I May Be Boring, But I'm Not Bored

Someone needs to write a history of boredom. Perhaps someone has. Let's do some quick research.

The only thing that comes up on amazon is Boredom: A Lively History, which has only 3.5 stars from 15 reviewers. I'll bet right now that more than one reviewer will call the book "boring."

1. Toohey teaches boredom by causing it.... When the author himself gets bored, he throws in another piece of artwork and spends a page or two talking about what boredom looks like.... It takes the author 181 pages of demonstrating to the reader that he's discovered the thesaurus feature of MS Word.... In plain English, Toohey's genius cure for boredom is to get a hobby.

2. Upon purchasing this book, I found it boring and put it up on Amazon to sell, which it did immediately.

In fairness, a few reviewers weren't bored by the book. I'll bet right now that more than one of them is a bore.

1. The sections on neurology tell us, among other things, that smell sensations travel from the nose to spinal pathways and thence to the insula.

2. Mr. Toohey's location at the University of Calgary, approximately 200 miles north of Glacier National Park, might seem out in the boondocks and a bit boring, but that is not the case. Calgary, Alberta, is a very large metropolitan area some 50 miles east of the Canadian Rockies. The city, the university, and the professor, as the book reveals, are good to know.

Who knew Canada could be so fascinating!

One of the reviewers makes reference to a psychological test called the Boredom Proneness Scale. Now, I only rarely experience boredom, and it is always a consequence of external factors such as airport terminals, continuing education requirements, and other people. Left to my own devices, I'm never bored -- if anything, over-stimulated.

So let's take the survey and see how we do: You are bored 0% of the time. Sounds about right, although, in another sense, I am extremely vulnerable to boredom. Only the unusual structure of my life saves me from being bored out of my skull. The only reason I'm not bored is because I can pretty much do exactly what I want to do when I want to do it.

Which isn't much, at least if viewed from the outside. If the average person were forced to adopt my eccentric (incentric?) lifestyle, he'd probably go nuts. As would I if forced to adopt his.

I don't understand how most people don't die of tedium -- or how it is that they aren't bored by the sorts of activities they engage in, whether it is the movies they watch, the books they read, the music they listen to, the news they consume. For me, enduring any one of these would constitute hell.

The Happy Acres Guy strikes me as a kindred spirit who is never bored. In a recent tweet he mentions that he is spending his Quarantime learning all about the Fourier Transform, and "having so much fun with it that I don't want the quarantine to end." What an odd bird! What is an FT, anyway? Easy: it

decomposes a function into its constituent frequencies. It refers to both the frequency domain representation and the mathematical operation that associates the frequency domain representation to a function of time, which is itself a complex-valued function of frequency, whose magnitude (modulus) represents the amount of that frequency present in the original function, and whose argument is the phase offset of the basic sinusoid in that frequency.

I probably don't have to tell you I that nodded off halfway through that paragraph. As I said, I am easily bored. Unlike Happy Acres Guy, I'm not an odd bird at all. Rather, I've been spending my splendid isolation immersed in the psychological theories of a pedantic medieval philosopher, here, here, and here, and having the time of my life.

Fourier and Aquinas: different blokes for different folks. Science vs. philosophy. Both approaches try to discover the causes of things, the difference being that science deals with proximate causes while philosophy digs down -- or reaches up -- to ultimate causes. (Scientism elevates proximate to ultimate causes, which is why it is so intrinsically stupid.)

Science investigates the world of becoming, metaphysics the world of being as such. One involves temporal truths that may or may not be, the other timeless truths that cannot not be. One looks at the phenomena, the other into the noumenal, i.e., the enduring reality behind shifting appearances.

Science progresses by a transition to new and better knowledge, often discarding the old as false or unsatisfactory. Philosophy progresses by a deeper and richer understanding of principles that are already known (Brennan).

I hope that wasn't too boring. To be continued....