Arthur C. Brooks argues boredom activates the brain's default mode network, prompting reflection on life's purpose. In a Harvard experiment, most people chose painful electric shocks over sitting alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. Avoiding boredom can increase depression and meaninglessness.
You need to be bored. You will have less meaning and you will be more depressed if you never are bored. I mean, it couldn't be clearer. Let me give you the, the good side of boredom in general. Boredom is a tendency for us to not be occupied otherwise cognitively, which is over our thinking system to use a part of our brain that's called the default mode network. The default mode network is a bunch of structures in your brain that switch on when you don't have anything else to think about. We don't like it. My colleague in the psychology department, here at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, he did experiments where, where people had to sit in a room for 15 minutes with instructions to do absolutely nothing, and there was nothing in the room to do except there was a button in front of them they could push, and if they did, they gave themselves a painful electric shock. Sit there bored or get a shock. A big majority of the participants gave themselves shocks instead of thinking about nothing. Why is boredom so bad? Well, because the default mode network makes us think about things that might be kind of uncomfortable. When you think about nothing, while your mind wonders and thinks about, for example, big questions of meaning in your life. What does my life mean? You go to kind of uncomfortable existential questions when you're bored.
