Why boredom is anything but boring
nature.com
nature.com
That tendency for boredom has leaked into other parts of my life and I am actively trying to fight it, and that is difficult. I hope this research continues and turns up decent conclusions.
For the record, I gave my two-weeks this past week. 6 months is long enough.
Get to work kind of early, put your stuff on your desk, fill coffee mug, etc. Make it look like you're there. Re direct your office phone to your cell.
Take your laptop or books you want to study to the nearby coffee shop, and do whatever you want there - side projects, learning, teaching yourself programming languages, etc. etc. Be sure to answer your cell and respond to work emails.
Come back into the office around lunch time and sit in the lunch room to eat, then head out again for the afternoon. It's easy to cover your tracks by saying you were in a meeting, or working with so-and-so, or whatever.
It took me a long time to understand it was better to do the above, than it was to sit at your desk and be seen to not be working hard (i.e. reading a programming book, or reading HN)
Most recently, I quit my job after 4 months because I tried to make too many improvements. Every time the topic of an improvement came up, I was told "You're the new guy. You can't expect to know the nuance of our infrastructure/application/code." It's the biggest cop-out, especially considering it began with, "You're the new guy with a fresh pair of eyes and great experience. If you see any problems, let us know!". It's a silly state of affairs when folk think of good intentions entirely in the lens of a threat model.
In fairness, I suppose I was a bit too critical. Maybe it comes from reading too much HN. :)
I stopped hanging in there, rented out an office and started working on my own thing. ;)
To someone who's never experienced it, it might seem like having no work would be great, but it's actually terrible for our sense of self-worth in my experience. A surprising number of people are too afraid to leave a position even if they feel it's soul-sucking. It takes serious guts to leave a steady job even if it sucks.
Good luck finding a more exciting position!
And then they fucked it up by adding a bunch of top-down, manufacturing oriented process, but by that point I was able to find another position and Gee the Eff Oh. At least my skills didn't stagnate, and I didn't have a sword hanging over my head on one of my personal projects.
[0]I'm still kinda baffled by this one. I had root access to everything already and could easily have written any malicious code I wanted to introduce at home.
Edit: Formatting
Is there a specific reason, or has your manager just forgotten about you? I'm confused.
I work as a teacher and I can recommend teaching to anyone who wants to avoid boredom. Never a dull moment, honestly. Always something to sort out. Not unicorns and butterflies, but never boring.
Some of the biggest life decisions I make come at the end of a spell of boredom. Either as a result of too long doing monotonous work, or purposely self-induced, perhaps in order to let my subconscious do all the work and let a solution float to the surface.
http://www.sorenkierkegaard.nl/artikelen/Engels/145.%20THE%2...
For what it's worth, I got a 4/28.
Mield forms of autism, by the way, is when you have too many of such behavioral loops.
Attribution please.
The question why, still unanswered, is much more tricky. It seems that, like it is with a language and many other traits, there is a genetic predisposition and environmental conditioning (training). It seems that autistic people has some genetically transmitted factors, which, if behavior patterns in early childhood is not corrected, would result in behavioral deviations, such as extreme shyness, inability to maintain an eye contact, sociophobia etc.
The famous "mind blindness", it seems, is an effect, a symptom, not the cause. Those children just didn't train themselves enough to recognize facial expression patterns properly because, perhaps, some inherited changes in the "social areas" of the brain which, for example, perform facial expression recognition.
Why are such areas supposedly exist? Because even newborns could distinguish calm and friendly face from angry, etc. Facial expressions is the most efficient way to read other people's emotions, along with other non-verbal bodily ques, such as posture and jerky movements. No one taught them to do it, so it is somehow hard-wired. Animal, of course, also read body-language, much better than we are.
Inability to read (or rather interpret) other people result in excessive anxiety, almost physical discomfort, and repetitiveness, as an effect, is probably an acquired habituation to deal with that anxiety.
Anyway "Mield [sic?] forms of autism, by the way, is when you have too many of such behavioral loops" is incorrect. I don't think that simply exhibiting the "behavioral loop" symptoms would be sufficient for a diagnosis at least.
The basic idea is that people with autism (or at least a big 'subset' of what we now call autism) are born with heightened sensitivities (or 'differences', in some way) on a very fundamental level. Whatever the exact cause, the result is frequent (high-functioning) and sometimes constant ('full-blown', to use the proper term :P) overload.
Or to put it differently, from the outside it looks like autistics are trying to navigate a dark basement with dark shades, where perhaps the real situation is that they're trying to navigate this room with night-vision goggles. In both cases they keep bumping into things and are 'deficient' in a number of ways. However, in the first interpretation, the problem is that the bare bulb does not provide enough light when wearing shades, whereas in the second interpretation the autistic is blinded because the light overloads his night-vision goggles.
Obviously, which of these is true has effects on how to treat the problem, assuming it's always one or the other and assuming there's not a third option, of course.
There is growing support of this theory, and Temple Grandin touches on it in her book 'The Autistic Mind' (which I find refreshingly hard-sciencey in its approach. More emphasis on brain than on mind, so to speak).
That said, a common criticism is that Intense World Theory perhaps explains a bit too much. And it's relatively new and basically the opposite of many of the previous theories.
Despite this caveat, the reason why I strongly support the theory, even if it might ultimately be entirely or partly wrong, is that it fits much better with the self-reported experience of actual autists, both high-functioning and low-functioning (in the cases where they find a way to communicate). And actually listening to the experience of the person suffering from something strikes me as rather crucial when you start talking about causes.
One reason why I dismissed the possibility that I might be autistic is that I simply did not identify with the descriptions. It was only after the diagnosis that I realized that the symptoms were ridiculously applicable to myself; it was just the underlying explanation that seemed like the opposite of my own experience. It baffles me that problems making eye-contact (the symptom) is still very often said to be because of an inability to understand it, or something like that (the purported cause), when most autistics I know or read about self-describe the cause as being 'overstimulated' and simply not being able to maintain eye contact because it's all 'just too much'.
I can strongly recommend 'The Autistic Brain', by the way. It's very enlightening.
Those command our lives anyway, the only thing is if we train ourselves good or bad ones (and know the difference).