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I think the crucial missing thing is being locked into undivided boredom. My mom would be getting her afternoon nap and I couldn't go anywhere so I just walked

I think the crucial missing thing is being locked into undivided boredom. My mom would be getting her afternoon nap and I couldn't go anywhere so I just walked around the house, opened drawers and cabinets and boxes with old parts, magnets and whatnot and experimented with them. With zero distractions, no internet, no mobile phone, nothing. So either read a book (I read mine many times over) or tinker away. And I am still tinkering, just with software instead, while getting paid for it.

RRWagner 2y ago
"Boredom is the fount of learning and creativity"
- noduerme 2y ago
  But, you must have tools. Some kind of tools. I grew up in the 80s and we were strictly forbidden from watching TV. There were no video games in the house. I only got to see Nintendo at friends houses... and I barely understood how they could get through level after level. Tabletop RPGs were also forbidden. Encouraged: building stuff out of sticks and mud or whatever was in the yard, mandatory reading of history books, chess. In the 80s, my parents viewed computing with equal suspicion to video games. I had to really make a case that what I was doing with BASIC and Pascal and later Hypercard was educational for me... and even then I was restricted to 1 hour per day on the family computer. But I had this 16K TRS80-100 that no one considered a game or a threat... and I was already dialing BBSs at 300 baud and getting kicked off after the parents were asleep. Um. So I've told this all to friends and girlfriends, and often they say "oh wow you were really abused" or something. I don't really fault my parents, I think it was good for me and my siblings in the end. But boredom is not the thing. Limited resources is the thing. Give a mind the ability to make the most of limited resources, and the mind will always find things of interest to stave off boredom. Boredom is the province of those with nothing to think about when not being stimulated. That's why "people who get bored are boring," as my ex used to say.
  - noisy_boy 2y ago
    > Limited resources is the thing I think that is true. When we didn't have access to a proper football at school, we took used notebook papers, made a ball out of it, put that in several layers of small plastic bags (for water proofing) and tightened that in with a thick string looped to cover the surface. It served perfectly as football for a bunch of noisy kids and was easily replaceable. Paucity provides the spark for creativity.
  - amatecha 2y ago
    There's definitely some truth to that. Consider the demoscene, where wildly creative stuff is typical made under certain limitations. For example, demos where the executable + resources is only 64kb [0] or 4kb [1] are often full of surprising creativity. That and of course demos made for primitive systems (by today's standards) like C64 [2] or Commodore Amiga [3]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCjSG_15kcw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCjSG_15kcw [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCh3Q08HMfs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCh3Q08HMfs [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCmUIcdG5wo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCmUIcdG5wo [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqnZH7Pa3vo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqnZH7Pa3vo
phatskat 2y ago
Yep. When I was playing around with Linux, it was pretty much “spend all the time in the world editing config files until things work.” It’s a much different ballgame when you can’t google your boot errors because the only thing that can connect to the internet won’t boot, even when it does you’ll have to futz around in kernel driver source code for your particular brand of external modem, and finally once you’re online Google doesn’t even exist but at least you don’t need it anymore!

RRWagner 2y ago

"Boredom is the fount of learning and creativity"

noduerme 2y ago
But, you must have tools. Some kind of tools. I grew up in the 80s and we were strictly forbidden from watching TV. There were no video games in the house. I only got to see Nintendo at friends houses... and I barely understood how they could get through level after level. Tabletop RPGs were also forbidden. Encouraged: building stuff out of sticks and mud or whatever was in the yard, mandatory reading of history books, chess. In the 80s, my parents viewed computing with equal suspicion to video games. I had to really make a case that what I was doing with BASIC and Pascal and later Hypercard was educational for me... and even then I was restricted to 1 hour per day on the family computer. But I had this 16K TRS80-100 that no one considered a game or a threat... and I was already dialing BBSs at 300 baud and getting kicked off after the parents were asleep. Um. So I've told this all to friends and girlfriends, and often they say "oh wow you were really abused" or something. I don't really fault my parents, I think it was good for me and my siblings in the end. But boredom is not the thing. Limited resources is the thing. Give a mind the ability to make the most of limited resources, and the mind will always find things of interest to stave off boredom. Boredom is the province of those with nothing to think about when not being stimulated. That's why "people who get bored are boring," as my ex used to say.
- noisy_boy 2y ago
  > Limited resources is the thing I think that is true. When we didn't have access to a proper football at school, we took used notebook papers, made a ball out of it, put that in several layers of small plastic bags (for water proofing) and tightened that in with a thick string looped to cover the surface. It served perfectly as football for a bunch of noisy kids and was easily replaceable. Paucity provides the spark for creativity.
- amatecha 2y ago
  There's definitely some truth to that. Consider the demoscene, where wildly creative stuff is typical made under certain limitations. For example, demos where the executable + resources is only 64kb [0] or 4kb [1] are often full of surprising creativity. That and of course demos made for primitive systems (by today's standards) like C64 [2] or Commodore Amiga [3]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCjSG_15kcw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCjSG_15kcw [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCh3Q08HMfs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCh3Q08HMfs [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCmUIcdG5wo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCmUIcdG5wo [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqnZH7Pa3vo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqnZH7Pa3vo

phatskat 2y ago

Yep. When I was playing around with Linux, it was pretty much “spend all the time in the world editing config files until things work.” It’s a much different ballgame when you can’t google your boot errors because the only thing that can connect to the internet won’t boot, even when it does you’ll have to futz around in kernel driver source code for your particular brand of external modem, and finally once you’re online Google doesn’t even exist but at least you don’t need it anymore!