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> necessity is to invention as boredom is to creativity. Well said. We have a no B-word rule in our house. "Boredom" is a cultural malaise. Neither my partne

> necessity is to invention as boredom is to creativity. Well said. We have a no B-word rule in our house. "Boredom" is a cultural malaise. Neither my partner nor I ever use the word. Until age 5 my kid never had the concept of "being bored". But after starting school she started coming home, huffing and shrugging like a teenager and saying "that's boring!". She gets sent to her room to "find something interesting to think about", and 30 seconds later she's happily playing a dolls game or shooting her bow and arrows at the wardrobe. To take a Wittgensteinian approach - words "stand in" as templates for as yet unformed concepts - young children use words with no understanding of their adult meaning, so they'll say, "that's gay", or "that's spazzy", (or whatever word they picked up in the playground) which means something like "I want be in control, and so I reject whatever it is you think I want". In 2022 "boring" is the worst accusation that can be levelled against anything. It's adults who create and propagate the conceit of "boredom". How could anybody actually be bored in this world, with all the marvels and freedom we have?! What adults mean is something different; "Don't leave me alone with myself, exposed to the existential chasm in my soul, and my abject learned helplessness".

CRConrad 5y ago
> What adults mean is something different; "Don't leave me alone with myself, exposed to the existential chasm in my soul, and my abject learned helplessness". I've come to accept and adopt my late father's idea about the purpose of portable music players, which he formulated shortly after the Sony Walkman had got competition from other brands of cassette players, and which now, after an (in retrospect rather short) interlude of dedicated MP3 players, applies to the music player apps in smartphones: That's why everybody[1] nowadays walks around constantly marinating their brains in a drizzle of background music[2]: To drown out their own thoughts -- or to cover the lack thereof. ___ [1]: i.e. more or less "everybody", at the time of writing, under the age of... Idunno, ~50? [2]: Or muzak, as Dad may have put it.

CRConrad 5y ago

> What adults mean is something different; "Don't leave me alone with myself, exposed to the existential chasm in my soul, and my abject learned helplessness". I've come to accept and adopt my late father's idea about the purpose of portable music players, which he formulated shortly after the Sony Walkman had got competition from other brands of cassette players, and which now, after an (in retrospect rather short) interlude of dedicated MP3 players, applies to the music player apps in smartphones: That's why everybody[1] nowadays walks around constantly marinating their brains in a drizzle of background music[2]: To drown out their own thoughts -- or to cover the lack thereof. ___ [1]: i.e. more or less "everybody", at the time of writing, under the age of... Idunno, ~50? [2]: Or muzak, as Dad may have put it.