184 posts 12/11/2019 8:58 pm
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Boredom...an article....and musings
Boredom is more complex than you imagined – plus its bad for your health
by Sheila McClear
November 22, 2019
“The cure for boredom is curiosity,” said writer and great wit Dorothy Parker.
“There is no cure for curiosity.”
Being bored seems to be a hopelessly modern condition. But it likely isn’t.
“It is such a universal, human experience,” said Jacqueline Gottlieb, a neuroscientist at Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute who recently convened a group of leading scholars in the field for a discussion.
“Yet, there is a lack of knowledge about boredom. Until recently, scientists paid it little attention.”
The gathered researchers looked at how boredom affects decision-making, relationships, and behavior. They came to the conclusion that ennui did more harm than it did good for the soul, looking at past research to come to the following points:
Boredom is common. The majority, 63%, of American adults experienced boredom at least once every 10 days.
Whether you’re bored depends on your demographics. One study from Carnegie Mellon found that boredom is even more common in men, youth, those who haven’t married, and those with lower incomes.
Boredom depends on what your problems are. It’s associated with those who are prone to depression, anxiety, anger, poor academics, bad work performance, and loneliness and isolation.
Many people would choose pain over being bored. During the research, a team of psychologists at the University of Virginia discovered that 2/3 of men and 1/4 of women would rather shock themselves with electricity rather than be left to sit in an empty room alone for 15 minutes.
Feeling the blahs exists on a continuum. There’s “transient” boredom, which is temporary, and chronic boredom, which lasts an extended period of time. Chronic boredom is dangerous, linked with impulsivity and risky behavior, like reckless driving, gambling, drug and alcohol use, and other self-destructive behaviors. In fact, boredom is a top reason for addicts to relapse on their drug of choice.
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One group that doesn’t get as bored, according to a study: the religious. Everyone from agnostics, atheists, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and the non-religious people participated in a mundane task.
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comment from Ryszard:
And, I may add one more group, those I would label, "The True Believers". Everyone know someone who is one of "those people".
I smile here coyly I admit, but this...
scheme-fiction-self deception
for those who choose to fall into this category have an "answer" from their lens for most anything that befalls them...it could be victimhood from the past-a lens over a past century to the exception of all previous centuries, however perverse and pleasurable that identity is to some, I assume-like clothes one wears, it marks "the superior individual"....I believe this perception they possess unto themselves differentiates them....and provides the comfort of answers (in the context of their world view) that I claim do not exist....in particular to ameliorate our human condition.
Meaning is as personal as identity to me. I quietly walk away or exempt myself from such folly of such "collective pursuits" to define or determine my fate instead I choose to suffer my own personal painful "ignorance" than accept the succor or emollients (sugar) of "answers from others to impossible questions" of our existence.
I love my very personal forms of tedium ... in measured amounts...like meditation it allows me to reflect on my existence, and with reverence I express gratitude for the solace it brings my soul. To know with wonder that I may not completely be ever at ease with my own direction towards life---it is in itself The Reward. There is admittedly unease-yet I never forget I am alive and free.
Ryszard
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887 posts 12/22/2019 11:30 am |
"1/4 of women would rather shock themselves with electricity rather than be left to sit in an empty room alone for 15 minutes." I am so happy to sit in an empty room alone for more than 15 minutes providing I haven't drink a lot before I enter that room. Just leave me alone please. 
"The True Believers" sounds like Buddha.
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sparrowhawk9 replies on 12/22/2019 1:04 pm:
I smile a little when I threw the term True Believer out there...and thankfully I got at least one response....as if no one has encountered the True Believer.
I do not have the luxury to be that person...I am FALLIBLE, all I can hope for redemption for those unkind acts that I trespassed against others...and ask for forgiveness. As time passes, I am reminded of words that should have passed between my parents and myself, and others close to me.
Trying not to be a reprobate and/or a "mean girl" with bad intentions (cruel) is my goal and to look positively upon the landscape of human emotions where dramas play out repeatedly. Whatever gets a person through the day and night and gives them solace is remarkable...as an antidote to make life pass effortlessly as sand through the hourglass of time.
And, what I had in mind for the True Believer is below....
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Summary of Eric Hoffer’s, The True Believer
September 4, 2017Book Reviews - Politics, Politics - Tyranny
Eric Hoffer in 1967, in the Oval Office, visiting President Lyndon Baines JohnsonEric Hoffer in 1967, in the Oval Office, visiting President Lyndon Baines Johnson
“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents … Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.” ~ Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
Eric Hoffer (1898 – 1983) was an American moral and social philosopher who worked for more than twenty years as longshoremen in San Francisco. The author of ten books, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983. His first book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951), is a work in social psychology which discusses the psychological causes of fanaticism. It is widely considered a classic.
Overview
The first lines of Hoffer’s book clearly state its purpose:
This book deals with some peculiarities common to all mass movements, be they religious movements, social revolutions or nationalist movements. It does not maintain that all movements are identical, but that they share certain essential characteristics which give them a family likeness.
All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and single-hearted allegiance …
The assumption that mass movements have many traits in common does not imply that all movements are equally beneficent or poisonous. The book passes no judgments, and expresses no preferences. It merely tries to explain… (pp. xi-xiii)
Part 1 – The Appeal of Mass Movements
Hoffer says that mass movements begin when discontented, frustrated, powerless people lose faith in existing institutions and demand change. Feeling hopeless, such people participate in movements that allow them to become part of a larger collective. They become true believers in a mass movement that “appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.” (p. 12)
Put another way, Hoffer says: “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the loss of faith in ourselves.” (p. 14) Leaders inspire these movements, but the seeds of mass movements must already exist for the leaders to be successful. And while mass movements typically blend nationalist, political and religious ideas, they all compete for angry and/or marginalized people.
Part 2 – The Potential Converts
The destitute are not usually converts to mass movements; they are too busy trying to survive to become engaged. But what Hoffer calls the “new poor,” those who previously had wealth or status but who believe they have now lost it, are potential converts. Such people are resentful and blame others for their problems.
Mass movements also attract the partially assimilated—those who feel alienated from mainstream culture. Others include misfits, outcasts, adolescents, and sinners, as well as the ambitious, selfish, impotent and bored. What all converts all share is the feeling that their lives are meaningless and worthless.
A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness, and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves—and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole. (p. 41)
Hoffer emphasizes that creative people—those who experience creative flow—aren’t usually attracted to mass movements. Creativity provides inner joy which both acts as an antidote to the frustrations with external hardships. Creativity also relieves boredom, a major cause of mass movements:
There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and
support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed. To a deliberate fomenter of mass upheavals, the report that people are bored still should be at least as encouraging as that they are suffering from intolerable economic or political abuses. (pp. 51-52)
Part 3 – United Action and Self-Sacrifice
Mass movements demand of their followers a “total surrender of a distinct self.” (p. 117) Thus a follower identifies as “a member of a certain tribe or family.” (p. 62) Furthermore, mass movements denigrate and “loathe the present.” (p. 74) By regarding the modern world as worthless, the movement inspires a battle against it.
What surprises one, when listening to the frustrated as the decry the present and all its works, is the enormous joy they derive from doing so. Such delight cannot come from the mere venting of a grievance. There must be something more—and there is. By expiating upon the incurable baseness and vileness of the times, the frustrated soften their feeling of failure and isolation … (p. 75)
Mass movements also promote faith over reason and serve as “fact-proof screens between the faithful and the realities of the world.” (p. 79)
The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude … presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth. If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine … simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. (pp. 80-81).
So believers ignore truths that contradict their fervent beliefs, but this hides the fact that,
The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual sources … but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace. The passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the sources of all virtue and strength … He sacrifices his life to prove his worth … The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to reason or his moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause. (p. 85).
Thus the doctrines of the mass movement must not be questioned—they are regarded with certitude—and they are spread through “persuasion, coercion, and proselytization.” Persuasion works best on those already sympathetic to the doctrines, but it must be vague enough to allow “the frustrated to … hear the echo of their own musings in … impassioned double talk.” (p. 106) Hoffer quotes Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels: “a sharp sword must always stand behind propaganda if it is to be really effective.” (p. 106) The urge to proselytize comes not from a deeply held belief in the truth of doctrine but from an urge of the fanatic to “strengthen his own faith by converting others.” (p. 110)
Moreover, mass movements need an object of hate which unifies believers, and “the ideal devil is a foreigner.” (p. 93) Mass movements need a devil. But in reality, the “hatred of a true believer is actually a disguised self-loathing …” and “the fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure.” (p. 85) Through their fanatical action and personal sacrifice, the fanatic tries to give their life meaning.
Part 4 – Beginning and End
Hoffer states that three personality types typically lead mass movements: “men of words”, “fanatics”, and “practical men of action.” Men of words try to “discredit the prevailing creeds” and creates a “hunger for faith” which is then fed by “doctrines and slogans of the new faith.” (p. 140) (In the USA think of the late William F. Buckley.) Slowly followers emerge.
Then fanatics take over. (In the USA think of the Koch brothers, Murdoch, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity, Alex Jones, etc.) Fanatics don’t find solace in literature, philosophy or art. Instead, they are characterized by viciousness, the urge to destroy, and the perpetual struggle for power. But after mass movements transform the social order, the insecurity of their followers is not ameliorated. At this point, the “practical men of action” take over and try to lead the new order by further controlling their followers. (Think Steve Bannon, Mitch McConnell, Steve Miller, etc.)
In the end mass movements that succeed often bring about a social order worse than the previous one. (This was one of Will Durant’s findings in The Lessons of History.) As Hoffer puts it near the end of his work: “All mass movements … irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred, and intolerance.” (p. 141)
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Quotes from Hoffer, Eric (2002). The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. ISBN 978-0-060-50591-2. |
sparrowhawk9 replies on 12/22/2019 8:59 pm:
And, Thanks for the comments----Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you! |
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