Sunday, September 27, 2009

Boredom   posted by Razib @ 9/27/2009 04:41:00 PM
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Do readers of this weblog ever get bored? It seems that life is short, and there's so much to do and read. I understand that work can quite often be tedious and mind-numbing, but that's not quite what I'm talking about. What I'm referring to is having leisure or free time, and being bored because you don't know what to do with it. If I have leisure I have a stack of books on my "need to read" list. And yet I realize that the average person finds books boring. So I guess my question is this: can the intelligent ever really be bored when given leisure? Consider being left on an island without any books, social interactions, and even diverse topography. You still have a brain and lots of facts which you can peruse, reassemble, and analyze, correct? On the other hand, the average human seems to need a lot of exogenous sensory arousal. Movies, sports, drugs, parties, etc. When I was a younger man and spending time with my less intelligent friends it was critical that we "do something," after all there's only so much interest that conversation about sex and sports can elicit. On the other hand with intelligent friends there were many topics we could fall back on in lieu of doing something. Is my assessment of the average human off?

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