How Boredom Works

This is an "I Heart" podcast. Guaranteed Human. If you're bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture. With your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard. And we pull apart the story behind the image, discovering forgotten interviews that changed exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I'm Immanuel Jochi, I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Adriah Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about mid-life women's health directly to you. 100% of women go through menopause, even if it's natural why should we suffer through it. Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. And I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And we are going to do the opposite of making you bored with this episode, Tom Bordeaux. That's right. Before we get going though, we want to recommend a podcast to our listeners from our always friend and former colleague. Forever friend. Forever. Yeah, he's our, he's our FF. But former colleague, we used to work with Mangesh Hadakadur at House of Works. And he, I'm not lying when I think we'll all agree because Jerry's listening to, that Mangesh is one of the, like, sweetest, sweet hearts, kindest, like, most intelligent, nicest dudes of all time. And that's reason enough to listen to anything that he does. He's a high quality person. He's the best. Mangesh is great. So he has a show out called How to Live Forever, which is not like, here's how you live forever. It's more like trying to understand this sort of movement that's going around of people that want to try and like extend life into, like, you know, hundreds of years or forever, which is super up, stuff you should know listeners, Allie, I think. Yeah. And it's a great show. He wants to recommend in particular, if you want to just give it a shot. He said the third and the fifth episodes are really standouts. Yeah. And I listened to episode five, because it sounded super interesting. And it is, buddy, because in episode five, Mangesh kind of goes, investigator, to track down this startup that's trying to create brain-dead clones for billionaires, so that when you get to be like, you know, 90 years old, you can do a body replacement and transfer, like, this is real future Rama kind of stuff, to transfer like the head of a billionaire to like a younger body. And this is actually having Peter Thiel as a funder of this thing. So as Arpa H, and it's just kind of crazy stuff. So that's episode five. But the podcast is How to Live Forever. And it's awesome. Yeah. And Mangesh is super interesting and entertaining. And if you're like, not quite convinced of this Mangesh guy, put this in your pipe and smoke it. He, along with another colleague of ours, Will Pearson, co-founded mental floss. Yeah. And the day when he was in college. Yeah, man. Yep. That's all you need to know. Yeah, Mangesh is the best. So check out How to Live Forever. I'm going to get all corporate here and say, wherever you get your podcasts. Ooh, is it guaranteed human? I think so. OK, great. OK, Chuck. So we're talking about boredom. I found it exceedingly hard to concentrate while I was studying this. Did you? Yeah, it was-- I hate to say it, but it was kind of boring. I actually liked it. Really? Yes, I did. At first, I was like, this is kind of boring. It's very dry. But if you put it all together, it actually boredom did become a little more interesting to me than it would have been before. Let me just say it like that. How about that? Well, that's good. But it's like when we researched sushi or yawning or whatever I wanted sushi, I couldn't stop yawning. Right, right. Like, reading about boredom actually makes you-- like, it's hard to concentrate, which is one of the traits of boredom. I just thought that was very interesting. For sure. If you want to talk about just how boredom is sort of defined, it is the experience of wanting to engage in something that is like satisfying to you, but not being able to, and being left in a state. In this case, it's called an adaptive state, where you don't have an optimal energy level. Maybe there may be some discomfort. This is a big part of boredom is it urges new action, because as we'll see, just being bored can lead to you doing really dumb things just of something is happening. If you put all that together, man, it really just sounds like you need a snickers. Right. You know? Yeah, maybe so, because boredom definitely urges you to pursue something different than what's going on. That's sort of the whole point behind it. Yes. Now, whether what you pursue is up to you, and it can be negative, it can be positive, it can be really bad for you. It can actually be great. And this is, like, it's really well studied. I think one of the things I appreciated about it is the philosophers starting in the 19th century with Chopin Hour, and then Nietzsche, like, they really thought a lot about boredom and what boredom was. And they created a great basis for it. That science then took over. And science has done a really good job of investigating it and explaining it too. And I love topics like that, 'cause we cover so much stuff. Like I like it when it's like, no one understands this. And here's this theory, and here's that theory. Right. And topics like that. But I also like topics where it's all like, oh, all the components are here, and we can put them together, and now I understand it. Yeah, for sure. I agree, too. If there's boredom happening, that means there's obviously nothing new or stimulating happening. There may be a time distortion. Like, things are really dragging on. And it might feel meaningless. And you mentioned, Chopin Hour, he put forth that boredom in pain or like the twin poles of life, and you just kind of swing between those. Yeah, and Nietzsche came along, and he was like, I agree, he said, yes, and I think boredom can actually lead to creativity. I don't think it's all bad. And he went on to say, which I think is going a little far, that God created humans because God was bored. Okay, it's a little, it's like, how are you gonna prove that? And he said, I'm a philosopher, I have to prove a (beep) and thing. (laughs) Emily has always, and I have since gotten on board, when you have a kid, I'm bored, I'm bored. You hear that a lot. And she, from the very beginning with Ruby, was like, well, you know what's on the other side of boredom? Creativity, and Ruby's tired of hearing that. But that's a good way to handle it with kids, is, and they say to, like, you know, don't hand them something to do. Like, your boredom, oh, here, do this and do this, and like, try and solve their problem. You know, like, solve it yourself, go find something to do. And if all goes well, and generally does, at least with my daughter, all of a sudden, she's, you know, drawing something, or writing something. - That's neat. - Yeah. Or you're like, where did she get that pony? (laughs) All of a sudden. I know, I'll create it. - So one thing that the philosophers did have in common, Chuck, was that they considered boredom important. And I think today most people, including me, I did not think of boredom as particularly important. But if you look at it a certain way, say, like, have science now, it does, it's extremely important in that, if you think about us never getting bored, we would just sit around either blissed out all day, or sitting around doing nothing, right? Like boredom actually prompts you to action. And they believe now that essentially, it's because your brain is constantly seeking new novel stimuli that when it's not granted that, when it doesn't have the opportunity to do that anymore, and we'll see in a second, there's different reasons why that can happen. It just basically shuts down to a certain extent, and that's not just it. If it just kind of shut down, you would just be day dreaming. There's also a negative rousal state to where you just feel restless, agitated, you can't concentrate, and those two things combined make boredom kind of unpleasant and spur you to action to go do something that will give your brain the novel stimuli it gets to search for. Like to search for signal among noise and then engage with the signal is how I saw it put, and that when it can't do that, that's where boredom comes. - Yeah, I thought that was really interesting and because I was today years old when I found it. out that the brain is constantly predicting sensory inputs. I always just kind of thought the brain was processing information as it receives it, but the brain is predicting like actively predicting sensory inputs and the brain loves it when those predictions are validated, but what it really loves is when it's in an environment where it makes a prediction that is slightly different than what it predicted in reality. Yeah, we would call that learning in other words, right? And that's where the brain gets a little dose of dopamine because we've talked about dopamine before. It's a reinforcing reward chemical, right? It's not like, oh, I ate the stickers and there's dopamine. That's a misstatement of what dopamine is. Dopamine is what our brain gets when our brain gets it slightly wrong so that it learns. It says, this is important. Here's what that correct answer was. And now your brain just learned. And that's what it seems to like the most like you said. Yeah, for sure. And boredom could also, or at least what it could represent, is a faulty prediction where the brain has an unrealistic award or reward that they think is coming. So in that case, it varies from like the prediction, but not in a good way. So like there's a hypothesis that if you're prone to boredom, that your brain isn't predicting well. It's like bad at predicting what's happening. Yeah, right. There's other situations that they've identified where you can get bored or where boredom sets in. One is obviously where you're just not getting enough stimulation. Like an example I thought of is let's say your quality control for the shot's brewery production line and your job is to look for a glove on a bottle. It's only happened one time and it's never happened since. And you're really getting bored by this point because you know that nothing new is coming along. So your brain is like, I'm bored, right? Yeah. Which as we'll see is a terrible state for you to be in as a worker for years and years on end. And then the other one is the opposite. Like you're getting so much information that you don't understand that you get bored because your brain can't find signal in the noise. And a good example I saw that is like a really dense lecture on a topic that you are totally unfamiliar with. Oh, yeah. You know, yeah, for sure. I fall into that trap a lot. I feel like. Yeah, I think most people do. Yeah. And you can become really restless if you're trying to become mentally engaged. And then if you fail to that, a real listlessness can follow. I mentioned the time thing. It can really feel like time has slowed down and that there's no value. And what's going on in your concentration is off. We did talk about like you don't necessarily yawn when you're bored, but you can yawn when you're bored. Like you can change your physical state. You could slouch a lot more. It's, you know, sometimes this may be a signal to other people that we're with of like, you know, this party's lame. Let's let's get out of here. Yeah, right. Yeah, because I remember in our yawning episode that they, one of the theories was that it was a signal that others that danger was nearby when we were anxious. Oh, yeah, that's right. Danger. So there's been studies about what it's like to be bored. All of us know what boredom is like. But I think if you just took me aside and, you know, five days ago said like, okay, what is boredom? Like explain it, describe it. I probably, yeah, I probably wouldn't have been able to. So people have studied to try to figure out subjectively what boredom's like. You ticked off a lot of it. But it seems like the studies that really kind of got to the root of it went to the furthest extreme and induced the deepest possible boredom that you can through sensory deprivation. And what they found is that the brain just goes haywire when it's bored to those extreme levels. Yeah, they did, you know, they didn't studies like this, you know, for decades, but there was one in the 50s at McGill University in Montreal, shout out Montreal, where they paid people 20 bucks a day to stay in these little rooms. You had to wear like sensory deprivation goggles and headphones and gloves and cardboard tubes on the arms. I didn't quite get that. I guess they just wanted you to be fully sort of, I don't know, block down. No sense of touch, maybe? Yeah, I guess so. And I think it was over the period of a few days. It never went longer than a week. Right. But it was not good. You know, people couldn't think of like fix on anything like any thought for any length of time at all. And their word pattern recognition got all over the place. Their arithmetic skills were terrible. They started like hallucinating and they became more susceptible to super natural beliefs. Yep. So obviously something like solitary confinement in prison, which I think we do a whole episode on solitary or just yes, we did and we concluded it's it's not only inhumane, it's in human. Yeah, completely. Because it physically alters the brain like it shrinks your hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that, you know, we talk about a lot, but it's involved in emotion control, spatial orientation, memory, that kind of thing. So you're basically just, you're shrinking that part of your brain when you throw someone in solitary. Right. You want to take a break and come back and talk about how boredom can be useful. Yeah, let's do it. If your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pros Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. Yeah, I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is the Trojan horse, whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pros Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Self-care September is here, which means it's time to rethink what self-care actually means. Yes, self-care can be a long walk, it can be an everything shower, it can be putting your phone on, do not disturb, but sometimes it's actually about sitting with the uncomfortable stuff and understanding your patterns, your boundaries, finally figuring out why you keep doing things that you swore you would never do again. I'm Gemma Speg, the host of the psychology of your 20s podcast, and each week we unpack the psychology behind the experiences that shape your 20s, from relationships and friendships to money, anxiety, confidence, attachment, just becoming more comfortable with who you are. Unlike the quarter life crisis which is depicted as the collapse, the quarter life reinvention is the expansion and worth of something. When we develop the ability to be happy by ourselves, nobody else can take that from you. So this self-care September, don't just take care of yourself, get to know yourself as well. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. Buy a user rather than sell at least 70% have a phone. Middle school is a different world than the one we grew up in. I'm Dr. Joy and this is Therapy for Black Girls. We spend real time on it in our surviving middle school run, bringing in a child psychologist and a psychiatrist who's raising two black girls of his own to talk about what's really going on with our kids right now. We got into group chats and gaming, friendship and bullying, and how to tell the difference between healthy monitoring and the kind of surveillance that erodes trust. You can think of belonging as "I can be myself and I can still be accepted." And then they're fitting in. Spitting in says "I have to change who I am in order to avoid rejection." Then we turn the conversation toward the fathers, sitting down with therapist Keir Gaines on black fatherhood and what it means to raise a daughter through this stage. You don't have more shorts so you can't do flips, you have more to dress you up across your legs. That's the range of this run, from screen time to identity to the fathers doing the work at home. This has been our surviving middle school run, brought to you by the people who spend their careers thinking about exactly this. I'm Dr. Joy. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the I-Hort Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Alright Chuck, so we've basically talked about how boredom is not pleasant and that kind of prompted a lot of researchers to be like, "Well then why are we experiencing boredom? If we experience boredom and it seems like a lot of different animals experience boredom too as we'll see, there has to be some sort of evolutionary benefit from it for it's sticking around for clearly tens or hundreds of millions of years, right? And what they finally landed on was the same thing that Shopenauer and Nietzsche and Henry David Throw, and a bunch of other philosophers pointed to, which was, it prompts you to go out and do other stuff. And it doesn't necessarily prompt you to go out and do the safest thing. It turns out that it prompts you to go do anything else, even stuff that is outside of your comfort zone. If it's an alternative to whatever you're doing now, and you're bored, you're much likely to go try it then when you're not bored, and that's what a bunch of researches turned up. Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, you think about the scenario of a bunch of kids bored in the summertime. They're like, "Hey, let's go jump off the roof of the house right now and see what happens." Yeah. You know, that kind of thing. There was a study in the, I guess it's a scientific paper, Emotion or a magazine. A journal, yeah. Journal. Quarterly, maybe? I don't know. A rag. A white paper. By doctors, Heather Lynch and Shane Bench, Lynch and Bench, where they subjected the participants to stimuli that would make them bored, either neutral board, positive board or negative board. And across all the studies, they, people reporting high boredom were more likely to choose something unfamiliar, which included negative experiences, and people bored by positive conditions sought out negative experiences. And if you were bored by negative content, you sought out positive experiences. So almost like you're, you're seeking out the opposite of whatever you're experiencing in your boredom. Exactly. Yeah. They kept showing them like picture after picture after picture. And even if it was positive, they're like, do you want to switch to the negative pictures? It's like cockroaches and stacks of dirty dishes. And the people were like, yes, please hurry up. Yeah. That's, so yeah, that's pretty good study pointing out that, you know, it will leave our comfort zone. At least we'll go look at pictures of dirty dishes if we're bored, right? And then other studies have kind of followed this up. There was one in 2014 that attached as something that could deliver an electric shock around participants' ankles and then just left them to be bored in a room alone for 15 minutes. And see if anybody would press the button that gave themselves a shock. Knowing that that's, if they press this button, that's what was going to happen. That wasn't like a surprise. And people did. A lot of people did as a matter of fact. They got so bored, they're like, I guess I'll just give myself electric shocks. I could see myself totally doing that by the way. I think it depends on the shock. I would at least try it once, probably eventually. That's, yeah, my deal. I would try it once and be like, well, I got to see what the button does. There's like no way I'm just going to sit here and not know. Right. Yeah. One guy apparently pressed the button 190 times in that, in that study. Yeah. They should do some follow-up studies with that guy. And just that guy. Something's going on there. Exactly. So circling it back around to evolution, what they basically put all this together is that, you know, just sitting around like a campfire or something, if we got bored or tuk tuk got bored, that might prompt them to be like, I'm going to go see what's over here. I'm going to go, you know, see what's down this river and then maybe tuk tuk encountered a new animal that tuk tuk had never seen before. And tuk tuk was kind of forced to create a new weapon to hunt that animal. Or even better, even better, tuk tuk made friends with that animal. And all of a sudden, both of their brains just enlarged because of the empathy and love that developed between them too. Yeah. I mean, that could go either way that, you know, I've talked a bit about watching the survival TV show alone. And a common theme among all participants on that show is like, you're right. You're by yourself. And like, it gets boring. And sometimes that has led to them making decisions that leads to like the end of their stay there because they did what tuk tuk did. They're like, Hey, I'm bored. I want to go across that stream that I thought it was probably a really bad idea to cross. And, uh, and turns out that was correct and all of a sudden they're getting helicoptered out. Yeah. But it can also work out too and that you go make a friend with an animal on the other side of the stream. Yeah, or kill it and eat it. So I think also one of the more prevalent interpretations among lay people like us, meaning people who like to just lay around, um, is that dumb people are more prone to be bored. And apparently this is the idea of Henry David Thoreau. He was like, if you're, if you're smart, you can always find something to occupy yourself. And I was like, shut up Thoreau. Yeah. We know that you're so smart and cool. We get it. Uh, you don't have to put everybody else down, um, studies have not borne out Thoreau's idea. It finds that, um, intelligent people and people of lower intelligence are not neither ones more likely to, um, to become bored more easily. But there are personality traits that create, um, like trait boredom. There's trait in their state, just like optimism. There's trait boredom in their state boredom. And trait boredom seems to be kind of identified with two different types of people. Yeah. There's a psychologist named John Eastwood that said, if you're, if you're an impulsive person, and if you're always like looking for that new thrill, uh, and that, you know, generally kind of understimulated by the world around you, then for that totally makes sense that you would be prone to boredom. Uh, this one, uh, I don't know, it can't make sense of, but if you're highly sensitive to pain and fearful of the world around you, um, maybe you're unsatisfied by the idea like the safety net of not leaving your comfort zone. So you might be more prone to boredom, but I guess maybe more willing to live with it. Yes. Your, your anxiety or your fears overcome your, your, your aversion, your natural aversion to boredom as a human because you, and so you're just not feeding your brain any new stuff anymore. So you become bored. It's very sad reason for, for being prone to boredom. Yeah. And in school, you know, you were talking about intelligence and school boredom is a big, you know, it can be a big challenge for any student, uh, but there are eight precursors for boredom in school, which is your, uh, under challenge, like maybe you're in a, um, like a remedial class and you're a little more advanced, uh, over challenge and go the other way too, where if you're like, I just don't get this stuff. So you just slip into boredom, right. Like you were talking about earlier, uh, monotony in classrooms, uh, if you don't like your teacher, uh, if you think there's a lack of meaning in going to school or a lack of involvement. Uh, and then the other one is just the, you know, man, I could, I could be doing whatever. I could be outside throwing the first B right now and said it'd be in in this dumb class. Yeah. And if you're an adolescent, you're essentially born to be bored, like your boredom levels peak between the ages of 10 and 17, apparently where you and I are in life right now is, um, where boredom levels dip the, the most, yeah, I feel that I can't, too. It's not like I'm, I'm always doing something meaningful or important. I just don't feel bored ever. That's all. I don't even, yeah, even when I'm not doing anything, I'm never bored. Say, man, I don't, I don't feel bored of anymore. It's kind of great. Yeah. It's great. I wonder if it's just getting to a certain point in your life where you're maybe just satisfied with where you are or maybe drinking the small things more. I don't know. Yeah. For sure. I think that's definitely part of it. Um, and I, apparently it starts to go back up as you get older, which I'm not looking forward to. Yeah. Let's avoid that. Let's agree to avoid that. Yes. All right. Agreed. Pinky swear. Pinky swear. Um, but nothing compares to your, your levels of boredom from 10 to 17. Part of it is that your brain is still developing. So you said impulse control, um, and needing stimulation is that is when we are one group of people who get bored more easily, well, adolescents by nature are like that because their brain is still developing. And then also they have much less agency or control over their lives and control or lack of control is positively correlated with boredom. Oh, sure. So, uh, yes, so if you're like, I want to go buy a mad magazine at this awesome, used comic book store, um, but I can't, because I can't drive. And it's all the way on the other side of town. You're probably going to really resent the situation that you're in right there and nothing is going to make you like you're not going to say, I'll just go play duck hunt then and be happy. You're just upset about that and that can create like a sense of boredom in and of itself. Buddy, do you remember the feeling you got when you got that driver's license? Um, um, no, not really. I don't. Oh, really? Yeah. Man, I, that, that is, uh, and it might just be me then it, that was a one of the single most like important sort of things that happened in my life up to, you know, my 20s or 30s even. Well, it's awesome. That freedom, when I finally got that car key and was able to go and leave the house by myself to go do something and go somewhere there. I wanted to go. That's cool, man. It was incredible. I remember the feeling of just being like, now I can leave. No, I mean, no shade toward my family or anything. I've talked before about not having the greatest to like situation with my parents and all. So yeah, I wanted to get out of there. But just the freedom to go to my friends house or whatever or go to the, the turtles record store or whatever. No, I remember those. Yeah. It was incredible. Yeah. No, totally. You prize freedom. Yeah, for sure. We should probably talk about digital media though because if you look at like boredom generationally, it's a different ball of twine these days. Yeah, so I think most people think when you get bored, you pull out your smartphone, you go on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok, I guess is how you pronounce it. And like now you're not bored any longer. And there are theories starting with our good friend Arthur Schopenhauer that you're still bored. What you have done is actually lowered your cognitive levels so that you're not bored anymore. You're not going in doing something meaningful or fulfilling to stave off boredom. You've just undertaken a deeply maladaptive response to boredom which is I'm going to stop thinking so much and that's what you're doing when you go scroll on social media. Yeah, I guess it's a temporary SAV kind of thing. But like chronic exposure to that to like your smartphone is basically pushing up the standard of what you find engaging enough to keep you from being bored. Does that make sense? Yeah, and that's so that's a little different from what I'm saying. That totally makes sense to me. The one I'm talking about is this idea that what you're engaging is existential escape. And there's a whole school of thought that boredom represents a threat to meaning. It shows you what you're doing right now is not meaningful. What you're doing is meaningless. Maybe your entire life is meaningless. Maybe everyone's life is meaningless. So you're threatened by that. Boredom generates those thoughts in you. So when you go pick up your phone and start scrolling, you are escaping those existential thoughts by not thinking about that kind of stuff. And when people spend hours and hours every day on their phone and everybody has it in their pocket, we have now this quick and easy way to just stop thinking and stop going and doing something else is more meaningful to you personally, not necessarily to society, but something that's more meaningful to you. And so we get trapped in this, this state of living to a lesser degree than we would if we weren't social media apps on smartphones. Seriously, it's as cut and dry as that. Yeah, for sure. I'm getting a dumb phone. Are you? Yeah, I've got to figure it out because I just started sort of looking into it. But I want to be able to have both with the same phone number. Because in certain situations, I'm going to I'm going to still want my iPhone like when I'm traveling or whatever. A lot of situations where I'm going to want it. But I want to get one and I just have and maybe if someone knows how to do this, that would be great if they could write in. But I want to get one that works with the same phone number on the same carrier. I'm happy to pay for the extra or whatever it costs to manage that account or whatever. But yeah, in a lot of most situations, I would try to have the dumb phone on me. I'm just like talking out of turn here, but it seems like spoofing your sim would be the answer to that. And I don't know how you would do that. But that would be my guess. I don't know what spoofing a sim means. Your sim card is what gives your phone, it's individual characteristics like your phone number and all that stuff. Okay, so you can figure out how to duplicate that or spoof it. You could conceivably have two phones with the same number getting the same info at the same time. You know, I don't know why Apple doesn't put out a dumb phone that's like, here's another thing we can sell you that works perfectly with your phone number and everything. I think they would sell a ton of those because people would be like, yeah, I want two phones. When I'm out with my friends, I want my dumb phone so I can just stay present. When I whatever, I want my smartphone. I think that I think you just kind of answered it that there's people who would say because generally people in charge don't want you to be present. Yeah, maybe so. That's yeah, that's my guess. I just saw where social media companies are being sued for 220 billion dollars by handful of states. Good. Good for getting children addicted to social media. Which they 100% did. Yeah, I'm really curious how that pans out because it's I mean, it's a slam dunk case. It's just those guys are so powerful. Yeah, I mean, they make the tobacco companies look like, you know, a local auto body shop. Yeah, I'm with you. And hats off to Australia because they mandated countrywide and no social media for any children under 16. Yeah, they did that a while back, didn't they? I don't know how recently, but they they're sort of leading the way in a lot of other countries are like, Hey, maybe that's not such a bad idea. And certainly, you know, we're going to do that in our family. And I don't even think 16, man, I would love to see Ruby get through all of high school without any exposure to social media. That would be something really great. Yeah, I think it's very sad. And I think it's going to be something that we it's just going to get more and more clear as time goes on. Like just how harmful that was. Yeah. And especially as it gets more and more fake and deepfaked in AI to the point where people are sitting around staring at something it isn't even real ever. Yeah, I tend to hope though, Chuck, that it's been ground in so hard and in such a compressed amount of time over the course of just several years that people are just going to have a natural backlash against it. And maybe like the cool thing will be to spend all your time outside doing stuff for, you know, I hope so, man. I would love to see it swing and things a lot of times do swing back hard the other way. I would love to see that of like people like smashing their smartphones and being like, no, man, it was things were better before. Let's go back to that. Yeah, that'd be great. Maybe we'll take a break and talk about animals and benefits of boredom. Does that sound good? Yeah. All right, we'll be right back. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is the Trojan horse, whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Gemma Speg, the host of the psychology of your 20s podcast, and each week we unpack the psychology behind the experiences that shape your 20s. From relationships and friendships to money, anxiety, confidence, attachment, just becoming more comfortable with who you are. Unlike the quarter-life crisis which is depicted as the collapse, the quarter-life reinvention is the expansion, and the course of something. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. We spent real time on it in our surviving middle school run, bringing in a child psychologist and a psychiatrist who's raising two black girls of his own to talk about what's really going on with our kids right now. So it's literally physiological and neurological and psychological chaos happening all of this end up. You're belonging, you could think of belonging as I can be myself and I can still be accepted, and then they're fitting in. Spitting in says I have to change who I am in order to avoid rejection. Then we turn the conversation toward the fathers, sitting down with therapists, cure gains on black fatherhood, and what it means to raise a daughter through this stage. You don't have more shorts so you can't do flips, you have one to dress you up across your legs. You have to get off her device, but the reality is there's a lot of life out there that we don't want you as your adults in their life to miss out on. This has been our surviving middle school run. Brought to you by the people who spend their careers thinking about exactly this. I'm Dr. Joy. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. (gentle piano music) - All right, everyone, we're back after our little rant, but it was taken in the right way. - At Tim Cook is like, those guys really hurt my feelings. - Tim Cook is like, oh, he gives me credit when they end up in a dumb phone that they can tell you for like $700. - Yeah, at least. - They're like, you can text and get the map to places and call people and that'll be $700. - Right, you're paying not to get what the cog needs to decline. I think that's really what the price reflects. - All right, so I promise to talk about animals getting bored, animals that aren't us that is, and they have done research and basically kind of said, like yeah, animals for sure get bored. I think we, I mean, people that are, you know, at least dog owners have seen their own dogs get bored and get, like, get destructive 'cause they're not stimulated enough. And I think that's kind of the same thing, but they've studied mink, like the animal, the mink, that they house them in non-enriching environments, was terrible. And then they said they definitely experienced boredom-like states because they found that they would, these mink would approach anything novel shown to them, even if it was like a predator, like what they thought was a predator, like a predator shadow and the noises of a predator, the mink was like, well, I'll go check it out. I don't care anything but this cage. - Yeah, and then interesting though, it increased curiosity in them like because they were bored. So that kind of goes to support that evolutionary idea too. - Yeah. - There's another one that studied rats, where basically they switched up foraging material and the flavor of the pellets under the foraging material for some rats and then others, they just gave them the same ones over and over again. And the ones that got the same ones over and over again, exhibited behavior like trying to find the exit out of their cage and other really sad stuff. So what's heartening about this is animal welfare people are pointing to this and saying like, if you have a pet or an animal that you keep, you have a greater responsibility to it than just keeping it alive and giving it food and water, maybe taking it for a walk. Animals get bored, which means you have to, you're responsible for stimulating something that gets bored if you've taken responsibility for it in any way. - Yeah, for sure. My one dog Gibson is a hound dog and he is very stimulated by smelling stuff obviously. So they say when you take your dog for a walk to let them smell. Like if you're constantly just pulling your dog, 'cause you're trying to get your steps in, they get more worn out from a 20 minute sniff walk than a hour like hardcore exercise walk. And my walks with Gibson, they're 45 to 50 minutes long and I bet half of that is standing around while he smells stuff. - I am so glad you said that, dude, 'cause that is absolutely true. And you see a lot of people who are like, come on. And that's, yeah, that's how your dog enjoys life is by sniffing other stuff. - Yeah, it's great and it's a good lesson for me. Like as a person, I thought you were learning some things to do. - No, no, no, just to slow down. Like yesterday, another weird example is I got, I went, sometimes I'll go out to play golf by myself if no one's around and get in like a little, you know, if they don't pair me with anyone, it's kind of great 'cause I can, you know, drop as many balls to take the shot over again and really like just sort of treat it as practice. - Yeah. - But I went out to do that the other day and they paired me with these two old fellers that were probably mid 80s to 90s. - Oh, wow. Boy, these guys were slow, slow, slow. And I was like, you know what, Chuck, this isn't that day. You're just gonna be there with them. You're gonna help look for their balls. You're gonna carry the clubs to them when they drop 'em and you're gonna slow it down. And it was a really lovely, relaxing experience. I didn't get bored, I tried to like, revel in the slowness of it all, you know. - They kept dropping their clubs? - No, like, you know, you carry a pitching wedge and a putter to the green and you drop your pitching wedge to put, I always go like, - That's kind of what you meant. - I would always go caddy to their club form or get their ball or whatever, you know, try to help these guys out. - I got you now. - They didn't like me very much of that, who the hell is still fun? - So, yeah, I think that's great advice too, just to slow down and stay present and mindful. - Yeah, and all that I think comes around to the boredom thing is like, there are many ways to keep yourself from being bored and one might be to just try and look at the circumstances and in a different way. - For sure. Also, I think it's important to bear in mind that you, like, what's meaningful to you or what's boring to you is boring or meaningful to somebody else, right? So, it's not, like, you'll get all sorts of advice like go out and read a book, go and ride a bike. That might not necessarily be meaningful to you. There's something else that's gonna be meaningful to you and that's advice that's typically given to deal with boredom, which is identify things that you care about and then go do those things. Just have them on hand. You don't have to do them all the time. You don't have to become the best at 'em. You don't have to drive yourself. You don't have to share your experience with anybody else. But just identify some things like this is meaningful to me so that if you do find yourself bored, you don't necessarily just pull out your phone. You go, "Hmm, maybe I'll go to rescue guppies out of elementary school aquariums." Right, whatever it is. Yeah, I mean, it definitely can lead to creativity. There's a psychologist named Sandy Mann that says that, you know, embrace that boredom. There was a study that she did where she had people copying numbers from a telephone directory and she found that they were more creative after, like she gave them a task, like, hey, try and think while you're doing this, try and think of new uses for plastic cups. And once they were subjected to the tedium of just copying numbers, it allowed their, you know, they embraced that boredom and their mind wander to all these creative things they could do with the cups. Beer pong was born. Exactly. And there's something called the default mode network where if you're, you know, not doing anything, that gives your brain space to go in that default mode where your brain isn't engaged in a specific thing but it can, like, get creative. Yeah, we've talked about that a lot over the last few years. And I know it's a big deal with ADHD that it's really hard to get out of your default mode network. Right. And so no surprise, boredom can be a part of ADHD, too. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, we're talking about some of the positives that can also be a negative thing because we talked about risk taking and risky behavior just to do something different. They definitely tied boredom to, like, you know, gambling, substance abuse and stuff like that, like the promise of a stimulation that you're seeking because your bored can sometimes be like a really bad thing. Agreed. You can turn to, we've been picking on smartphones and sorry to everybody who's like, you guys are too preachy these days. That was definitely very preachy. But it is a pretty good example. It's not the only one. People take up drugs, literally take up drugs because they're bored with life. They start drinking sometimes. Studies show that people who are bored consistently go to lower quality or low nutrition snacks over, you know, something better for them when they have the option. Like, you can just, you go in a place where you're going to find some sort of stimulation. And yeah, so there are a lot of risk behaviors associated with boredom that you're going to do something because you got to get rid of that arousal state that's unpleasant, which is boredom, but it's not necessarily going to be going and volunteering at the cancer ward at your local hospital. It might be, I'll go see what cracks all about. Man, you're so preachy. Some people do, we get that from time to time. Yeah, but you're sitting there encouraging people to engage with the world and to go volunteer for cancer or not to do crack. Like, get off your high horse. I think that some people don't like being told what to do no matter what it is. I know, yeah, I don't, I feel like also, I think it's our age too. We're just lucky that we're not like the kind who tell everybody how stupid they are too, you know? Yeah, I mean, I hope people know, it's always take it or leave it like, you know? You don't have to be the way we're saying to be, but I love the advice of engaging with the world or volunteering for, you know, sick children in a hospital rather than doing crack. I'll stand, I'll die on that hill. And I think also though, Chuck, it's really important that we pointed out that there's not some ideal thing you should go do now that it's all based on what you find meaningful. And that's the point. Now, well, we're saying you should go for what you think you should go do. The point is just do something that's going to help you in the long run more than, you know, turning to pot. Right, procrastination is another thing. I know we've talked about that before, but it is definitely a response to boredom. A pronist of boredom increases someone's tendency to procrastinate generally, which is interesting because it's, you know, doing that thing would solve the boredom problem that like the thing you're putting off a lot of times. I think they're quite. it with like looking at your smartphone. You're not actually doing anything. You're just lowering your brain standards for input. I guess that makes sense. And we talked about some stuff with managing boredom, like, you know, identifying ahead of time things that you could go do. Like you said, don't just try to solve it immediately for kids. Let them kind of figure it out on their own. I also saw there was a study where researchers presented kids with a big bag of toys and they found that the kids played with each one a little bit and then just just stopped eventually. And that if they gave kids just like one toy, the kid engaged with that one toy much longer. So that's part of it too. I guess is robbing children of any sort of choice in life. I think it's the less in there. I really, what really hit home was when you like to do something meaningful for you. I really like that you said that because that could be going to, you know, working in your garden or whatever. It could be drawing something. It could be writing something. It could be taking a walk. It could be anything. It doesn't have to be some like grand meaningful gesture to other people. Right. That's what I was trying to say. That there's not some level that your activities have to rise to to be considered meaningful. If they're meaningful for you, bam. Do not say that looking at Instagram is meaningful for you. You're lying. You're lying to yourself. You're lying to Chuck. You're lying to me. You're lying to everybody. I agree with that. I think that's it for boredom for now, huh? Yeah. It was a good one. I like this one. I did too. And I think since this is the end of boredom, it's time them for listening to me. That's right. This is Short and Sweet. Hey guys, long time, listen to her first time writer. This is about the irony episode from Nick. And once had a debate about the song "Ironic" that you guys talked about from "Lonus Morris" at the English teacher I worked with, I argued that it is a purely ironic song because it's called "Ironic" and contains no irony. And irony is flipping expectations to a certain degree on a metal level. I really think the song is pure irony. Never really thought about that. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for the great content guys. I used to have playlists for my AP students to listen to for introducing subjects and for review. And they enjoyed it. And it helped lay the foundation for their studies. And that is Nick. Thanks a lot Nick. That was just a all-around great email. It's not very often that our minds are just completely blown, but I'm pretty sure you just did it for both of us. Yes. If you want to be like Nick and blow our minds, please do. You can send it in email to [email protected]. Stuff you should know is a production of "I Heart Radio." For more podcasts, my heart radio visit the "I Heart Radio" app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. If you're a bookshelf and you are for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Each week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Listen to pro society on the "I Heart Radio" app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we pull apart the story behind the image, discovering forgotten interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture. I'm Emmental Jochi, I'm Kai Wright, and this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the "I Heart Radio" app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bring vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. 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