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Comment by purple-leafy | Hacker News Reader

The state of boredom is due to a lack of focus, goals, and having too many options.

Also, bored people are typically boring people.

Remove all social media, stop reading the news, get on top of your finances, keep a small but significantly valued group of friends, have a vision for your life, and have honbies and side projects, and failing all that - get off your ass and go for a walk. If you’re disabled that last part makes things tricky though unfortunately for some.

I’m never bored, there’s too many rabbit holes and too much work to do

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> Also, bored people are typically boring people.

This is such a bad sentiment. Being bored is fine and a normal part of existance, it doesn't make a person boring. There are LOTS of reasons to get bored and we don't all need to feel stimulated all of the time. Being bored can push people to do something new, being bored can just be down to having to watch Cars with your kid for the 1000th time because they want to watch it with you and you don't always put your own self first. Being bored can also be due to burnout, trying to chase all the shiney new stuff to make yourself feel interesting.

I think the platitude is geared towards people who are chronically or continuously bored.

The subtext is that when motivated and engaged people feel bored they find something to do. They recognize that the emotion they experience does not indicate that the world is devoid of engaging activities and ideas.

While true perhaps for some people, this still risks labelling folks with eg depression/dysthymia/chronic fatigue as boring. Lacking (mental) energy can prevent one from doing a lot of things.

Which is a shame, but that probably does make someone more boring at face value. I’ve suffered depression many times, I would say while depressed I was pretty boring to be around. Which is a shame, but probably true

Exactly, depression isn’t known for its fun and exciting side effects.

In that context, would you say being boring/interesting is a fundamental aspect of a person or a temporary state (like emotions)? Because if antidepressants (or alcohol etc) can make one less/not depressed or turn a sober person into someone “fun”, was the person boring or were they just in a boring state of mind (whatever that may mean)?

I don’t think there is much of a meaningful distinction to be made.

Someone may be boring within a situational context, but that context may persist throughout someone’s entire life.

Most people have some contexts within which they are engaged or exciting, and some where they are not.

Speaking as someone who has struggled with some of those things, those people generally ARE more boring.

Lacking mental energy to engage and not doing things has real consequences. It doesn’t mean they are bad people, but it is just realistic to acknowledge those consequences, like saying quadriplegics are usually bad at marathons.

I partially agree, but at least for me, it’s much easier to do something if someone else is doing it. I may be bored/tired by myself but if someone’s going for a hike or discussing fun technology I’ll likely try and join them and may not come across as boring.

Sorry by that i mean people that say “I’m bored” or chronically bored people. All things in moderation

> I’m never bored, there’s too many rabbit holes and too much work to do

It is a temporary condition. At some point on thousandth rabbit hole you'll feel yourself bored, and decide not to dive deeper, because what is the point. Probably you will be able to use rabbit holes as a means to fight boredom for some time afterwards, but it would be harder and harder with time passed.

Many people I know felt something like that with video games. Video games were interesting. Then they became not so interesting. And then people just lost the point of playing video games. My brother was constantly upgrading his PC to play newest titles. Now he is still upgrading his PC, because it makes him feel happy, but he doesn't play anymore. I never upgraded my PC to play a game, I played those that could run on the hardware I had. Now I don't play games either. I try sometimes to play to fight boredom, but it doesn't work, it is more boring to play now than not to play.

> Remove all social media, stop reading the news, get on top of your finances, keep a small but significantly valued group of friends, have a vision for your life

You know, it is easier to learn how to deal with boredom than to achieve all this points. Some people never manage to have friends or to get on top of their finances.

All these things is what maybe makes you immune to boredom. It doesn't mean it will help others: people are wonderfully different. But the worse: probably all these things have nothing to do with your lack of boredom. What you witness is a correlation, it doesn't have to be a causation, it can even be a spurious correlation.

I lost interest in video games all of a sudden when I saw how they were made, and how all those little design elements were made to keep the player's interest and attention. I was like "oh, I'm being manipulated constantly when playing this". Really put me off, like "seeing how sausages are made".

That’s a fair reaction to seeing how the sausages are made. I wonder what will happen to the human condition when the great questions are finally answered. How did we get here, how did the universe come to be, are there aliens ?

Exactly the same, I lost all interest in video games when realized I was just moving numbers in a database

This is one reason why I never really got into microtransactions. Oh, you want me to pay you money just so you can toggle a 0 to a 1 in a database to signify me being able to use a particular hat in-game? No thanks.

I do still enjoy making numbers go up when I don't have to pay anything beyond an initial purchase, though (i.e. I still like playing games)

"Real money" is also like this, bank balances etc.

Indeed but money can be exchanged for goods and services. My minecraft inventory, not so much.

People are manipulated all the time in attempts to keep interest and attention, by just about everything they consume. Conversations with others, news articles and books that they read, music and podcasts they listen to. I imagine you can find it in just about anything in modern society if you look hard enough for it.

I'm bored when I'm doing things that I'm not interested in, but at the same time, have to pay a lot of attention, like attending some of the meetings, or certain lectures when I was a student.

The problem is the opposite of having too many options. If I have options, if the situation allows my mind wonder, if I don't need to focus, but instead can think about anything, I can easily sit there for hours without getting bored.

> and having too many options.

I'm old enough to be able to remember when there were ~6 TV channels, and, really, only 4 of them actually worked.

You had option A, B, C, or D, and you picked on. Usually it came down to an A or B.

Now with 300 channels I get lost in choosing something, and ultimately default to something generic as background noise as opposed to actually giving it my attention.