If you thought all bored minds found baneful employment in the devil’s workshop, honing weapons or chiseling graffiti, you are wrong. In their interesting new research on Boredom and pro-social behaviour, Van Tilburg and his friends of Limerick University overthrow all those boring theories that said you could be bored to your death or others’ damage. “Bored George helps others”, they have found out.
It’s relieving to know that it isn’t often that boredom results in the pursuit of less meaningful vocations like unlocking one’s jaw from a gargantuan yawn that got frozen during an ice age of monumental boredom. (http://theoneminuteblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/whats-world-watching-yawn.html) Instead, they have found out that boredom is a sort of dark, dead end from where one would do anything to escape, scaling the formidable walls ahead to achieve heroic feats no less than donating blood, working for charity or at least maintaining a blog!
Stranded on the shores of boredom, Robinson Crusoe turned to the tedious yet tremendously fulfilling activity of shipbuilding. It was on a lazy Sunday afternoon (or was it Monday?) that boredom shoved Alice down the rabbit hole to engage her in some pro-social activity like saving the Queen of Hearts her head.
If only everyone realized this immense use of boredom, they would stop disparaging those poor souls caught in the cocoon of idleness. For those could just be seemingly endless interludes before a moment of epiphany and evolution!
The only one whose boredom doesn’t ever move him to doing anything constructive seems to be Andy Capp. He is eternally comfortable in his couch of idleness but wait a minute… he might be using up all those idle moments thinking up meaningful new excuses!
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