Woman stares out through window blinds, looking bored

Intolerable Boredom

Lorna Lythgoe on October 12, 2023

We underestimate the seriousness of boredom.

We think children are ‘just whining’ when they complain of boredom. Bored adults are ‘lazy’, ‘unimaginative’ or ‘hyperactive’. If generous, we sympathise with the experience of boredom as we would a mild toothache that’ll pass.

Yet boredom is a known threat to wellbeing. Nothing makes that clearer than considering the central role boredom plays in the punishment of prisoners. Locked away, the prisoner suffers the drawn-out malaise of time expanded. As added punishment, they are placed in solitary confinement away from stimulation.

It’s hard to deny the severity of boredom under these conditions, but for many of us, of course, life is not a prison and we can access a plethora of stimuli. For some though, profound boredom pervades.

Boredom proneness

Sherlock Holmes is renowned for his proneness to boredom. When ‘the game is not on’, he is famously drawn to the thrilling escape of narcotics. Holmes is the archetypal hyperactive mind who is chronically understimulated by normal life. Suffering from a so-called low boredom threshold, he is one of two distinctive personality types prone to boredom, says psychologist Professor John Eastwood. The other type finds the world so frightening they retreat, and boredom ensues.

It’s not only these extreme personality types who suffer stultification though. Boredom is a complex phenomenon experienced widely that has only recently gained traction in research (2017 marked the fifth International Interdisciplinary Boredom Conference and the seventh Boring Conference). And there’s still little understood about it, as this vague conclusion in Live Science from a 2012 review of research into malaise demonstrates:

“[Boredom is] some combination of an objective lack of neurological excitement and a subjective psychological state of dissatisfaction, frustration or disinterest, all of which result from a lack of stimulation”.

Existential angst

Philosophers and writers, on the other hand, have been debating boredom widely for millennia. Existentialists especially have taken up tedium’s cause for the feelings of meaninglessness and isolation it evokes, such as Kierkegaard in Either/Or and Heidegger in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.

While the jury remains out for a full scientific understanding of boredom, what is generally agreed is that it involves decreased motivation, isolation, disconnection, insufficient stimulation and reduced attention, and it arouses deeply unpleasant feelings of existential anxiety. At its core, boredom is a problem of time, attention and meaning. Time stretches out, nothing can occupy us sufficiently, and things feel pointless.

The value of boredom

Yet there are benefits. Ennui has driven human innovation from the dawn of time. From an evolutionary perspective, emotions should be adaptive not destructive, so boredom, while unpleasant, may serve to encourage our curiosity. Professor Heather Lench says boredom “stops us ploughing the same old furrow, and pushes us to try to seek new goals or explore new territories or ideas”. Dr Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire found boredom led to higher performance in tests for creativity, possibly because “tedium encouraged their minds to wander, which leads to more associative and creative ways of thinking”.

Benefits aside, we mustn’t dismiss the experience of boredom as trivial or childish. It’s not just an odd turn of phrase that we say, “bored to death”, “dying of boredom” and “kill time”. The suffering from boredom can be intolerable.

Boredom and depression

Boredom is both a cause and symptom of depression. “Boredom is the average state of melancholia, whereas melancholia is the pathological state of boredom,” said Fromm in The Pathology of Normalcy. When depressed, life loses its colour and the monotony of nothingness can drive a person to utter despair, even oblivion. And when bored, like prisoners deprived of stimulation, a person is vulnerable to the black hole of depression.

Eastwood says that people are more prone to boredom when they feel their lives lack meaning and fulfillment. He found that when research participants were coached to see meaning and purpose in their lives, they were less bored during the tests that followed. Boredom, it seems, is indeed an existential condition.

Boreout

In their 2007 book, Boreout, Peter Werder and Philippe Rothlin write about the dangers of a lack of meaningful work. ‘Boreout’ (in contrast to ‘burnout’) describes the under-stretched worker who is so bored it negatively impacts their productivity and engagement. Management consultancy Sirota Survey Intelligence found in their 2008 study that “being bored has far more serious consequences for an organisation than being overworked”.

Critical theorist and social psychologist Erich Fromm believed boredom to be a response to industrial society in which workers engage in alienated labour. He argued that the thrills and novelty we seek in consumerism are a mere distraction from the tedium induced by this alienation. In our neoliberal, consumerist society, perhaps Oliver Burkeman is on point when he writes, “boredom feels more intolerable, these days, because there’s so much stimulation to be had”.

In 2016, French perfume executive Frédérik Desnard sued his employers for €360,000 for ‘boring him’ out of his €80,000 per year job. Indeed, Mann says boredom can have “severe” consequences, leading to stress, depression and risky habits that can ultimately shorten life expectancy. Yet boreout is not a recognised psychological condition.

In a BBC interview, Natasha Stanley, head coach at Careershifters in London, compares the “insidious creep” of boredom that leads workers to question “what the point of their life is” to the proverbial boiling frog. Drop a frog in boiling water and it’ll hop out. Put it in tepid water and slowly turn up the heat and it’ll boil to death without noticing.

Beware the rising temperature…

Further reading:

Sandi Mann, The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom is Good

Peter Toohey, Boredom: A Lively History

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

Image of a cassette tape and its reflection

Just an unfocused, entitled millennial?

Lorna Lythgoe on October 12, 2023

Millennials get a bad rap. In an interview that went viral on social media, author Simon Sinek gives an unforgiving indictment of millennials, saying managers struggle to manage them because they are unfocused and entitled. He laments their belief that they can do anything in life, saying that they demand work that makes an impact and has purpose but quit as soon as the fire splutters.

Sinek’s sentiments have been echoed again and again in the public discourse: it is not okay to burn strong and fast then stop, you have to stay the distance. Aside from the fact that Sinek probably overstates the ‘millennials problem’ (sounds like the usual young people today hyperbole), he reveals a common prejudice towards a certain section of society. Not millennials. Scanners.

Scanners & divers

A ‘scanner’ is a term coined by author and career coach, Barbara Sher, who categorises people as either scanners or divers. Divers like to get deep into what they do, and they stay the distance because they’re built to. They’re the specialists. Scanners, on the other hand, prefer to alight briefly before moving on to the next project. They love new ideas and challenges, and are driven by a passion for learning, so when they’ve got what they came for they leave. Scanners are generalists (or polymaths, or Renaissance Men and Women).

The problem is, there’s a deep-seated distaste for scanners embedded in the cultural psyche. No less so than in many scanners themselves, who often feel ashamed of their polymathic leanings and try to bury them and conform to diver behaviour. This becomes clear when reading Sher’s list of scanner statements in her 2007 book, Refuse to Choose!:

“I can never stick to anything.”

“I know I should focus on one thing, but which one?”

“I lose interest in things I thought would interest me forever.”

“I get bored as soon as I know how to do something.”

“I can’t stand to do anything twice.”

“I keep changing my mind about what I want to do and end up doing nothing.”

“I work at low-paying jobs because there’s nothing I’m willing to commit to.”

“I won’t choose a career path because it might be the wrong one.”

“I can’t pay attention unless I’m doing many things at once.”

Scanner guilt

Sher says scanners are taught they’re “doing something wrong and must try to change”. In her compelling TED talk, Emilie Wapnick explains how scanners (she calls them multipotentialites) learn to feel flawed because society expects them to choose one path. She argues that ‘destiny’, ‘purpose’ and our ‘one true calling’ are “highly romanticised in our culture”, so that people with multiple interests that wax and wane are left feeling abnormal.

Wapnick points out that the question, ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’, keeps kids up at night worrying about the answer, but “it does not inspire them to dream about all that they could be”. As Sinek’s comments show, imagining you can be anything – or everything – is seen as a problem.

Scanners at work

The thing is, there’s not only room for both divers and scanners, but also the need for both. In the workplace, divers and scanners live symbiotically, balancing each other out and together creating enviable results. Any project needs someone with the fire to start it and someone else with the focus to finish it. That’s the point of team work. And every field benefits from the pairing of someone with a broad overview and multidisciplinary background with someone with specific, expert knowledge. Yet, do a Google search for ‘starters and finishers’ and you’ll get a disproportionate number of articles telling us how to get better at finishing.

Despite the residual prejudice, there is an increasing call for generalists in the workplace. Changes in the economic climate mean that specialist roles are becoming more generalist. In an article published in the Harvard Business Review, Vikram Mansharamani says it’s generalists – with their varied experience – that our global and connected economy requires. He cites robust evidence that generalists are better at predicting outcomes in the face of uncertainty because of their breadth of perspective. “The specialist era is waning”, says Mansharamani.

And with the explosion of AI and machine learning, and, with it, the looming automation of our jobs, who do you think is best adapted to survive the cull?

Martin Ford, futurist and author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, in a recent Guardian article says that the safest jobs are those involving considerable creativity and building complex relationships. Two things generalists often do best. What’s more, experts advise us to diversify our careers and deploy multiple talents in order to stay employable. Sounds like a scanner’s dream! “We’ll all have seven or eight jobs, with the average adult working for a number of companies simultaneously”, predicts Futurist Faith Popcorn.

The coming era of scanners

Wapnick says multipotentialites have three strengths: idea synthesis, rapid learning, and adaptability. These are highly desirable in this time of massive economic change and ambiguity. Those who can pivot in the direction of market needs stand the greatest chance of surviving and thriving.

“As a society, we have a vested interest in encouraging multipotentialites to be themselves. We have a lot of complex, multidimensional problems in the world right now, and we need creative, out-of-the-box thinkers to tackle them,” says Wapnick.

So, Simon Sinek, perhaps your unfocused and entitled millennials are, in fact, the newly adapted generation for the future. And maybe all the scanners out there with hang-ups about their allergy to single-minded focus are coming into their own.

A person peers over a precipitous cliff edge

Growth Seekers

Lorna Lythgoe on October 12, 2023

Written for the Growthseekers blog in 2017:

I am a growth seeker. Looking back at my life and career and “connecting the dots backwards”, as Steve Jobs urges us to do in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, it’s easy to see I’ve thrown myself headlong into every learning opportunity that’s piqued my interest.

But that’s not the narrative I’ve always told myself. In times of doubt, I lament my butterfly tendencies. Why do I chop and change? Can’t I stick at anything? How come the fire that ignites me for a new project inevitably splutters and fizzles?

On failing

Jobs tells the story of his dropping out of college after six months. He had no idea what he was doing, but he followed his intuition that college wasn’t for him. Freed from doing the classes he was supposed to do, he stuck around for another 18 months, sleeping on friends’ floors and collecting cans for the 5 cent deposit while he attended the classes that captivated him.

Jobs followed his curiosity, and those college experiences fed into his revolutionary work and life as an entrepreneur and inventor responsible for Apple and the seismic changes we’ve seen in our lives since.

Only when you look backwards can you connect the dots that led you to doing the best you can with your life. But sometimes, the positive connections can seem a little hazy. Other times, it looks a lot like one bad choice after another.

Connecting dots

When Jobs was 30, 10 years after he had founded Apple with Wozniak in his parents’ garage and it had grown into a $2 billion company, he got fired. That had to feel like a fairly epic failure. I guess Jobs doubted his choices then too.

“It was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for months. It was a very public failure and I even thought of running away from the valley.”

But he plowed ahead anyway, again following his gut.

“I decided to start again. I didn’t know it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that ever could’ve happened to me….It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

Over the next five years, Jobs founded Pixar and a company called NeXT which Apple then bought, leading Jobs back to Apple where he’d eventually become CEO. NeXT is the technology now at the core of macOS and IOS.

So, the apparently pointless question marks and downright disasters of our pasts will all come good in the end. I can buy that. I want to believe.

But before I pat myself on the back too vigorously for my sagacity in doing some things badly, I think it’s worth probing whether there’s room for improvement. Jobs might be right that if we’re willing to take risks and fail we will grow, but I’m pretty sure he’d have us mine those failures for insight into how to fail less next time.

Growing

In her influential book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Stanford Professor Carol Dweck describes how some children were easily deflated when given a difficult task, while others were excited about the challenge. The latter children didn’t see the failure involved in the struggle, only the opportunity to get better.

This was a pretty revolutionary insight. A common view was – and still is, in some spheres – that being smart meant avoiding failure, so failing meant not being smart. These challenge-loving children instead believed we can cultivate skill and intelligence. They had a ‘growth mindset‘. And it’s not just a question of attitude: neuroscience shows that, like muscles, our brains grow through exercise.

Contrast that with the ‘fixed mindset’, where one believes intelligence is simply something you have or don’t have. Only if you have a certain personality and amount of intelligence can you succeed in life.

This belief leads people to give up easily, and to be thwarted by setbacks and so-called failures. They think the people they consider successful got there because they are effortlessly smart and talented and have avoided failure. Jobs is a shining example of just how very wrong they are.

Effortful perfectionism

When I survey my past endeavours, I am troubled by the hints of a fixed mindset. I have sometimes lost momentum because of the discomfort of not being competent quickly enough. I have got disheartened and turned away when the challenge has been too daunting.

Fortunately for me though, we can develop our growth mindset. I am making it my personal challenge to nurture mine.

Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work“. I like that view. But just engaging my willpower won’t do it. Once I venture too far out of my comfort zone, self-preservation will kick in and I’ll forget Edison and just want to get out of there.

In her career change guidebook, Pivot, Jenny Blake warns against getting into your ‘panic zone’. Likewise, Stephen Krashen found that anxiety delimits people’s success in learning (the affective filter hypothesis). With all the best will in the world then, if we aim too high or too fast, we get discouraged. The only way is to take baby steps.

Dweck found people with fixed versus growth mindsets exhibit two kinds of perfectionism: one that expects instant results with no effort (effortless), the other that has high standards and is prepared to work to get there (effortful).

I am committing to effortful growth. I can’t achieve perfection right away, but I can start where I am and work to improve, digesting the challenge nibble by nibble. I expect to have set-backs, but I’ll chip away at them. I am a growth seeker.