radio/popup/audio/listen.html?autoPlay=true&clipIds=&mediaIds=815275075787&contentarea=radio&subsection1=radio1&subsection2=currentaffairs&subsection3=ideas&contenttype=audio&title=2016/11/22/1.3862159-the-tedium-is-the-message&contentid=1.3862159

The program is a study of boredom, its origins and its results. Apparently, boredom can lead to creativity. Makes sense to me. Boredom appears also to sometimes arise when there are distractions….for example, if you are reading a book when there is a low level sound playing (maybe a television), you may find you can read, but with effort because it is hard to concentrate. In that circumstance you may attribute the reading difficulty to the book being boring. This has been shown experimentally.

I have long viewed boredom as a rejecting type emotion --- an emotion that, when we feel it, says we are not content with our here-and-now….we reject our current experience. I have treated it as something which requires an antidote, and sometimes that has been deliberate diversions….perhaps thinking of something or doing something. I can now see that it isn’t necessarily something to be mitigated.

Another aspect of boredom to which my attention was drawn was that it has apparently not always being recognized in history. It appears to be a relatively modern experience, and one which was known within the wealthy class of ancient Rome. This is evidenced from word studies.