2024-06-10
25 分钟Dr Laurie HATES boredom! Since childhood she's found it so painful that she'll do anything to avoid being bored. She'll watch crappy TV. She'll find extra work to do. She'll snack. But boredom is actually an incredibly useful tool to boost our happiness and creativity. With the help of leading boredom experts, Dr Laurie learns how to embrace doing nothing and finds that in the midst of tedium our brains can come up with the most amazing breakthrough ideas. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Pushkin, there's one trait that my mom and I have in common.
Can you hear me now?
Yes, I can see you, too.
Okay, wait a minute.
Let me put the TV off.
So this is for a whole podcast season that we're doing on stuff that I'm bad at.
Okay.
This is a whole episode about boredom because I feel like I'm pretty bad at boredom.
You are.
The 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal was convinced that he knew the single greatest challenge facing our species.
All of humanity's problems, he said, stem from man's inability to sit down quietly in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal was lucky he didn't meet me or my mom, but I feel.
Like I'm bad at boredom because you're bad at boredom.
Yeah.
No, I didn't do well with doing nothing, as a matter of fact, waiting for you.
If I went and made a puzzle, I couldn't just sit and wait for you to call back.
I don't know if it's heredity or just learned behavior, but I got it from you.
Yeah, it's one of the many wonderful things you got from your mother.
Psychologists define boredom as a transient, unpleasant affective state in which an individual feels a pervasive lack of interest, such that it takes pained, conscious effort to attend to an activity.
But you may not need a professional to tell you how dreadful boredom is.