Boredom for a subject does not reflect a defect in the subject, but in our understanding of it. In the ears of the ignorant, a foreign language is a monotonous barrage of meaningless intonations, but knowledge of its grammar transforms sound into speech, capable of conveying Shakespeare's or Plato's meaning. The surface of Mars seems to me a tiresome landscape of red dirt, but to an astrophysicist who speaks the obscure language of rocks, it is a crossword puzzle written by the Big Bang. We protest to the passionate not to bore us with details, not realizing that lack of details is precisely what bores us, for details reveal the richness and inner coherence that are invisible from a distance, as a microscope reveals teeming life in a drop of muddy pond water.
Paging through an accounting textbook, walking past a wig shop, or listening to a lecture on early American basket-making, I never say "that is uninteresting" but rather "I am uninterested", for it is always more reasonable to assume that I fail to see what is there than that devotees see what is not there. I love to hear of people devoting their lives to pursuits that sound dull to me, for I know that their enthusiasm is right and my boredom is wrong, and I am happy for the rebuke. I convert my specific boredoms into general fascination with passion's possibilities, reflecting that, under altered alignments of choice and chance, I might have given my days to different causes. There is more worth loving than we have strength to love.
A foolish trope of modernity is that experience leads to disenchantment and ennui. Boredom with life does not result from exhausting life's riches, but from skimming them. Nothing is boring, except people who are bored.
Mr. Stanley’s Aphorisms and Paradoxes are outstanding examples of the long-form aphorism...
inevitably studded with discrete individual aphorisms that could easily stand on their own.
"Boredom is an admission of stupidity."
anon
This validates one of my core beliefs - anything can be interesting if you pay attention to it. I developed a genuine appreciation for plants and flowers from an ex - because he was interested in them, and I learned to be.
The more you pay attention, the more you see.
Lovely. I just started riding horses and will compete in my first dressage show next month. Before I learned the little I now know, dressage was achingly boring, a horse and rider following a set, boring circuit. The rider does very little, I thought.
My legs and arms can tell you how wrong I was! I find it thrilling to practice--it requires every ounce of my concentration--and I love to watch it.
This has been true of everything I've learned--painting, piano, raising children. And so now, when my kids tell me they are bored, I tell them that "only boring people are bored." And for them, sometimes it takes that quiet place where boredom starts to push them to stop and look at the details.
"Boredom, inconstancy, anxiety"
Pascal
Very nicely written. And oh so true.
The phrase 'this is boring' is a subjective statement of 'I find this boring'. Thus, saying 'this is uninteresting' is a subjective statement of 'I am uninterested'. And as such, you wasted everyone's time writing this.
You may want to google "boredom is a smell," which will lead you to a truism of sorts among programmer types: If something is boring, that means you understand it well enough to automate it. In the process, a boring problem becomes an interesting automation problem. I would generalize that a bit further to say that boring things can be either automated or delegated, so that in an ideal workplace, everyone is woking to the limit of his abilities, productivity is maximized, and no one is bored on the job. The usual obstacles to that are organizational (turf wars, union rules, petty bureaucrats, etc.).
That of course, assumes that everyone is ambitious enough to work his to the best of his abilities. I suspect though, that lack of such ambition is often the result of the conditioning of having worked in a bad organization. Hence the career advice: The quality of the people you work with is paramount.
Marcus Aurelius wrote that everything is beautiful when viewed in detail. Still true, after all these years.
Over 50 yrs ago my Grandma used to tell me, "if you're bored it must be because you are boring!" She instilled in me a fascination for the many mini intersecting worlds all around me, the ones I know nothing about that command the attention of others for 40-80 hrs or more a week! There are experts devoting their lives to the most minute detail of subjects I know not one thing about!!!!! How wonderful is that. Damn poor day you don't learn something new.
Hmm.. Wassup AtheistConservative?
A little 'bored' were we? hehe.
Whatever anything actually is, we'll never know.
The picture we build of it based on electromagnetic energy and pressures exists only in our transient minds. So there!
> Everything is Interesting
You've obviously never been forced to sit through The English Patient.
> I never say "that is uninteresting" but rather "I am uninterested"...
Semantics. If you say the former, intelligent people understand that you are stating your opinion.
> I love to hear of people devoting their lives to pursuits that sound dull to me, for I know that their enthusiasm is right and my boredom is wrong, and I am happy for the rebuke.
This is a completely subjective statement. You have not demonstrated that your boredom is "wrong", you have merely asserted it.
When my kids used to whine that they were bored, I would squeal, "Oh, goody!!", grab a pencil and paper, and make a LONG list of chores to be done.
Later in life, they thanked me and pitied their friends for their inability to care for themselves or their property.