Protopia...............

 

Utopia is also impossible because it is friction which propels progress. Without the pressure of new problems, there is little reason for advancement. Some people think of utopia not as a destination but as an ideal, but even that is misleading because utopia ignores the inherent tradeoffs in every benefit. We don’t get better without also earning some new problems. Problem-free is a stagnant death zone, and nothing we should aim for.

-Kevin Kelly, from here

thanks Chris

anti-excitement..........................

 

Investing isn’t supposed to excite you every day. In fact, the more exciting it feels, the more likely it is that you’re not actually investing but just speculating, with a fancier vocabulary.

-Vishal Khandelwal

   via

On the importance of the "struggle"....

 The downfall of capitalism will not come from the uprising of an impoverished working class but from the sabotage of a bored upper class. This was the view of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. Schumpeter believed that at some point in the future, an educated elite would have nothing left to struggle for and will instead start to struggle against the very system that they themselves live in.

-from Newsweek magazine of all places 

via

On emotional connection.......................or,

.........................................hoping computers stay unmotivated:

David Foster Wallace once said, "If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."  In many ways, this is very true.  If you never get bored, you'd be a step closer to being a computer.  Computers do all kinds of boring things for us, and they do them quite well and very quickly.  Computers don't need game mechanics.  They don't get bored or unmotivated.  Yet we are designing offices as if we were machines - but we're not.  Jane McGonigal, a researcher and game designer, argues that by its very nature, efficiency entails removing game mechanics form the design of labor.  In other words, we're taking the fun out of it.
     Karl Marx was wrong about a lot of things in economics, but we're now realizing he was also right about some stuff.  When you remove people's emotional connection to their labor and treat them merely as machines that produce efforts, it's soul killing.

-Eric Barker,  Barking Up The Wrong Tree:  The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

Oh, wow...............................

"So we have a crop of young bored billionaires looking to change the world.   I think that’s cool.   I hope they succeed."


-Steven Novella, as lifted from here


One should be very careful about what one wishes for.

This is good to know..............

"I do not believe, however, that a clear distinction can be made between psychological and social aspects when dealing with a phenomenon such as boredom, and a reductive sociologism is just as untenable as a psychologism."

-Lars Svendsen,  A Philosophy of Boredom

Hereditary faults........................

Nietzsche pointed out that the 'hereditary fault of all philosophers' is to base themselves on man at a particular period of time and then turn this into an eternal truth.  So I will make do with stating that boredom is a very serious phenomenon that affects many people.  Aristotle insisted that virtue is not natural, but it is not unnatural either.  The same applies to boredom.

-Lars Svendsen,  A Philosophy of Boredom

On rereading..............................

I spent ten days in the pulmonary ward, while the fever turned into pneumonia.  A flood of intravenous antibiotics eventually got on top of it, but meanwhile the problem of boredom loomed.  I staved it off by rereading Lord Jim, a copy of which, along with the usual epics about swords and dragons, was on the library cart which a very sweet and obviously fulfilled senior female volunteer was wheeling around the wards.  More than half a century ago Lord Jim had been one of the set novels for my first-year English class at Sydney University, and I remembered it as a boring book.  I suppose I had a plan to stave off one kind of boredom with another, as a kind of inoculation.
   On the strength of this long-delayed second reading, the book struck me as no more exciting than it had once seemed, but a lot more interesting.   I had long known Conrad to be a great writer:  on the strength of Under Western Eyes alone, he would have to be ranked high among those English writers - well, Polish writers resident in England - who, dealing with eastern Europe, analyzed the struggle between the imbecility of autocracy and the imbecility of revolution.

-Clive James,  Latest Readings

None percent.................................

“I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.”

-Louis CK

so restless.............................

...so restless is man's intellect that were he to penetrate the secret of the universe tomorrow, the likelihood is that he would grow bored on the day after.

-Loren Eiseley 

Sorry for being boring.................

      "I came to understand over my years as an assistant coach that when the audience is bored, it's not their fault."
-Bill Walsh

School's out for summer................

cartoons via

Yawn..............................................

Going.................................

"Place at eye-line in work cubicle: 'I don't know where I am going from here but I promise it won't be boring.' - David Bowie"
-Nicholas Bate, as excerpted from here

Mencken on life itsownself......................

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.
-H. L. Mencken as excerpted from the 8/9/26 Baltimore Evening Sun

Boredom.....................

"A certain power of enduring boredom is essential to a happy life.  The lives of most great men have not been exciting except at a few great moments.  A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men."
-Bertrand Russell