Books and the 'Boredom Boom'

I think his dad was just trying to get his son to stop whining about how bored he was.

Nah, I'm pretty sure he just wanted to encourage me to come up with ways to entertain myself. Thus, my childhood hobbies included building a city out of empty kleenex boxes for a family of little pieces of wool to live in; recording songs off the radio onto cassette tapes and coming up with indexing strategies to keep track of them in notebooks; and soaking every plant I could find in rubbing alcohol to find out which ones made dye I could paint with. Weird kid, what can I say.

I think you mean you'll project it everywhere. I say this to my kids as well, not to signal anything but to engage their creativity. A lot of kids these days can't figure anything to do if they don't have a device in their hands. I had to routinely ride in a car for 8+ hours as a kid and mobile devices either didn't exist or were so expensive as to may as well not exist. A lot of my creativity today stems from techniques I developed in those times.

Only this case, despite following the syntactic form, has nothing to do with this pattern.

For one, it's not about signaling superiority (which is what the pattern is all about) -- it's merely advice. The sayer (?) is not claiming they are exciting themselves, just that being bored is a sign of not recognizing opportunities to be engaged with something.

(Also, in the general case, the presence of the pattern or the snobbism of the one saying it, doesn't mean it's also wrong).

Also on HBO (Game of Thrones S05E04):

Stannis Baratheon to his daughter Shireen: "My father used to tell me that boredom indicates a lack of inner resources."

Shireen: "Were you bored a lot too?"

Edit: formatting

Neither boredom nor never being bored is a sign of a boring personality. But for me, the spirit of OP's quote is that if you're intellectually curious, you can almost always find something to explore - the systems around you, the natural environment, getting to know ordinary people, examining and classifying materials, describing your lack of stimulation poetically...And that's a good attitude to cultivate. You'll still probably get bored occasionally; it's a part of life.

Yeah where I live, if there are no cars the lights don't change.

I hate, REALLY hate the intersections that try to be smart about me taking a kitty-corner crossing by pressing both direction buttons.

When I do that, I'm trying to tell the light what I need so it can figure out the correct timing signals to get me where I need to go faster.

This is also the case where I live - if you don't press the button the whole thing stays unlit so you know it's "off".

It's the same for door-close buttons in the handful of elevators I use regularly. The doors do close just when you push it, whereas you have to wait several seconds if you don't.

There are busy intersections where the buttons are installed, but are only active outside of rush hours or on weekends or not on weekends or only when the circus is in town etc.

Because the programming of the lights is different to facilitate maximum throughput (f.e. with a green wave) in some periods, and the walk signs are on a constant/different timing then.