CHAPTER 3
THE MOTIVATION TO CHANGE
The children are bustling with excitement. Hundreds of people swarm along the shore of Lake Michigan on a perfect spring day—blue skies, light breeze, and the promise of better days ahead. The year is 1933 and Chicago is alive, celebrating a “Century of Progress!”
You stroll past multicolored tents and unimaginable exhibits. A Lilliputian city of midgets, exotic wild animals from all corners of the globe, babies in incubators, automobiles from the future! But your children drag you by the hand to the most bizarre tent of all—Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium!
Just taking the stage is an unassuming man—no taller than you, with neatly cropped hair and wearing white breeches, held tight by a black belt with a large brass buckle. The announcer, sporting a tuxedo, top hat, and cane, completes the circus atmosphere. He booms, “Behold, Ladies and Gentleman, a sight not for the faint of heart. Arthur Plumhoff—the Pain Proof Man!”1 The audience is rapt. “An ordinary man with extraordinary powers. Watch as he repeatedly pierces the flesh without flinching once!”
Plumhoff steps forward with the gait of a street fighter. Without a word he picks up a five-inch needle. Crouching slightly, unblinking eyes staring, Plumhoff slowly opens his mouth, a gaping expression evincing more terror than awe. The room is silent. Theatrically he proceeds to push the needle first through one cheek, clearly visible through his open maw, before continuing on to penetrate the other.
Gasps of surprise and revulsion fill the tent. Your older son edges forward in his seat, enthralled. His younger brother cringed before the first cheek was breached and has cowered against your chest, eyes covered ever since. You think to yourself, “How is this even possible? How can a man stand such pain?”
“The Human Pincushion”—a man whose lack of pain led him to a life in the circus—was first discussed in medical journals in the 1930s.2 His disorder—congenital analgesia—starkly highlights the function of pain: it alerts us to the need for action.
It’s important to note that the purpose of pain is not to cause hurt. The function of pain is to signal the need to act. From the reflexive withdrawal from fire (Figure 3.1) or the retraction of your hand from an errant chop of the kitchen knife, to more deliberate actions like taking painkillers for a headache, pain signifies a need to do something to remedy the feeling.
This functional account of pain is not new. Pain has long been seen as an experience that interrupts our current focus of attention and motivates action to escape the painful experience; this disruption to our ongoing goals can, in turn, create an urge to restore the goals we had been pursuing before the pain began.3 For physical pain, where tissue damage is the prime mover, this picture is relatively simple. But what of the kind of psychological distress we suggest is strongly associated with being bored?
Figure 3.1. René Descartes, The Path of Burning Pain (1664). This drawing is intended to show the neural pathways for a withdrawal reflex. The fire leads to a painful sensation, presumably burning skin, which is transmitted to the brain, where an action is planned. In this rather quaint drawing, the cherubic subject, sporting a bemused grin and showing little to no signs of pain, reaches calmly toward the afflicted toe. The fire is far more likely to elicit a spinal reflex than a deliberate action. The point, however, is that the pain generated by the fire demands action.
One theory suggests that pain, including psychological pain, operates as a self-regulatory signal.4 While physical pain may elicit an automatic response, like removing your hand from the flame, psychologically unpleasant states like sadness—and boredom—may evoke more complex reactions. The distress we feel at the loss of a loved one evokes many responses, from wanting time alone to actively seeking the comfort of others. However we choose to respond to a psychologically stressful event, the point remains the same: pain—physical or psychological—operates as a signal, prompting action. We believe the boredom signal can be understood in much the same way.
Let’s imagine an average day in the life of an office worker. Perhaps the day starts with some enthusiasm for what lies ahead. Our office worker is fully engaged in the tasks at hand. But it’s hard to imagine being “switched on” all the time. The office worker must fight against distractions and deal with other signals to act, like a rumbling stomach, which communicates the need to eat. Sometimes, even the best attempts to stay tuned-in will fail. As time marches on, and things seem to be taking longer than expected, perhaps our office worker starts to fidget.5 She pushes her chair back from the desk, stretches, takes a deep breath, and gets back to the grind. A little later on, she’s checking emails, deleting spam and fidgeting a little more than before. A brief glance out her window turns into a five-minute daydream. Each of these episodes might reveal boredom is lurking, as she tries to lose herself in distractions, but perhaps it’s not until the signal is strong enough that our office worker realizes that she’s bored! Off-task and unsatisfied, she checks social media to see what her friend Bob is having for lunch today. That leads her to an article on climate change deniers from Sheryl’s post and, just like that, she’s down the rabbit hole of infotainment. The climate change piece leads to yet another article highlighting the latest gaffe by a prominent politician, and that leads to a fluff piece on pandas donated to the Toronto Zoo, which finally leads her to the sports page for a depressing recap of the local team’s latest losing streak. At each point, she is disengaged and unsatisfied. The boredom signal tells her as much: This activity is not satisfying; do something else! There are many reasons why our office worker may have become disengaged—the inexorable march of time (things often become less interesting the longer we do them) or the sense of being trapped (having to do the task but not wanting to do it) might lead to sounding the boredom alarm. Whatever the reason, it is the boredom signal that highlights her lack of engagement.
Understanding boredom as a signal to act forces an important distinction between engagement and meaning, a distinction we will return to often. Although it’s not popular to admit, most of us can imagine doing something deeply meaningful, let’s say playing with our children, that nonetheless could be suffocatingly boring. Children seem far more content to persist in the telling of knock-knock jokes ad nauseam! On the other hand, you can imagine being fully engaged with something that you wouldn’t normally say was particularly replete with meaning. Binge-watching the latest inane reality TV series may seem a waste of time in retrospect, but it was totally absorbing at the time. In this sense, the boredom signal tells us less about the content of what we are doing and more about the fact that whatever it is, we are not fully engaged by it. Turn the knock-knock session into a wrestling bout and maybe boredom can be avoided.
Another way to think of the boredom signal is to ask what a life without boredom might look like. We might even long for a boredom-free life. But on closer examination we should be careful what we wish for. A life without boredom would be filled with apathy and stagnation. At first glance, the claim that a boredom-free life would lead to apathy might seem crazy, because boredom and apathy seem so similar. Indeed, they both share the state of being disengaged. But as psychological states, they are, and feel, fundamentally different. The apathetic person is free of the pressured desire to find engagement. By its very definition, apathy is an absence of any desire to even bother redressing a lack of challenge—a failure of motivation, classically embodied in the couch potato. But for the bored person, things are very different. They are acutely aware of their strong desire for engagement—all of which leads to discomfort when that desire goes unmet.6 As with pain, boredom motivates us to act—to redress the negative impact of disengagement. Eliminate that motivation and we may have a life without boredom, but in its extreme this becomes a life without desires of any kind.
Similarly, a life without pain might seem like something we would all want. However, for the “Human Pincushion” this meant a life fraught with the dangers of inadvertent self-harm. Perhaps attractive in the abstract, a life without boredom could lead to complete stagnation and a level of inaction that would ultimately be harmful to us as individuals and as a society. Our existence would have been short-lived if we did not engage our skills and talents to achieve goals. Imagine where we’d be if our ancestors had been content to remain mentally unengaged, lolling around the campfire (assuming they had the initiative to tame fire in the first place), never feeling the motivation to explore, create, and understand. No doubt, this would be a recipe for an unproductive and short life. Like pain, boredom is an important signal telling us we need to act to fully realize our potential.
The signal functions well when we respond to it adaptively. You might accurately read the boredom signal, but how you act next is critical. You could choose to engage in behaviors that are ultimately harmful—couch surfing behind your buddy’s 4 × 4 or indulging in more than a few pints at the local pub. Or you could choose more productive outlets for engagement: go for a run, grab a new book to read, pick up your guitar and belt out a few classics. Unfortunately, time and time again boredom has been linked to maladaptive responses, including increased impulsivity and addiction.7 Adaptive responses to the boredom signal need to invoke self-regulatory mechanisms to choose something more engaging than whatever we have been doing and to avoid potential distractions (in other words, leave social media alone until our lunch break). Succumbing to distraction and waning self-control represent potential antecedents to extended boredom. Chronically adopting maladaptive boredom remedies—from the extreme of couch surfing to the more mundane time sink of Facebook surfing—are unlikely to prevent boredom episodes from punctuating our days in the future, even though they may alleviate the state temporarily.
Consider boredom, then, as both a transient state and as a disposition.8 We all know people who claim to never struggle with boredom. They may even state that “Only boring people get bored!” If indeed some people are blessed with a boredom-free life it might be because they are simply better at quickly responding to the signal before boredom becomes protracted. In this light, boredom only becomes problematic when it happens often and when our responses to it are ineffective or maladaptive.9 As a transient state, boredom is aversive and disruptive, but in many instances may be relatively easy to remedy. Perhaps, on reading the signs of impending boredom, the boredom signal gets the office worker started on long-term project number two, immediately revitalizing the work day. Or perhaps she does become engaged by Bob’s culinary posts on social media. It may be that a failure to respond appropriately to the boredom signal is associated with a higher frequency of experiencing the state and a difficulty in extricating oneself from it.10 Those failing to respond to the boredom signal effectively may struggle to select an appropriately engaging new goal. Any failure to swiftly select something to do—adaptive or otherwise—may doom them to the prolonged, aggressively dissatisfying experience of boredom. Again, the distinction between content and process is important here. The boredom signal itself does not do any of the work needed to figure out what to do next or why what we’re doing now is not enough. Determining what might be more engaging, meaningful, or satisfying likely depends on complex psychological processes related to motivation, reward, learning, and past experience. Boredom can’t solve itself. It merely raises the alarm (Figure 3.2).
Negative feelings normally signal the presence of something relevant in our environment. A snake on the path ahead or an angry person rushing toward us, for example, signify an important event demanding a response. We suggest that boredom operates in much the same way. Where fear and pain signify the presence of something demanding a response—the snake on the path ahead stops us in our tracks, forcing a rapid search for a safe escape route—boredom signifies the absence of something; an absence of engagement. But how that absence is felt is a complex matter. Perhaps for some the onset of boredom is accompanied by physical sensations, such as a need to fidget, to pace, to dispense with unspent energy. For others there may be no discernible physical signature, but there may be a psychological need, poorly defined but ultimately arising from a feeling that potential is somehow being wasted. Regardless, this absence of engagement poses an immediate challenge. I’m bored. Now what?
Figure 3.2. Calvin, the perpetually daydreaming hero of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip, detects the boredom signal successfully … but he is not thanked for externalizing the boredom alarm! Calvin’s predicament highlights another factor important to the experience of boredom—situational constraints. He is trapped in the boring classroom with no avenue for an adaptive response.
In this light, boredom need not be seen as entirely negative.11 Although a negative feeling, boredom operates as a positive signal in at least two ways. It tells us that what we are doing now is no longer engaging, and it reminds us of our goals. It may even remind us that there are different, potentially better goals to strive for. Andreas Elpidorou, a philosopher from the University of Louisville, describes this as the “push” that boredom provides. Like pain, which motivates us to protect ourselves, boredom motivates us to seek out and engage with something that is perceived as more challenging, more engaging than whatever we are doing now.
Without the potential for boredom, the motivation to engage our cognitive capacity, we would squander our resources and fail to realize our potential. Contrasting tales of an eleven-year-old valve operator from the early eighteenth century and a pathologically lethargic teenager from the mid-twentieth century show just how important the desire to be mentally engaged really is.
Poor old Humphrey Potter’s job was to repeatedly open and close valves at precisely the right moment to successfully operate Newcomen’s atmospheric machine.12 Monotonous doesn’t even begin to capture it! Humphrey hated being a plug man. Even by 1713 standards, his was an exceedingly boring task. Watch for the right moment … open valve A … wait for the next critical moment … close valve B. Lather, rinse, repeat. Humphrey was bored and restless. He knew there had to be a better way. Indeed, there was, and unlike his more compliant fellow plug men, Humphrey was driven by primordial boredom to discover it. Humphrey noticed that he, as a thinking, decision-making, sentient person, had been rendered superfluous by his job. Valves were to be opened only when another mechanism was in a specific location and never at any other moment. So Humphrey set about devising a system of cords and gears to make the atmospheric machine do the work for him. Eureka! His boring job eliminated, Humphrey could now run off and play with the other children. Faced with extreme boredom, he had contributed to a monumental evolution of the steam engine—the introduction of the skulking gear—“skulking” being the eighteenth-century word for shirking work!
Flash forward more than 200 years to meet the yin to Humphrey’s yang, Elsie Nicks. Elsie had suffered from terrible headaches for as long as she could remember. They got so bad she was prescribed morphine just to cope. But things were about to get even worse. As a teenager in 1941 she began to have “episodes.”13 She would become drowsy and extremely apathetic. She spoke only occasionally and in whispered monosyllables. Her behavior was far more reclusive than the cool, detached attitude common to teenagers. Eventually Elsie lost the capacity to act at all. This was not catatonia or paralysis—she simply had no drive. Elsie’s case was a medical mystery of sorts. Was this an instance of the epidemic that killed almost a million people twenty years earlier—encephalitis lethargica?14 Eventually, her Australian-born doctor, Hugh Cairns, discovered the culprit—a cyst in Elsie’s brain rendering her inert. Draining the cyst resulted in brief returns to normal behavior. Ultimately, Cairns was forced to remove the offending cyst, restoring Elsie’s capacity to act based on her wishes, wants, and desires. Cairns named her condition akinetic mutism.
There is something essential about boredom embedded in Humphrey’s and Elsie’s stories. Namely, boredom is an expression of the fact that we have intentions, and intentions are critical to functioning successfully in the world. Humphrey was committed to acting in a way that was engaging and used his abilities to their fullest. Because of this he was burdened by boredom when faced with the job of plug man. His boredom drove him to find a better way. Elsie, on the other hand, lacked the ability to commit to any course of action.15 Because of this she was not burdened by boredom when faced with sitting for hours with nothing to do. Indeed, she could not even will herself to be dissatisfied because she did not want to do anything else. In a nutshell, someone with akinetic mutism shows a complete lack of self-initiated action. The condition is defined as an inability to form and maintain desires.16 Essentially, Elsie became like a machine—able to behave only in ways others programmed her to. In the absence of others’ commands, Elsie was content to sit for extended periods of time doing nothing. Apathy of this kind is in many ways the opposite of boredom. When apathetic we do not care, but when bored we care deeply. In fact, we are tormented precisely because of our desire for something satisfying to do, and we are bored precisely because that urgent desire goes unsatisfied.
Without the capacity to form intentions to act, without the drive to engage, we would also lack the capacity to experience boredom. We could consider that never experiencing boredom due to a failure to formulate any desires is a Pyrrhic victory.17 Pyrrhus is the Greek general who lamented having won battles against the Romans at such an enormous cost that ultimately the war could not be won. Perhaps an absence of desires frees us from boredom in the moment (winning one battle) but ultimately prevents us from effective engagement with the world (in this analogy, losing the war, as Pyrrhus did). At their most foundational level, desires can be thought of as biological drives—drives that function to preserve our lives and the future of our clan. People that can’t form desires are at serious risk of death. At their most lofty heights, desires represent human strivings that keep us searching for a better way, like Humphrey’s need to escape the monotony of the work of a plug man. In comparison, Elsie couldn’t even reach for a dropped candy, much less create a revolutionary gear to avoid the drudgery of work.
It’s a double-edged sword. Having the capacity for desires, intentions, and projects puts us at risk for boredom, yet without them we would never innovate and develop as individuals or as a society. Humphrey’s solution to his boredom was to create a machine—a machine that both relieved him from the drudgery of being a plug man and also resulted in a better steam engine. Machines, like Humphrey’s skulking gear, don’t shirk monotonous work. Machines, computers, and automatons will do the same repetitive task over and over again without complaint. In a manner of speaking we are advantaged by the possibility of boredom, whereas—from our point of view—the virtue of a machine is that it has no capacity for boredom. Indeed, machines that cannot be bored are a clever invention of biological organisms that can. Such machines have played an important role in our society. But, and here is where things take an ironic turn, we want more from our machines. We want our machines to be intelligent, and intelligence is a whole new ball game.
Think of your desktop computer. It may have incredible computational power, but no one would claim it comes even close to having what we would call true intelligence or the capacity for adaptive behavior. It can’t even do simple things like make a cup of coffee. If we want to create artificial intelligence (AI) machines that will innovate and solve problems they were not originally designed for, we have to make them be more like Humphrey—prone to boredom. To make machines intelligent, we have to make them motivated to shirk monotonous work and driven to avoid squandering their computational resources. Evolution, it appears, clued into this long before AI researchers. But AI researchers are starting to catch up. And, examining the work that AI researchers are currently doing to make machines prone to boredom in order to be intelligent, we find strong evidence of our claim that boredom is a functional, adaptive signal.
An important aside is in order. Some philosophers and researchers suggest that mental states, like boredom, ought to be defined by what they do, not based on what they feel like or what is happening in the brain—this is the “boredom is what boredom does” school of thought. Functionalists of this stripe might claim that AI literally experiences boredom. This is not our approach.18 Rather, we are sticking by what we said in Chapter 1, defining boredom by what it feels like and the underlying psychological mechanisms that give rise to that feeling. Here, our goal is to describe the functional role of boredom, not provide a new way of defining boredom. So when we say that intelligent machines must have the capacity to be bored in order to be intelligent, we mean they must experience states that play the same functional role that the feeling of boredom does in our own lives. We make no commitment to what machines are actually feeling, or even if they are capable of feeling states that approximate our own. However, this is not merely a case of anthropomorphizing. Rather, our excursion into the world of bored AI deepens our understanding of the function of boredom and bolsters our proposal that human boredom is adaptive.
A fascinating machine named Kismet is a good example. Like Humphrey, Kismet has what we might call desires, which make it both smart and vulnerable to boredom. Cynthia Breazeal, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), created Kismet, an AI system intended to be capable of complex, humanlike social interactions.19 Informed by research on facial expressions and the social difficulties seen in autism, Kismet is essentially a robotic head capable of facial expression that interacts with people.
Breazeal understood the importance of intentions for intelligent, self-directed behavior, so she gave Kismet three basic drives. Kismet wants to socialize, play, and rest. Kismet’s drive to socialize motivates it to seek out and interact with its human companions. Kismet’s drive to play motivates it to seek out and interact with toys. Kismet’s drive to rest motivates it to quiet down and, if alone, sleep. It could be said that each drive specifies a set of needs that Kismet is motivated to satisfy. Like Goldilocks, however, Kismet will only flourish when it has the “just right” amount of each of these things—not too much and not too little. This idea of maintaining the “just right” amount is what biologists call homeostasis. All living things try to keep their internal conditions in an optimal zone. Our bodies, for example, work very hard to keep our core temperature relatively constant—the Goldilocks zone for our well-being. Disaster ensues if our core body temperature increases or decreases too much. Similarly, Kismet possesses homeostatic regulatory processes to maintain just the right amount of socializing, playing, and resting.
Looking more closely at Kismet’s drive to socialize illustrates how this works. We’ve all got that one relative we try to avoid at Christmas dinners, right? An intrusive aunt who stands too close and never stops talking about herself? You instinctively want to move away, excuse yourself from the dinner table to—supposedly—use the bathroom. When faced with this kind of intrusive aunty, Kismet does something similar. It averts its gaze in an attempt to break off the interaction. In essence, aunty has overwhelmed the AI, and its socialization bucket is overflowing. On the other hand, we know what it’s like to be cooped up at home in the depths of winter for days on end with no one to talk to. Cabin fever strikes. You might even get desperate enough to give your aunt a call! This is what too little social contact feels like. Kismet’s motivation to socialize increases to urgent levels in these instances. Its socialization bucket is empty, and it is desperately trying to catch the attention of a human in the room, expressing the need to communicate. So whether from too much or too little interaction, Kismet’s motivation becomes more intense as its level of socialization deviates from the “just right” zone. These changes in motivational intensity are associated with different emotional states. “Just right” is comfortable. Too much is distressing. Too little is boring. Kismet’s capacity to want gives rise to the possibility of it being bored. The yearning for satisfying engagement sets the conditions that activate boredom within Kismet. This state of boredom pushes Kismet to explore its surroundings in order to find things that will satisfy its basic drives.
Babies come into the world motivated to explore and influence the world around them. This motivation turns out to be the critical foundation for development. Without it, learning would not happen. In fact, it could be said that we become intelligent by exploring things around us. In line with the notion that exploration represents a foundation of human development, Alan Turing proposed that the way to create true AI would be to simulate the mind of a child.20 Pierre-Yves Oudeyer noted that the key in Turing’s advice is that AI researchers should solve the problem of why a robot would learn, rather than only thinking about how they learn. That is, we need to give robots the desire to explore and manipulate their environment and this, in turn, will give rise to intelligence. This is exactly what Oudeyer and his colleagues have been doing—designing robots that are intrinsically motivated to investigate their surroundings. He then puts these robots in situations rich with opportunities to explore and manipulate, stands back, and watches how they become competent through interacting with the environment. He also found that when in highly familiar situations that do not offer opportunities for novel engagement and learning, the robots get bored. Once again, we see that boredom is a price that robots—like us—have to pay if they want to be intelligent. In this light, boredom and motivation are inextricably linked.
Jacques Pitrat came to the realization that AI systems must have the capacity for boredom through working with his co-investigator CAIA.21 CAIA—otherwise known as Chercheur Artificiel en Intelligence Artificielle (or Artificial Researcher on Artificial Intelligence)—is both Pitrat’s creation and able assistant. In a clever move, Pitrat decided to study AI by creating an AI researcher. Now, almost thirty years in, CAIA is valuably contributing to his efforts. As a bonus, Pitrat can observe CAIA in action and learn from its performance. Pitrat’s goal is to eventually create a completely self-directed, artificial AI scientist. To achieve that goal Pitrat gave CAIA the capacities of self-observation and self-evaluation. Armed with the capacity for self-observation, CAIA can notice what it is doing and understand why it failed or succeeded in solving a problem. With the capacity for self-evaluation, CAIA can prioritize the easiest and most important problems, determine if a problem is even worth attempting to solve, and decide if its solutions are useful. Combining these capabilities, CAIA is able to pull out of unproductive computational loops. Essentially, like Humphrey Potter, CAIA is motivated to avoid squandering its resources—and thus, you could say that CAIA tries to avoid boredom.22
Unfortunately, like the hapless child pleading with their parent to alleviate their boredom for them, CAIA can’t do anything about its boredom other than stop and complain. CAIA signals its boredom and then waits for Pitrat to step in and solve the problem. In turn, learning when and why CAIA becomes bored provides Pitrat with critical insights toward his goal of creating better AI systems. Ultimately, CAIA may one day be able to solve its own boredom through innovation and, like Humphrey, invent a skulking gear.
Kismet, on the other hand, has a rudimentary mechanism to alleviate boredom. The key to Kismet’s ability to alleviate boredom is something called a “getting sick and tired of the same old thing” (habituation) component to its programming. This component causes a shift in Kismet’s “attention” when it is stuck with the same old, same old. Like Humphrey and CAIA, Kismet knows when to quit. Rodney Brooks, the head of Breazeal’s lab, calls this the “Steven Spielberg memorial” component in honor of the robot in Spielberg’s movie AI who sat, unproductively, staring at a statue for 2,000 years! Brooks and Breazeal wanted to ensure Kismet would not make the same mistake, so they gave it the capacity to be bored.
Boredom can strike when things don’t ever change, and Kismet is programmed to react to that. But boredom can also strike at the other end of the extreme, where things are constantly changing. An ever-changing environment is too chaotic and noisy for us to make any sense of, ultimately leading us to disengage out of boredom.23 This too has been a problem for AI researchers. In work intended to imbue AI agents with the drive to be curious, researchers found that their agent—which was learning to navigate a virtual maze—got stuck in the maze if they placed a virtual TV screen with continuously changing content on one wall.24 Each new image on the screen was novel, satisfying the agent’s curiosity drive. Clearly, getting stuck in one spot indefinitely would not be an adaptive thing for humans or AI, certainly not when the goal was to explore and learn to solve a maze. Interestingly, in other computational work, boredom was shown to be a better driver of exploratory behavior than curiosity. When researchers created two distinct types of artificial learning agents—one driven by boredom and the other by curiosity—it was the bored agent that learned best.25 This is not to say that curiosity fails to drive exploration and learning. But the bored agent would not be captured by the TV with constantly changing content. It would eventually get bored by the meaningless noise and move on, while its curious cousin would stay glued to the idiot box.
CAIA and Kismet can get bored and quit. In his provocative book The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick), Seth Godin highlights the value of what he calls “strategic quitting” to avoid getting stuck in a cul-de-sac of wasted effort.26 Counter to the famous saying, “Winners never quit and quitters never win,” Godin notes that winners quit all the time, and knowing when to quit—before you have squandered your resources—is a really valuable skill. Boredom—the motivation to change—is our ally in this regard, pushing us to move on to something new. Elsie lacked it, Humphrey had it, and smart machines are getting it. We should not be so quick to ask for a boredom-free life—just ask the Human Pincushion what happens when you can’t experience pain.
Pain of any sort—emotional or physical—feels bad; we don’t like it and want to be rid of it as soon as possible. It’s the same with boredom. So the most immediate and pressing message of boredom is to get rid of this horrible feeling. And indeed it’s good to make a change. Being mentally unengaged is of no good to anyone. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, however, is: What should we do? Boredom can’t directly answer that question. Maybe we should redouble our efforts with the task at hand so as to become engaged. Maybe we should try our hand at something else. But if so, what? To compound our predicament, boredom feels so bad that we are driven to grab the quickest, easiest, most soothing balm, which may not be the best for us in the long run. So to hear the deeper message behind “get rid of this horrible feeling,” to respond adaptively to the motivation to act, we must keep in mind the causes of boredom we discussed in the previous chapter. It’s the same with physical pain; we can only respond in a truly effective manner when we understand the cause. Otherwise, we are left haplessly trying out one possibility after another and believing we have found a solution that might only be a temporary Band-Aid.
At its deepest levels, boredom tells us we are squandering our abilities and not engaging with the world in a way that fulfills our agency or, as Robert White put it, our need to express and develop our competence.27 So, when feeling bored, the message is not merely to make the disagreeable feeling go away as fast as possible, but to find a way to interact with the world that better engages you and gives expression to your desires and abilities. For boredom’s call to action to be effective, we must keep in mind that below the superficial motivation to change, boredom is ultimately the motivation to express ourselves as agents, in control of the choices we make. At its best, boredom won’t let us rest until we take up our agency, discover what we desire, and cultivate engaged interactions with the world.
But this is tricky. In the moment of being bored we can feel as though we lack control, to the point of feeling all we can do is complain. Yet, it is precisely in these moments that we most need to rediscover our agency rather than to treat ourselves as a vessel to be filled, titillated, or soothed. Being an agent is something we have to work at. We have to take steps daily to foster agency, both in ourselves and in those around us. And we have to be on our toes, because the forces that thwart our agency can change over time. At each stage of life, the causes of boredom manifest in different ways.