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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

> “Profound boredom may sound like an overwhelmingly negative concept but, in fact, it can be intensely positive if people are given the chance for undistracted thinking and development.”

Is there historical evidence, from before social media or computers existed, that boredom made people productive or creative? I am worried about my kids never ever being bored, and the points in the article are tempting to believe, but when I think about history, I’m sure people were more lots more bored but not sure they were creatively doing any better than what we see today.

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Boredom is what led to pretty much every project I've ever done. I usually have a list in my head of things that could be made better, but they never come to anything until I have a lengthy period of nothing to do.

Latest example: I had to take all my vacation time this year or else I'd lose it. I got so bored that I built this over the past weeks: https://github.com/kstenerud/kbnf

I don’t know anything about your job, so it’s pure assumptions, but aren’t you using your creative input to solve problems in your job as well ?

Basically, your hobby projects are probably more freeing and unbounded, but are they more _creative_ than the work you’re be doing in your paid time ?

That's an interesting question... I'm not sure how one would quantify which is more creative, and I certainly wouldn't stay long at a job that has no creative outlet. It's also confounded by the fact that I got my current job because they're using one of my open source projects as part of their core business.

In my personal history my creativity has dropped by a frightening amount since the rise of YouTube and smartphones.

I now have to actively lock myself out of certain services and do daily meditation sessions to somewhat counteract those distractions.

They're just too easy to indulge in.

I've mostly stopped doing music and writing prose because of it, and I'm slowly getting back into the groove.

Anecdotally, I do a lot less personal projects and wild exploration since spending much more time on the net every day. This resonates to other people’s comments I think.

On the other hand, when looking back at what I was doing a decade or two ago, they were dumber, clunkier and just less interesting things overall. My personal take is that the barrier to invest time into something is now a lot higher, but the results are to me much more fulfilling and impacting.

Doing stuff out of pure boredom wasn’t as efficient and engaging as doing stuff that I long thought about and actively create time to execute on.

I'm not sure whether it counts as boredom, but Python was said to have been created by GVR to keep himself occupied during a Christmas holiday.

My four step kids have no idea what boredom is. I, however, do, and found most of my creative endeavours and hobbies arose when I was bored. I'm pretty sure if boredom wasn't the alternative, I wouldn't have learned the guitar, or spent many hours daydreaming science fiction fantasies.

I think it's hard to judge, because we have so many more tools and resources today which amplify creative output.

It might true that we are have more creative output today than we did 100 years ago, while also being true that social media stifles us from reaching our full creative potential.

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