Boredom Is Learned

Part Two in my series on Curiosity.



There are no bored three year olds. They don't exist. Three year olds want to know everything: they explore the worlds through their eyes, hands, and mouths. Not always in that order. And that doesn't begin to describe a child in the presence of a strong odor, like fresh cookies or dog poo, or a loud sound, like fireworks or bird chatter. The five senses are hubs of great activity. The world is a whirling carousel of interesting things to a child. Things shimmer with possibility and purpose. Three year olds NEED to know everything.

So why don't thirteen year olds? Or thirty or forty or fifty year olds, for that matter?

I don't know. I suspect it has to do with the hidden cost of experience. As we grow and learn, we get energized by what is fresh and novel. Things happen that we don't expect. It's a ride! We experience something, we are thrilled/horrified/seduced/shocked by it, then expect to experience it again. Or expect it to change. Either way, by the very nature of learning, we use past experience to shape our present experiences. We know the world through the comparison between what happened yesterday and today. We feel wise when we recognize what's about to happen. We celebrate our ability to see the patterns in things; we reward those with the most correct answers. Our lives become safer and more stable as we become more steeped in the “causes and effects” of the world.

But something happens: as we grow, these expectations begin to erode our ability to experience something on its own terms. We experience fewer things that surprise us. We are constantly predicting what's going to happen-- and, often, we are right.

Life is scary! Predicting what's going to happen makes it bearable. Sometimes, it's the only difference between safety and danger.

The cost is that we often don't see everything that's there. We begin see ONLY the patterns that we've seen before; we focus on what's predictable and often miss the things that we don't expect.

As Sherlock Holmes tells us, we see what we expect to see.

And so, we learn to stop learning.

And that's how I define boredom: the result of displacing the wildness of curiosity with the stability of predictability.

We return to the three year old. Driven by curiosity, a child has no room for boredom. He wants to learn everything. As he grows, the preponderance of experience wears down his interest in the world, like the ocean lapping at an enormous stone on the beach. The sharp edges of curiosity, through predictability and experience, become the smooth contours of boredom.

How do we stop this erosion?

Do we even want to?

EAT! SCREW! RUN! KILL!

Part One in my series on Curiosity.

Why do we do anything?

I ate three hot dogs this week. I bought a Phoenix record. I ran twice. I got up early to watch the World Cup. I drank beer. I called my mom. I read about “Bloody Sunday.” I graded papers. I ignored a phone call. I DVR'ed the President and Glee. I watched one but not the other. I remembered a lost friend.

Why did I do any of this stuff? Seriously. What is the engine that drives human movement?

And how did I eat three hot dogs? Yikes.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be exploring why people do what they do. I'm interested in what moves us. I'll be examining myself and, if you freaky readers are into it, I'll be examining you.

I'll start this week with a list of concepts I'm playing with. Get in here if you've got ideas that I'm overlooking. Get in here!


I Blog America's Taxonomy of
“Why People Do Stuff”

The concept of INCENTIVE.
We love this one in our country. INCENTIVE is the prime mover. Desire + work = action. People don't do things altruistically. People do things to get something for themselves-- and all of us want things for ourselves. It's natural, baby. It's Adam Smith's economic psychology blended neatly with Thomas Aquinas' theological credibility; The Wealth of Nations' manifesto and the Quinque viae's undeniable elegance. All movement begins as the same force: to serve one's needs or desires.

The concept of SURVIVAL.
Here is Charles Darwin's contribution to the conversation. Not entirely distinct from the INCENTIVE argument, SURVIVAL boils things down to eating, reproducing, and running from danger/neutralizing danger. Keep the species, the relationships, the family, the business, the town, the country-- keep things going. Help things thrive and kill things that present danger. During a riveting episode of the BBC's Planet Earth, my tatooed, bearded, and reflective friend Brian eloquently observed that all of life is about four interjections: EAT! SCREW! RUN! KILL!

The concept of GUILT and SHAME.
Ok, I don't want to go to deeply into spirituality, religion, or psychology here. I have tremendous respect for all three and I recognize that the politics of these kind of conversations can often overshadow everything. And it's not to say that religion or psychology can be reduced to guilt or shame. But I would be remiss if I skipped the idea that we do things in order to avoid GUILT and SHAME. Here, we care less about what we want and more about avoiding what we don't want. We act in order to not feel bad.

Finally, my favorite concept of CURIOSITY.
Curiosity offers no unified theory. It's a messy idea, really. The CURIOSITY argument seems pretty easy to deny, actually: 1) the reason to do anything comes from curiosity and 2) people are curious because they want to understand the unknown. The deniability of CURIOSITY rests in the idea that, after childhood, our curiosity atrophies. I'm not sure we do very much to satiate our curiosity throughout the day. We don't investigate much, we don't explore much, we don't leave our comfort zones much.

We're not, actually, all that curious.

I mean, sure, we watch our celebrities or our politicians, we watch our children and our parents-- we are “curious” about some things. We want to know what's happening next door when the cops show up. We want to know what our best friend is doing at the hospital. We want to know what you will get me for my birthday in November. November 3rd-- just a heads up, people.

But we are not curious when we are eating three hot dogs. We are not curious when we call our moms. We are not even that curious when we are watching Glee or the President. We are not all that interested in understanding the unknown here. We're basically just being amused. Or irritated. But we're not being curious.

So why do I add it to the list of 'Why We Do Stuff?'

Because I suspect, in any effort to improve anything, CURIOSITY might be one of the most important and useful reasons to do act.

The Midget Emperor Is (Almost) Naked

Leaders need to strongly advocate and maintain their values.



So my principal wants to create to a committee to “address the problem of plagiarism in our school.” It's a “controversial issue” he told us.

Whatever happened to simply saying: we will deal harshly with students who cheat?
We will give them zeros. We will take away privileges. We will not allow kids to go to the prom. To walk at graduation.

I thought to myself, “I'd like to create a committee to address the problem of students bringing guns into our school.” You know, because you need a committee to address issues that are absolutely against everything we stand for.

We should have committees to deal with the problems of students selling drugs in the faculty bathroom.
A committee to address the selling of freshmen to international prostitution rings.
A committee to address the burning of books on the school track.

Of course, we don't have to create a committee to address the problem of students paying a stripper come to the school.

A midget stripper. In a cop uniform. Stripping in our cafeteria. Approved by our main office. Today.

Seriously. I checked. It was approved.

The good news is, I guess, that this man, whose professional choices I respect, did not strip down too much. I wasn't there. But I heard that he fired off a lap dance or two, so there's that.

A lunch monitor told me that there were a “few hundred kids” gathered for the event.

So, we don't need a committee because we've already decided how to handle the problem of midget strippers in our cafeteria.

But we need a committee to deal with plagiarism.

The Tyranny of Consistency

BP is going to be just fine.

No matter how many things are screwed up by this mess, BP will be F-I-N-E.

Why? Because WE are fine with it. You and I are like, basically, ok with it. And not because we are amoral or apathetic.

It's because of the Tyranny of Consistency.

To illustrate, I thought I'd share a little anecdote about two students, Emma and Jose. These are not their real names.

Emma submits her work with a mechanical precision. She crafts her responses, building arguments upon well articulated evidence culled from the texts, delivering elegant essays (double spaced!) that include flawless documentation. She includes jokes. Emma writes fine papers; she peppers her prose with a patina of smartly shaded idioms. English teachers pray to Ancient Greek gods to send students like Emma.

She listens, she contributes, she modifies her work. She grows.

Jose abandons his work with the ease of a drunk aristocrat. He belches his responses, constructing arguments mitigated by energy-drink chemistry, trailing dog-eared looseleaf that includes dozens of errors in punctuation and spelling. He adds insult. Jose writes lousy papers; he smears his prose with a quilt of carelessly sewn non-sequitur. English teachers pray to Ancient Greek gods to smite students like Jose.

He refuses, he dismantles, he plays by few rules. He festers.

One day, Emma is late with a paper; it's her first time being late with anything. The teacher, despite his waterproof rules regarding tardiness, allows her a day to make up the work that she gratefully accepts.

Jose, on the other hand, has been on time once out of dozens of times. Through experience, he knows the teacher’s calculation for late points better than the teacher himself. Jose, who appears to notice nothing, notices Emma’s reprieve. He tells his mother and she gets on the phone with the teacher’s supervisor. Within two weeks, the staff of the school receives an email from the principal about the importance of consistency and fairness.

What's this have to do with BP?

Jose weighs the cost of working against the cost of the consequences. He's wagered that our school doesn't want justice; it wants stability. Or, at least, the appearance of stability.

And Jose, like BP, has made a good bet.

The idea of “fairness” rests squarely at the heart of what is often called “common sense.” Unfortunately, fairness and consistency have become interchangeable. When we say “fair,” what we most often mean is “stability preserving.”

Worse, we’ve muddled it more by confusing “fairness” with “justice.” We've figured out that the only way to be “fair” is to do things which will rock the boat the least. To make the system work "justly," we believe that tomorrow must be as predictable as today.

The problem rests in a system that is founded on the idea that creating consistency is the BEST means to create stability and fairness. But that mess in the Gulf is no example of stability, and neither is Jose and his mother's puppetry of our principal.

To change, we all need to challenge ourselves to face our own part in this. Our schools are simply manifesting the values of our culture. Schools didn't invent the idea of conflating justice with consistency. Schools didn't create a world that loves stability at almost any cost.

Our culture did. And, in case you didn't notice, you and I are a conspirators.

What are we trading for this stability, this consistency, that we treasure so much?

I'll tell you what I'm going to do tomorrow: I'm going to drive my car to work. My car that always starts when I turn the key. The car I drive, everyday, the same route 35 minutes each way to work.

The car I fill up, sometimes, at BP. Vroom vroom.