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Jarred McCormick

Professor Bauer

ENG 101

29. November 2016

Project 4 Defense

I arranged my media on my Padlet in a particular way to make my argument that sensory overload due to modern technology is harmful because it deprives us of boredom. I argued that boredom is crucial for our growth of individuals. To start out, I chose the quote from comedian Louis C.K. because he gives an interesting perspective on boredom. He claims that we cannot possibly be bored with the endless amount of opportunity that the world provides us. I chose to put this quote close to my thesis because it summarizes in a very general way what my arguments for project 4 and all of my other projects were. Next to the thesis, I put a quote from philosopher Bertrand Russel because it gives another perspective of boredom that I agree with and that summarizes my argument. On the right of my thesis, I put a quote from one of my primary sources in my annotated bibliography that defines boredom in a positive light, which is what I attempted to do in this project. It equates boredom to motivation and gives the audience a perspective on boredom that is unique and that they might not have heard already. The tone of my Padlet changes from serious and deep to humorous with the baby meme to the right of the quote from Elpidorou. I included this picture because it would keep the audiences attention, make them laugh, and further illustrate the definition of boredom as a desperate search for meaning and significance. It also points out the negative outcomes that can come from boredom. With Elpidorou's quote in mind, we know that we can transform boredom into motivation and we do not need to metaphorically "shit ourselves" to cure boredom.

The next line of media images concerns the problems with not having enough boredom due to sensory overload from modern society. I start out with a quote from Albert Einstein about how he believes that a quiet life can lead to an invigorated mind. I placed this here so that the rest of my argument would have credibility because one of the most brilliant scientists to ever live agrees with my stance on boredom. Lastly on this line, I included a quote from Steve Jobs about how he limits his children's technology time. Even the creator of Apple, one of the world's largest tech companies, believes that too much stimulation from technology is harmful. I put the quotes for this line at the beginning and at the end because the audience is reminded of the credibility of my argument before and after they look at the pictures that support my argument in the middle. Second from the left I included a stock image of a busy Times Square. I placed this here to show next to the Einstein quote because it is an extreme contrast to the quiet, country life that he praised. everyone in the picture seems to be very busy and overstimulated from the numerous advertisements. Nobody in the picture seems to be stopping just to slow down or think. I placed the cartoon next to the quote from Steve Jobs because it illustrates the negative effects of overusing technology. Not only are the people in physical danger from cars, but they are blind to what is happening in front of them because they are too distracted by their phones. Overall, I chose to address the second part of my thesis in the first line and the first part in the second line because it made more sense for my argument. It is important to know the positives of boredom before making an argument against the over-use of technology because the audience cannot understand the point of limiting the use of technology without first realizing the benefits of doing so. On the last line, I put links to my three primary sources from my annotated bibliography in case the audience wants to further research my subject and view more detailed and elaborate forms of my argument. I put these sources last because they are just links and they could distract from the main images and quotes that I thought best summarized my argument. These sources are mostly meant for further reading on my topic for those interested or support for my argument for those who are not yet convinced.

Works Cited

"Bored Baby Meme Generator." Bored Baby Meme Generator - Imgflip. N.p., n.d. Web. 29                              Nov.2016.

Carroll, B. J., P. Parker, and K. Inkson. "Evasion of Boredom: An Unexpected Spur                                          to Leadership?" Human Relations 63.7 (2010): 1031-049. Web.

Elpidorou, Andreas. "The Bright Side of Boredom." Frontiers. Ed. Jeffrey Yoshimi. John David

Eastwood, 3 Nov. 2014. Web. 15 Nov. 2016.

"FarahZulkifly.Wordpress.com." Farah Zulkifly. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.

"FLOW PSYCHOLOGY." Wordpress.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.

Koerth-Baker, Maggie. "Why Boredom Is Anything but Boring." Nature.com. Nature Publishing

Group, n.d. Web. 15 Nov. 2016.

Limited, Alamy. "Stock Photo - Manhattan New York USA United States America Times                         Square Advertising Advertisements Architecture Busy City Colourful Colours."                          Alamy. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.

""Patience and Boredom Are Closely Related. Boredom, a Certain Kind of Boredom, Is                          Really Impatience. You Don't like the Way Things Are, They Aren't                                                Interesting Enough for You, so You Deccide- and Boredom Is a Decision-that You Are Bored." - Bertrand Russell."                  Quoteaddicts. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.

"Steve Jobs Quotes About Tech." QuotesGram. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.

"219,000 Minutes of Emptiness." Wordpress.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.

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Evasion of boredom: An unexpected spur to leadership? - Brigid J Carroll, Polly Parker, Kerr Inkson, 2010

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Boredom has been largely omitted from the leadership literature, or dismissed as a problem, incongruent with effective leadership. Our research showed that the boredom discourse of senior managers engaged in a leadership development programme contrasted with their construction of challenge in leadership.

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Boredom from a psychological perspective

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Boredom from a psychological perspective

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In 1990, when James Danckert was 18, his older brother Paul crashed his car into a tree. He was pulled from the wreckage with multiple injuries, including head trauma.

The recovery proved difficult. Paul had been a drummer, but even after a broken wrist had healed, drumming no longer made him happy. Over and over, Danckert remembers, Paul complained bitterly that he was just - bored. "There was no hint of apathy about it at all," says Danckert. "It was deeply frustrating and unsatisfying for him to be deeply bored by things he used to love."

A few years later, when Danckert was training to become a clinical neuropsychologist, he found himself working with about 20 young men who had also suffered traumatic brain injury. Thinking of his brother, he asked them whether they, too, got bored more easily than they had before. "And every single one of them," he says, "said yes."

Those experiences helped to launch Danckert on his current research path. Now a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, he is one of a small but growing number of investigators engaged in a serious scientific study of boredom.

There is no universally accepted definition of boredom. But whatever it is, researchers argue, it is not simply another name for depression or apathy. It seems to be a specific mental state that people find unpleasant - a lack of stimulation that leaves them craving relief, with a host of behavioural, medical and social consequences.

In studies of binge-eating, for example, boredom is one of the most frequent triggers, along with feelings of depression and anxiety. In a study of distractibility using a driving simulator, people prone to boredom typically drove at higher speeds than other participants, took longer to respond to unexpected hazards and drifted more frequently over the centre line. And in a 2003 survey, US teenagers who said that they were often bored were 50% more likely than their less-frequently bored peers to later take up smoking, drinking and illegal drugs.

Boredom even accounts for about 25% of variation in student achievement, says Jennifer Vogel-Walcutt, a developmental psychologist at the Cognitive Performance Group, a consulting firm in Orlando, Florida. That's about the same percentage as is attributed to innate intelligence. Boredom is "something that requires significant consideration", she says.

Researchers hope to turn such hints into a deep understanding of what boredom is, how it manifests in the brain and how it relates to factors such as self-control. But "it's a ways out before we're answering those questions", says Shane Bench, a psychologist who studies boredom in the lab of Heather Lench at Texas A&M University in College Station. In particular, investigators need better ways to measure boredom and more reliable techniques for making research subjects feel bored in the lab.

Still, the field is growing. In May 2015, the University of Warsaw drew almost 50 participants to its second annual conference on boredom, which attracted international speakers from social psychology and sociology. And in November, Danckert brought together about a dozen investigators from Canada and the United States for a workshop on the subject.

Researchers in fields from genetics to philosophy, psychology and history are starting to work together on boredom research, says John Eastwood, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, Canada. "A critical mass of people addressing similar issues creates more momentum."

A measure of malaise

The scientific study of boredom dates back to at least 1885, when the British polymath Francis Galton published a short note in Nature on ' The Measure of Fidget' - his account of how restless audience members behaved during a scientific meeting. But decades passed with only a few people taking a serious interest in the subject. "There are things all around us that we don't think to look at, maybe because they appear trivial," says Eastwood.

That began to change in 1986, when Norman Sundberg and Richard Farmer of the University of Oregon in Eugene published their Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS), the first systematic way for researchers to measure boredom - beyond asking study participants, "Do you feel bored?". Instead, they could ask how much participants agreed or disagreed with statements such as: "Time always seems to be passing slowly", "I feel that I am working below my abilities most of the time" and "I find it easy to entertain myself". (The statements came from interviews and surveys that Sundberg and Farmer had conducted on how people felt when they were bored.) A participant's aggregate score would give a measure of his or her propensity for boredom.

The BPS opened up new avenues of research and made it apparent that boredom was about restlessness as much as apathy, the search for meaning as much as ennui. It has served as a launching point for other boredom scales, a catalyst for making the field more important and a tool for connecting boredom to other factors, including mental health and academic success.

But it also has some widely acknowledged flaws, says Eastwood. One is that the BPS is a self-reported measure, which means that it is inherently subjective. Another is that it measures susceptibility to boredom - 'trait boredom' - not the intensity of the feeling in any given situation, which is known as state boredom. Studies consistently show that these two measures are independent of each other, yet researchers are only beginning to tease them apart.

This can be particularly confounding in educational settings. Shifts in teaching style or classroom environment are unlikely to reduce students' trait boredom, which is intrinsic and slow to change, but can be very effective at reducing state boredom, which is purely situational. The BPS has often been misused to measure both forms of boredom at the same time, yielding answers that are likely to be misleading, says Eastwood.

Scientists are still hashing out how to improve on the BPS. In 2013, Eastwood helped to develop the Multidimensional State Boredom Scale (MSBS), which features 29 statements about immediate feelings, such as: "I am stuck in a situation that I feel is irrelevant." Unlike the BPS, which is all about the participant's habits and personality, the MSBS attempts to measure how bored people feel in the moment. And that, Eastman hopes, will give it a better shot at revealing what boredom is for everybody.

But to measure boredom, researchers must first make sure that study participants are bored. And that is a whole different challenge.

The most boring video ever

One way to create a particular mood, used for decades in psychology, is to show people a video clip. There are scientifically validated videos for inducing happiness, sadness, anger, empathy and many other emotions. So when she was working on her dissertation at Waterloo in 2014, Colleen Merrifield decided to make a video that would bore most people to tears.

"When she was working on her dissertation, she decided to make a video that would bore most people to tears."

In Merrifield's video, two men stand in a white, windowless room. Silently, they take clothes from a pile between them and hang them on a white rack - a camisole, a shirt, a sweater, a sock. The seconds tick by: 15, 20, 45, 60. The men keep hanging laundry. Eighty seconds. One of the men asks the other for a clothes peg. One hundred seconds. They keep hanging laundry. Two hundred seconds. They keep hanging laundry. Three hundred seconds. They keep hanging laundry. Shown on a loop, the video can last for as long as five and a half minutes.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people to whom Merrifield showed this found it stupefyingly dull. But then she tried using the video to study how boredom affected the ability to focus and pay attention. Her protocol called for participants to carry out a classic cognitive attention task - watching for star-like light clusters to appear or disappear on a monitor - then to sit through the video to get good and bored, and finally to do the task again so that she could see how boredom affected their performance. But she found that she had to redesign the experiment: the task was boring people more than the video.

This was not entirely unexpected. Previous studies of boredom had often used tasks instead of videos. But it also demonstrated the problem. There are so many ways for researchers to bore people with tasks - asking them to proofread address labels, say, or to screw nuts and bolts together - that it had always been difficult to compare individual studies. For instance, different studies have found boredom to be correlated with both rising and falling heart rate. But without a standardized method for inducing boredom, it is impossible to work out who is right.

In 2014, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, published a paper that aimed to begin the process of standardization. It compared six different boredom inductions, representing three broad classes - repetitive physical tasks, simple cognitive tasks, and video or audio media - as well as a control video. The researchers used the MSBS to see how intensely each task elicited boredom, and a measure called the Differential Emotion Scale to see whether each task elicited boredom alone, or a number of other emotions. All six tasks were significantly more boring than the control and all six caused boredom almost exclusively. The best of the bunch was a task that required participants to click a mouse button to rotate a computer icon of a peg a quarter of a turn clockwise, over and over.

After that, says Danckert, "I think I might be abandoning the video" to induce boredom in the lab. Instead, he will rely on behavioural tasks.

The inexactness of the tools leaves holes in what researchers can reasonably say about boredom. For instance, many real-world problems that are highly correlated with boredom are connected to the idea of self-control, including addiction, gambling and binge-eating. "I characterize boredom as a deficiency in self-regulation," Danckert says. "It's a difficulty of engaging with tasks in your environment. The more self-control you have, the less likely you are to be bored."

But does this mean that self-control and boredom are measures of the same thing? Even Danckert is uncertain. Consider people with a history of traumatic brain injury. "Failures of self-control are their problem," he says. "They might be inappropriately impulsive; there's increased risk-taking; they might also engage in drug and alcohol abuse." Danckert certainly saw his brother, Paul, experience all those things in the wake of his injury.

But in Danckert's research sample of people with traumatic brain injury - who are predominantly in their 40s - ageing seems to have weakened the link between boredom and self-control. In data that are not yet published, Danckert says, his patients report levels of self-control no lower than those of the general population, but their boredom-proneness scores are much higher. By contrast, Danckert's brother seems to demonstrate the opposite effect. He struggled for years with self-control issues, but eventually became less bored and reclaimed his love of music. "It's the most important thing in his life, next to his children," Danckert says.

So there is reason to suspect that boredom and self-control can exist independently - but there is not yet enough evidence to understand much beyond that.

Painfully dull

Despite all this uncertainty, researchers see themselves as laying a foundation, creating tools and standards that will allow them to tackle really important questions. "We're establishing boredom as a testable construct," says Bench.

"We're establishing boredom as a testable construct."

Defining boredom is an important part of that. Different researchers have different pet definitions: a German-led team, for example, identifies five types of boredom. But most workers in the field agree that, at least some of the time, people will work very hard to relieve boredom. This not only presents a more active version of boredom than most people are probably used to, but also has tangible connections to efforts to address boredom in the real world.

Lench and Bench are testing whether the drive to become un-bored is so strong that people might be willing to choose unpleasant experiences as an alternative. This idea builds on research that has shown a correlation between sensation-seeking behaviour, even risky behaviour, and high boredom-proneness scores. It is also similar to findings published in Science in 2014 and Appetite in 2015. In the first study, researchers asked people to sit in a room with nothing to do for as long as 15 minutes at a time. Some of the participants, particularly men, were willing to give themselves small electric shocks rather than be left alone with their thoughts. The second paper described two experiments: one in which the participants had access to unlimited sweets, and another in which they had access to unlimited electric shocks. Participants ate more when they were bored - but they also gave themselves more shocks. Even when it is not very pleasant, apparently, novelty is better than monotony.

Novelty might also have a role in overcoming boredom in the classroom. In 2014, for instance, researchers led by psychologist Reinhard Peckrun of the University of Munich in Germany reported how they had followed 424 university students over the course of an academic year, measuring their boredom levels and documenting their test scores. The team found evidence of a cycle in which boredom begot lower exam results, which resulted in more disengagement from class and higher levels of boredom. Those effects were consistent throughout the school year, even after accounting for students' gender, age, interest in the subject, intrinsic motivation and previous achievement. But other studies suggest that novelty can disrupt this cycle.

Sae Schatz, director of the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative, a virtual company that develops educational tools for the US Department of Defense, points to one experiment with a computer system that tutored students in physics. When the system was programmed to insult those who got questions wrong and snidely praise those who got them right, says Schatz, some students, especially adult learners, saw improved outcomes and were willing to spend longer on the machines. Schatz thinks that this could be because the insults provided enough novelty to keep people engaged and less prone to boredom.

Looking to the future, researchers such as Eastwood are intent on finding better ways to understand what boredom is and why it is correlated to so many other mental states. They also want to investigate boredom in people who aren't North American college students. That means testing older people, as well as individuals from diverse ethnic and national backgrounds. And, given the impact that boredom may have on education, it also means developing versions of the BPS and MSBS that can be administered to children.

Many researchers likewise hope to expand on the types of study being done. To get beyond self-reported data, Danckert wants to start looking at brain structures, and seeing whether there are differences between people who score highly on the BPS and those who don't. These data could help him to understand why boredom manifests so strongly in some people with traumatic brain injury.

There's also a need, Danckert says, for more scientists to realize that boredom is fascinating. "We may be on the cusp of having enough people to advance a little more quickly," he says.

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In 1990, when James Danckert was 18, his older brother Paul crashed his car into a tree. He was pulled from the wreckage with multiple injuries, including head trauma. The recovery proved difficult. Paul had been a drummer, but even after a broken wrist had healed, drumming no longer made him happy.

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Boredom from a philosophical perspective

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Boredom from a philosophical perspective

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Department of Philosophy, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA

Boredom proneness is commonly assessed and measured using self-report scales and questionnaires. The only full-scale measure of boredom that has been extensively used to assess boredom proneness is the Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS) ( Farmer and Sundberg, 1986). BPS takes boredom proneness to be the tendency to experience boredom in a wide range of situations ( Farmer and Sundberg, 1986). Although there is a close semantic relationship between the terms "tendency" and "disposition," boredom proneness should not be understood as a dispositional state or property. A subject can possess the disposition to Φ even if the subject never actually Φ s. For that reason, I wish to suggest that one is prone to boredom not only if one possesses characteristics that make one susceptible to being bored, but also if one frequently experiences boredom. Unlike a disposition that can remain hidden or non-actualized, boredom proneness, I hold, has visible and significant for the subject manifestations. Indeed, the frequent experience of boredom forms something akin to a pervasive lens through which the world is filtered. The boredom prone individual often and easily finds herself to be bored, even in situations that others, typically, find interesting and stimulating. Furthermore, she regularly becomes incapable of maintaining sustained attention, and interest in one's activities ( Damrad-Frye and Laird, 1989; Eastwood et al., 2012; Malkovsky et al., 2012), she lacks excitement for, or can find no purpose in, what she is doing ( Barbalet, 1999; Fahlman et al., 2009; van Tilburg and Igou, 2012), and she easily becomes frustrated, restless, or weary by either stimuli-poor or challenging situations ( Farmer and Sundberg, 1986). Boredom proneness is associated with a plethora of significant bodily, psychological, and social harms ( Vodanovich, 2003). Boredom proneness is positively correlated with depression and anxiety ( Ahmed, 1990; Blaszczynski et al., 1990; Sommers and Vodanovich, 2000; Goldberg et al., 2011; LePera, 2011), anger and aggression ( Gordon et al., 1997; Rupp and Vodanovich, 1997; Dahlen et al., 2004), a lower tendency to engage in and enjoy thinking ( Watt and Blanchard, 1994; Seib and Vodanovich, 1998), a propensity to make mistakes in completing common tasks ( Wallace et al., 2002), poor interpersonal and social relationships ( Leong and Schneller, 1993; Watt and Vodanovich, 1999), lower job and life satisfaction ( Farmer and Sundberg, 1986; Kass et al., 2001), problem gambling ( Blaszczynski et al., 1990; Mercer and Eastwood, 2010), and drug and alcohol abuse ( Lee et al., 2007; LePera, 2011).

Boredom proneness ought to be distinguished from the state of boredom, i.e., the actual experience of boredom (cf. Fenichel, 1953; O'Hanlon, 1981; Neu, 1998; Fahlman et al., 2013). Even though boredom proneness is predicated on the antecedent experience of boredom-viz., one cannot be said to be prone to boredom if one never experienced boredom-the very experience of boredom does not entail boredom proneness. One can be in a state of boredom without one necessarily being prone to boredom. Understood as a psychological state that is not necessarily the manifestation of boredom proneness, boredom is an aversive, transient state that can be often easily alleviated. It can also be a rather common and mundane experience. For instance, most of us experience boredom while waiting in line to pay for our shopping, when our bus or train is delayed, or when we have to endure the same conversation, lecture, or TV show over and over again. Often, boredom is situational: it is brought about by the unchallenging, monotonous, or repetitive situations in which we find ourselves ( O'Hanlon, 1981). As a result, boredom can be allayed by a mere change in setting. Boredom, however, need not always be situational. Depending on our moods, desires, and attitudes, situations that are ostensively meaningful and challenging could also bring about the state of boredom ( Geiwitz, 1966; Mikulas and Vodanovich, 1993); conversely, situations that are repetitive, monotonous, and utterly humdrum do not have to lead to the experience of boredom ( Perkins and Hill, 1985; DeChenne and Moody, 1988).

Theoretical discussions of the state of boredom have been predominantly one-sided. Notwithstanding a few notable exceptions ( Nietzsche, 1974, p. 108; Brodsky, 1995; and Russell, 1996, pp. 48, 52), the literary and philosophical history of boredom consists of a series of attempts to articulate boredom's distinctively negative nature. Boredom is thought to be disruptive and harmful ( Dostoevsky, 1962, p. 418; Stendhal, 1975, p. 211; Burton, 1621/2001, p. 390; Pessoa, 2002, p. 76; Novalis in Donehower, 2012, p. 48), a great source of unhappiness and suffering ( Schopenhauer, 1966, pp. 204, 312-313, 321; Beckett, 1978; Nisbet, 1982, p. 26; Kierkegaard, 1987, pp. 37, 285-286; Fromm, 1990; Schachtel, 2001, p. 183) and, ultimately, a state that hinders the development of one's intellectual, social, and even moral capacities (Dante's Purgatorio, XVII-XIX; Cassian, 2000; Sinkewicz, 2003; Pascal, 2004, pp. 40, 163). Boredom, as "the root of all evil," is a problematic state ( Kierkegaard, 1987, p. 286); it has very few, if any, redeeming characteristics.

Despite its impressive historical backing, the view that boredom is entirely negative should be rejected. Recent empirical work on boredom, taken in tandem with theoretical considerations about its nature and character, suggest a rather different picture of the state of boredom ( Barbalet, 1999; van Tilburg and Igou, 2012; Bench and Lench, 2013; Gasper and Middlewood, 2014). In broad strokes, the picture is as follows: on account of its affective, volitional, and cognitive aspects, boredom motivates the pursuit of a new goal when the current goal ceases to be satisfactory, attractive, or meaningful to the agent. Boredom helps to restore the perception that one's activities are meaningful or significant. It acts as a regulatory state that keeps one in line with one's projects. In the absence of boredom, one would remain trapped in unfulfilling situations, and miss out on many emotionally, cognitively, and socially rewarding experiences. Boredom is both a warning that we are not doing what we want to be doing and a "push" that motivates us to switch goals and projects. Neither apathy, nor dislike, nor frustration can fulfill boredom's function ( Goldberg et al., 2011). In what follows, I elaborate on this picture of boredom and make a case for its value and significance.

But first, more needs to be said about the very nature of the state of boredom. In terms of its affective (or qualitative) character, boredom is an aversive state that is characterized by feelings of dissatisfaction, restlessness, and weariness. Although additional feelings might be present during the state of boredom (e.g., mild frustration), the aforesaid feelings are essential to boredom. Not only subjects who experience boredom report on having these feelings, but also, and most importantly, the lack of any one of these feelings would result in a psychological state that is different than boredom ( van Tilburg and Igou, 2012; Fahlman et al., 2013; cf. Thackray et al., 1975; Hill and Perkins, 1985; Perkins and Hill, 1985; O'Brien, 2014). Boredom without dissatisfaction cannot be boredom: to be satisfied with one's situation is to cease to be bored with the situation. Restlessness and weariness are equally essential. When one is bored one is not content with one's situation. The state of boredom is one from which we seek to escape. While bored, one is thus restless, for one is not content with one's current situation and one wishes to be doing something else ( van Tilburg and Igou, 2012). Lastly, the experience of boredom involves weariness. To experience boredom is to experience a certain kind of weariness or mental fatigue. The boring, in other words, tires us.

The experiential character of boredom includes more than its affective aspects. That is to say, boredom is not merely a sensual or a qualitatively state. While bored one has certain thoughts about one's situation or object of attention. Often, for example, one thinks that the situation in which one finds oneself is bereft of significance or meaning ( van Tilburg and Igou, 2012), or that what one is currently doing is incongruous with one's plans. Furthermore, while bored one has a desire, often quite strong, to engage in a different and more satisfying activity. One also has a difficulty maintaining and focusing one's attention ( Bernstein, 1975; Fisher, 1993; Martin et al., 2006; Eastwood et al., 2012). One even experiences a slow passage of time ( Fenichel, 1953; O'Connor, 1967; Hartocollis, 1972; Conrad, 1997; Martin et al., 2006).

In a state of boredom, the world is revealed to oneself in a particular and indeed striking fashion ( Elpidorou, forthcoming). The world appears not only to be uninteresting, but also distant, foreign, and often unyielding. Boredom contributes to a loss of value, significance, or meaning. The world of boredom is, in a sense, not our world: it is not the world that is in line with our projects and desires. Our current situation does not attract us; we do not feel compelled to engage with it. The weariness that we experience while bored, compounded with the perception of a slower passage of time, makes the character of boredom all the more aversive ( Sackett et al., 2010). Being in a state of boredom feels like being emotionally trapped: the unsatisfying situation with which we are engaging seems to last longer; it appears to be removed from our concerns; and we feel weary. Crucially, however, boredom is not a state of equilibrium. We are not content in it. We feel restless and wish to be doing something else. We desire escape from boredom. In turn, while bored it is difficult for us to focus our attention on features of the present situation. Our mind wanders and alternative goals and situations suddenly become salient to us. If boredom is likened to an emotional trap, it is a trap that due to its own character fortunately "pushes" us to escape from it.

The significance and value of boredom should now be apparent. First, boredom is informative: it tells us something both about the world and about ourselves. While bored, our situation is disclosed to us as unfulfilling, uninteresting, unchallenging, or non-stimulating. On account of this disclosure, boredom also informs us of our own goals, interests, and even self-perceived wellbeing. Being bored means that we are currently engaged not only in an uninteresting or unchallenging situation, but also in a situation that fails to meet our expectations and desires. Boredom is a state that is about ourselves as much as it is about the world.

Second, and most importantly, the negative and aversive experience of boredom acts as a force that motivates us to pursue a goal that appears to us to be more stimulating, interesting, challenging, or fulfilling than the goal that we currently pursue ( Barbalet, 1999; van Tilburg and Igou, 2012; Bench and Lench, 2013). In an episode of boredom, our current goal or situation is perceived as unpleasant and unappealing, often as devoid of meaning or significance; on the contrary, alternative goals and situations are made salient and appear to us to be attractive. Boredom thus facilitates the pursuit of alternative goals: it "pushes" us out of this non-stimulating, uninteresting, or unchallenging situation and into another. In motivating us to pursue a situation that is different from our current one, boredom ultimately promotes the restoration of the perception that one's activities are meaningful and congruent with one's overall projects ( Locke and Latham, 1990; Sansone et al., 1992; Heine et al., 2006). What alleviates boredom is not simply a change of activity. Rather, what alleviates boredom is a change from an uninteresting, unfulfilling, or non-stimulating situation to one that is perceived by the agent to be satisfactory and in line with her plans and wishes.

Given its twofold function, boredom is best understood as a state that monitors and regulates our behavior. It informs us when we are out of tune with our interests, and, on account of its aversive character, motivates us to engage in situations that are perceived by us as fulfilling or meaningful. Boredom is important. It promotes our interests by trying to keep us in touch with what we care about. It safeguards us from emotional traps and long-term dullness.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to a reviewer for extensive and very helpful comments on previous versions of this article.

Footnotes

References

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Note to reviewer: Before reading the revised version of my paper, please read my response to your comments on the Interactive Review Forum. Thank you.]Boredom proneness is commonly assessed and measured using self-report scales and questionnaires. The only full-scale measure of boredom that has been extensively used to assess boredom proneness is the Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS) (Farmer & Sundberg 1986).

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"Boredom is both a warning that we are not doing what we want to be doing and a 'push' that motivates us to switch goals and projects" (Elpidorou).

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Sensory overload, due to recent advances in media and technology, is potentially harmful because boredom is crucial for our growth as individuals