Although I’m not around kids a lot, it seems to me that they all seem to use terms like, “I’m bored” or “this is really boring” a lot. We live in such a plugged in world that if someone, especially a younger someone, isn’t “on-line” they’re bored.
As far as I know, there is no universally accepted definition of boredom. It seems to be a mental state that people find unpleasant — a lack of stimulation that causes them to seek relief.
Today if a child says they’re bored, parents usually sit them in front of the TV or hand them an iPad or some other electronic device. While this may silence the “I’m bored” for a while, I don’t think it has much of a chance to make the child more creative or motivated to interact with the real world. When we’re fortunate enough to keep our grandchildren we almost never turn on the TV and we encourage them to interact with us or others and entertain themselves by some non-electronic activity.
I don’t want this to sound like a sermon, but kids need the freedom to spend some time just thinking. Boredom can be a positive thing — sometimes it forces one to become more creative and motivated… it might actually be good for you.
But anyhow, some things are boring — there’s no getting around that… watching paint dry, waiting for your iPhone to recharge, reading all 72,546 pages of the US Federal Tax Law, watching grass grow, the Kardashians….
And of course everybody knows at least one, maybe more if you’re unlucky — boring person.
Boring people aren’t harmful, but they are rarely very good company in any circumstance or situation. What makes a person boring? I guess that depends on the “borer” and/or the “boree” but generally boring people usually don’t want to try anything new, tell the same stories over and over and are usually self-centered…. Like everything in this blog, the following is only my opinion.
Boring people tend to not expand their personal horizons. They are stuck in their own personal physical boundaries. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that they would connect more with different people and experiences (and maybe ever improve the quality of their lives) by expanding their horizons.
Boring people usually don’t have much of a sense of humor. I don’t know why, but I suspect it may be because they don’t allow themselves to engage in situations where they might experience something fun. It’s pretty much the same old routine, the same old stuff day in and day out.
Boring people rarely see things from someone else’s point of view. Their world begins and ends at their door…
I’ve noticed that boring people never have a real opinion on anything. The events of the world pass them by completely — they appear to have no real passions or loves in their lives.
Boring people complain about their lives. Usually they never, ever stop complaining about their lives and how everything always goes wrong for them. They don’t consider how things might be for other people and how lucky they might actually be — especially compared to others…
Ok, enough of that — even I’m bored talking about being bored and boring people.
Between boring things and boring people, boring things win hands down — boring people are much worse. Almost no thing has to be boring… there really are no uninteresting things, only uninteresting people.
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