
The privilege of boredom: How philosophy can happen in isolation - apollinaire
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/privilege-boredom-philosophy-isolation-anil-gomes/
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caiobegotti
_We know, now as ever, that boredom is far from the worst that people will
experience during this pandemic. Descartes reminds us that boredom can also be
a privilege. For boredom allows the mind to wander, to rest on an idea longer
than it would otherwise have, to start off on a road which leads to habits of
attention._

The other day I mentioned to a friend that many people we both know say they
are struggling with isolation and lack of something exciting happening and we
both concluded that they are the same people that, it seemed to us, never
reserve time for their own thoughts and probably are finding this whole
boredom privilege quite painful because they are finally forced to pay
attention to the person inside their minds, and that can be frightening I
suppose. To some people that can easily become the worst experience during
this pandemic.

~~~
watwut
It is not so much frightening to be inside own mind. These people thrive on
things happening and lack of sensory input and lack of feelings and lack or
anything you could think about and lack of place to spend energy makes them
suffer.

I don't know why people project fear on others lately all the time or project
deep scary depths. Sometimes it is simply that quick change makes you suffer.

~~~
westoncb
I think the reason for it is grounded in theories of causation in human
emotions/behaviors: there are a number of behaviors which are deemed to behave
like 'symptoms' in that they are effectively determined by a smaller set of
underlying emotions, e.g. fear.

Part of the idea, from what I can tell, is that the emotion (e.g. fear) in
many cases doesn't appear at the surface level because it is "unacceptable" to
a person, so their mind/brain assists in disguising it. But—the symptoms it
causes are still there, hence this process of associating (visible) symptom
sets to (non-visible) root causes, so that a non-superficial way of dealing
with the problem might be recommended.

~~~
watwut
Or maybe it is simply shaming and dominance thing. Fear is used to emasculate
and shoe the supposedly afraid person as lesser.

Like with masks - those opposed them like to frame wearing them as fear "I
will not be afraid". It is never responsibility, caution nor fashion nor "who
cares why not". It must be fear, because it shames.

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cortesoft
I find that having children has made me think deeper on a lot of things, for
the simple fact that children ask very difficult questions without having a
lot of other context to reference to when explaining. When you can’t use
anything besides what your kid has already learned to explain something, you
really have to think deeply.

I remember how long it took for my two year old to really grasp the meaning of
“tomorrow”. Is it tomorrow yet? When does tomorrow happen? You said something
was going to happen tomorrow, and now that thing is happening, so it must be
tomorrow now... but then why are you saying something else is going to happen
tomorrow? I thought it was tomorrow now!

~~~
nift
When it is summer (like now) and the sun sets here around 10 pm, my son can
put his head on the pillow for 5 mins, get up, see there is light outside (by
leaving his room, as his rooms is dark) and exclaim: "It is now morning!". He
is not always convinced that we are not lying to him when saying that is still
evening / night.

Maybe it gets easier to explain when they have a better understanding of time?
Understanding time has past and how much of it seems to be difficult for kids
to grasp / understand ? (I have no clue, just observing my own small world).

I guess the same could be said for adults though, our concept of time often
depends on whether or not we want to do what we are doing - time flies and so
on. Sorry for the tangent!

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psychomugs
Whenever running or exercise comes up in conversation, someone will invariably
ask what music I listen to. They're often shocked when I reply that I don't
carry anything on me other than a dumb stopwatch and my keys. Running is the
only respite I have from being wired in, a sort of pre-shower shower time for
me to face myself and my ideas. I've been trying to make it a habit to
immediately jot down any ideas right after.

~~~
catalogia
Somebody once called me a psycho after learning I don't listen to music/radio
when driving. It's simply my preference, but I guess some people feel very
strongly about it.

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dnprock
I've seen this topic, the gap between philosophy and life, being discussed a
lot in Buddhism. The Vietnamese Buddist monks usually talk about "Đạo và Đời"
meaning "Religion and Life." The monks explain why they don't get married and
laypeople can. If we generalize the concept, it can become "Philosophy and
Life."

The answer is practice. It's like math. In order to understand a concept, we
need to practice. In the information age, we often assume that we understand
some concepts by just reading Wikipedia pages. We all strive to be polymaths.
We want to discover the next great philosophy. But we end up being confused.
Practice is the key to understanding. Frequent mediation, having quiet time,
isolation are forms of practice.

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monadic2
Boredom is not a privilege except through material circumstances, it’s
literally a form of suffering. That it is a microcosm for the suffering of the
material world has literally thousands of years of discussion worth examining.
Perhaps this time could also be spent contemplating the material circumstances
that lead to the fucked-up nature of considering boredom to be a privilege.

~~~
lostinroutine
Could you point me to some examples of such discussion? Very interested in
checking them out.

------
JoeAltmaier
I sometimes think, people in cities are constantly distracted by the
entertaining parade of events forever passing. They have no time to think in
silence and stillness.

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082349872349872
Children may not be capable of the sustained informed rigour needed to "work
on" philosophy, but they're certainly capable of the playful inquiry needed to
"hack around" philosophy.

(I had a sports coach who used to ask the little kids questions like "what is
freedom?" I asked him why he asked them questions that adults fail to answer,
and he replied he was hoping that, in five or ten years if not now, they might
come up with an answer he hasn't yet run across)

~~~
memexy
That's a great coach. Planting the seeds that will help those kids later in
life to not be afraid of asking hard questions because they will remember
their coach asking these questions. It helps to have role models like that
because people are mimetic and they copy from everyone around them.

~~~
082349872349872
(from profile: "What if thoughts had Fourier transforms?")

Couldn't the "frequency-domain" conjugate of thoughts be Vannevar Bush's
"Associative Trails"?

~~~
memexy
How so?

~~~
082349872349872
They're conjugate in the sense that thoughts will be part of many different
trails, while trails are composed of many different thoughts. Focus too much
on the specific thought, and one loses track of which specific trail; focus
too much on the trail, and one loses track of which thought. (so a self-
reinforcing coherent group of thoughts and trails would be a gaussian?)

~~~
memexy
Interesting perspective. I imagine trails as graphs and stepping through a
graph is like looking at the components of a time-domain representation of a
signal so in my mind associative trails are a time-domain representation of
thinking. But you might be onto something. I've been thinking about how to
incorporate search into something I'm working on and search can be considered
a frequency representation because finding and ranking documents is about
finding the frequency components relevant to the query. If associative trails
can incorporate search then that might be a good enough frequency-domain
representation.

In the context of knowledge engineering I think "frequency" representation has
to be dynamic and search is a very simple form of dynamism. But I might be
thinking about this the wrong way and your view might be more correct, i.e.
static content = frequency domain, dynamic content = time domain.

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downerending
Not sure I'd call it a _privilege_ exactly, but frank boredom probably did
help me learn computers as a child. There was no hardware around, nor anyone
to learn from, so I simply read whatever sales literature and manuals I could
get my hands on (which wasn't much). Sheer boredom led me to study them well,
and it was good early learning.

That said, boredom can also be quite agonizing, and I wouldn't wish it on any
but my enemies.

------
Ericson2314
If people took daily showers in 17th century Europe this would have been a lot
easier. Nothing like a good long shower for thinking.

~~~
mtgp1000
People back then had miles to walk and no phones to stare at or tvs to watch.
There was plenty of time to think.

It's easy to think of ideas that others have had (interpolate). Much harder to
synthesize new ideas (extrapolate), or at least those of significance.
Probably related to P NP problem.

Edit: yes, verifying would be P and synthesizing would be NP. And with this
new intuition I suppose encryption will probably be safe!

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Depends where you're walking how free your mind is to wander - if you're
walking through woodlands, on rough tracks, in country with wild animals then
you could have no cognitive overhead available for pondering.

I walk, pandemic aside, 45mins each way to work as it's on quiet pavements I
can walk without thinking which is a different experience to walking in rough
country when one needs to focus on the walking itself.

For me I come up with a couple of inventions/innovations every week (ideas are
cheap as everyone says, which is rubbish for me as ideas are about my only
differentiator) but unfortunately I don't have facilities or time (nor
probably the skills) to develop them.

~~~
mtgp1000
I disagree, hiking rough terrain is an excellent time for me to think,
personally. I find the stimulation is additive.

Sort of like bouncing a leg or twirling a pen.

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eb3c90
It can, but lots of interesting philosophy can need collaboration. Good
philosophy of mind stuff should be informed by neuroscience.

