3 ms·

"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

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