How Boredom Works

11:28Chuck Bryant:Yeah, right. 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 Schatz Brewery production line and your job is to look for a glove on a bottle. And that'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? Which, as we'll see, is a terrible state for you to be in as a worker for years and years on end.

12:07Chuck Bryant: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 of that is like a really dense lecture on a topic that you are totally unfamiliar with.

12:24Josh Clark:Oh, yeah. You know? Yeah, for sure. I fall into that trap a lot, I feel like.

12:31Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I think most people do.

12:32Josh Clark: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 in what's going on and 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 like 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 get out of here.

13:10Josh Clark:Yeah.

13:10Chuck Bryant:Right. Right. Yeah, because I remember in our yawning episode that they, one of the theories was that it was a signal to others that danger was nearby when we yawning, when we're anxious.

13:22Josh Clark:Oh, yeah, that's right, danger.

13:23Chuck Bryant: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, OK, what is boredom? Like, explain it, describe it. You'd say this. I probably wouldn't have been able to. So people have studied to try to figure out subjectively what boredom is 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.

14:07Josh Clark:Yeah, they did, you know, they've done 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, locked down. No sense of touch, maybe? Yeah, I guess so. and I think it was over the period of a few days they never went longer than a week right but the 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 the supernatural beliefs.

15:00Josh Clark:Yep. So obviously something like solitary confinement in prison, which I think, did we do a whole episode on solitary or just?

15:06Chuck Bryant:Yes, we did. And we concluded it's, it's not only inhumane, it's inhuman.

15:12Josh Clark: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.

15:31Chuck Bryant:Right. You want to take a break and come back and talk about how boredom can be useful?

15:36Josh Clark:Yeah, let's do it.

15:50Josh Clark:Mom, are we there yet?

15:52Chuck Bryant:Ten more minutes.

15:53Josh Clark:Only ten minutes? Can you drive slower? What's up with them today? Lingo Kids. That app we downloaded last week? They love it. The games, this funny baby bot character. Kids, we're almost there.

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16:42Chuck Bryant:and Canada. Sign up for Apple Business today.

16:46Josh Clark:You know, everyone, today's savvy burglars have done the math, and they know that if they trigger your alarm, they still have time to grab what they want and go. But SimpliSafe is different. When an intruder sets foot on your property, AI-powered cameras detect them, and a live U.S.-based agent takes action to deter them before a window ever breaks.

17:04Chuck Bryant:Yep, you can leave your house without worrying because you know SimpliSafe has you covered to prevent a crime before it even happens.

17:11Josh Clark:SimpliSafe's agents assess the threat, they intervene, they speak through the camera to scare off the intruders, and they call 911 for dispatch. Yeah.

17:18Chuck Bryant:Unlike traditional systems that alert you only after a break-in is already underway, SimpliSafe is designed to help prevent the crime before it starts. Right now, you can get 50 % off a new SimpliSafe system. Go to simplisafe.com slash stuff. That's simplisafe.com slash stuff for 50 % off. And when you order, write in stuff you should know in the how did you hear about a survey to let them know we sent you. There's no safe like SimpliSafe.

17:59All right, Chuck.

18:00Chuck Bryant: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 sticking around for clearly tens or hundreds of millions of years, right? And what they finally landed on was the same thing that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Henry David Thoreau and a bunch of other philosophers pointed to, which was it prompts you to go out and do other stuff.

18:39Chuck Bryant: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 will you're much likelier to go try it than when you're not bored. And that's what a bunch of research has turned up.

19:01Josh Clark: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.

19:11Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

19:11Josh Clark: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 bored, positive bored, or negative bored. And across all the studies, 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.

19:57Josh Clark:And if you were bored by negative content, you sought out positive experiences. So almost like you're seeking out the opposite of whatever you're experiencing in your boredom.

20:07Chuck Bryant: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. So, yeah, that's a 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 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.

20:50Chuck Bryant:Knowing that if they press this button, that's what was going to happen. It 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.

21:02Josh Clark:I could see myself totally doing that, by the way.

21:05Chuck Bryant:I think it depends on the shock. I would at least try it once, probably, eventually. That's, yeah, my deal.

21:09Josh Clark: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.

21:14Chuck Bryant:Right.

21:15Josh Clark:Yeah.

21:16Chuck Bryant:One guy apparently pressed the button 190 times in that study.

21:21Josh Clark:Yeah, I think they should do some follow-up studies with that guy.

21:24Chuck Bryant:Just that guy. Something's going on there. Exactly. 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 him 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.

22:04Chuck Bryant:And all of a sudden, both of their brains just enlarged because of the empathy and love that developed between the two.

22:10Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, that could go either way. 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 out here 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 cross that stream that I thought it was probably a really bad idea to cross. And it turns out that was correct. And all of a sudden they're getting helicoptered out.

22:42Chuck Bryant:Yes. But it can also work out, too, in that you go make a friend with an animal on the other side of that stream.

22:48Josh Clark:Yeah. Or kill it and eat it.

22:52Chuck Bryant:So I think also one of the more prevalent interpretations among lay people like us, meaning people who like to just lay around.

23:00Josh Clark:Yeah.

23:02Chuck Bryant: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 smart, you can always find something to occupy yourself. And I was like, shut up, Thoreau.

23:14Josh Clark:Yeah.

23:14Chuck Bryant:We know that you're so smart and cool. We get it. You don't have to put everybody else down. Studies have not borne out Thoreau's idea. It finds that intelligent people and people of lower intelligence are not, neither one's more likely to become bored more easily. But there are personality traits that create like trait boredom. There's trait and there's state, just like optimism. There's trait boredom and there's state boredom. And trait boredom seems to be kind of identified with two different types of people.

23:47Josh Clark:Yeah, there's a psychologist named John Eastwood that said if you're an impulsive person and if you're always looking for that new thrill and generally kind of understimulated by the world around you, then that totally makes sense that you would be prone to boredom. This one, I don't know, I can't make sense of, but if you're highly sensitive to pain and fearful of the world around you, 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.

24:25Chuck Bryant:Your anxiety or your fears overcome your aversion, your natural aversion to boredom as a human because, and so you're just not feeding your brain any new stuff anymore. So you become bored. It's very sad reason for being prone to boredom. Yeah.

24:43Josh Clark:In school, you know, you were talking about intelligence and school boredom is a big, you know, can be a big challenge for any student. But there are eight precursors for boredom in school, which is you're under challenged, like maybe you're in a like a remedial class and you're a little more advanced over challenging and go the other way to where if you're like, I just don't get this stuff. So you just slip into boredom, like you were talking about earlier. Monotony in classrooms, if you don't like your teacher, if you think there's a lack of meaning in going to school or a lack of involvement.

25:17Josh Clark:And then the other one is just the, you know, man, I could be doing whatever. I could be outside throwing the Frisbee right now instead of being in this dumb class.

25:26Chuck Bryant: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 where boredom levels dip the most. Yeah, I feel that. I can too. It's not like I'm always doing something meaningful or important. I just don't feel bored ever. That's all. I don't either. Yeah, even when I'm not doing anything, I'm never bored.

25:54Josh Clark:Same, man. I don't feel boredom anymore. It's kind of great.

25:58Chuck Bryant: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.

26:08Josh Clark:I don't know.

26:09Chuck Bryant:Yeah, for sure. I think that's definitely part of it. And apparently it starts to go back up as you get older, which I'm not looking forward to.

26:18Josh Clark:Yeah, let's avoid that. Let's agree to avoid that.

26:20Chuck Bryant:Yes. All right. Agree. Pinky swear.

26:22Josh Clark:Pinky swear.

26:23Chuck Bryant:But nothing compares to your levels of boredom from 10 to 17. part of it is that your brain is still developing. So you said impulse control and needing stimulation is 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. Yes. So if you're like, I want to go buy a mad magazine at this awesome used comic book store, 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.

27:12Chuck Bryant:And nothing is going to make you like you're not going to say, oh, I'll just go play duck hunt then and be happy. You're just upset about that. And that can can create like a sense of boredom in and of itself.

27:26Josh Clark:Buddy, do you remember the feeling you got when you got that driver's license?

27:35Chuck Bryant:No, not really. I don't. Oh, really? Yeah.

27:38Josh Clark:Man, that is, and it might just be me then. That was one of the single most important sort of things that happened in my life up to my 20s or 30s even. Wow, that'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 that I wanted to go. That's cool, man. It was incredible. I remember the feeling of just being like, now I can leave.

28:10Josh Clark:I mean, no shade toward my family or anything. I've talked before about not having the greatest situation with my parents and all. So, yeah, I wanted to get out of there. But just the freedom to go to my friend's house or whatever or go to the Turtles Record Store or whatever.

28:25Chuck Bryant:No, I remember those.

28:26Josh Clark:Yeah, it was incredible.

28:27Chuck Bryant:Yeah, no, totally. You prize freedom. Yeah. That makes sense.

28:31Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. We should probably talk about digital media, though, because.

28:35Chuck Bryant:Yes.

28:36Josh Clark:If you look at like boredom generationally, it's a different ball of twine these days.

28:42Chuck Bryant: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.

29:09Josh Clark:Yeah.

29:10Chuck Bryant:So that you're not bored anymore. You're not going and 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.

29:28Josh Clark:Yeah, it's, I guess it's a temporary salve 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.

29:46Chuck Bryant: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 you're you're threatened by that. Boredom is it generates those thoughts in you. So when you go pick up your phone and start scrolling, you are escaping this the those existential thoughts.

30:27Chuck Bryant:Oh, 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. Yeah. 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 there weren't social media apps on smartphones. Seriously, it's as cut and dried as that.

31:02Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. I'm getting a dumb phone. Are you? Yeah, I 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. Oh, neat. Because in certain situations, 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.

31:24Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

31:24Josh Clark:But I want to get one, 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 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.

31:46Chuck Bryant: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.

31:57Josh Clark:I don't know what spoofing a SIM means.

31:59Chuck Bryant:Your SIM card is what gives your phone its individual characteristics, like your phone number and all that stuff.

32:05Josh Clark:Oh, okay.

32:05Chuck Bryant:So if you can figure out how to duplicate that or spoof it in TikTok terms, you could conceivably have two phones with the same number getting the same info at the same time.

32:17Josh Clark: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. And when I whatever, I want my smartphone.

32:38Chuck Bryant: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.

32:48Josh Clark:Yeah, maybe so.

32:50Chuck Bryant:That's that's. Yeah, it's my guess.

32:53Josh Clark:I just saw where social media companies are being sued for two hundred and twenty billion dollars by a handful of states. Good. For getting children addicted to social media.

33:02Chuck Bryant:Which they 100 percent did.

33:05Josh Clark:Yeah.

33:05Chuck Bryant: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.

33:20Josh Clark:Yeah, I'm with you. And hats off to Australia because they mandated countrywide no social media for any children under 16.

33:28Chuck Bryant:Yeah, they did that a while back, didn't they?

33:31Josh Clark:I don't know how recently, but they're sort of leading the way. And 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.

33:46Chuck Bryant: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.

33:57Josh Clark:Yeah, and especially as it gets more and more fake and deep faked in AI to the point where people are sitting around staring at something that isn't even real ever.

34:07Chuck Bryant: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, you know?

34:28Josh Clark: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 people smashing their smartphones and being like, no, man, things were better before. Let's go back to that.

34:41Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

34:41Josh Clark: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.

35:05Josh Clark:Warning, the following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grown-ups.

35:10Chuck Bryant:One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Knock, knock, knocking at the door. Knock, knock, knocking at the door. Five, six, who is it? Five, six, who is it? It's Cowie and Elliot. It's Cowie and Elliot.

35:28Josh Clark:Lingo Kids, only suitable for kids. If it gets stuck in Mom's head, that's not our problem. Lingo Kids! Everything kids love. Download now for free. You know, everyone, today's savvy burglars have done the math, and they know that if they trigger your alarm, they still have time to grab what they want and go. But SimpliSafe is different. When an intruder sets foot on your property, AI-powered cameras detect them, and a live U.S.-based agent takes action to deter them before a window ever breaks.

35:55Chuck Bryant:Yep, you can leave your house without worrying because you know SimpliSafe has you covered to prevent a crime before it even happens.

36:02Josh Clark:SimpliSafe's agents assess the threat, they intervene, they speak through the camera to scare off the intruders, and they call 911 for dispatch.

36:09Chuck Bryant:Yeah, unlike traditional systems that alert you only after a break-in is already underway, SimpliSafe is designed to help prevent the crime before it starts. Right now, you can get 50 % off a new SimpliSafe system. Go to simplisafe.com slash stuff. That's simplisafe.com slash stuff for 50 % off. And when you order, write in Stuff You Should Know in the How Did You Hear About a Survey to let them know we sent you. There's no safe like SimpliSafe.

36:58Josh Clark:Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower personal dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client, paid or sponsored.

37:14Chuck Bryant:Stuff you should know, stuff you should know.

37:22Josh Clark:All right, everyone, we're back after our little rant. I hope it was taken in the right way.

37:28Chuck Bryant:Tim Cook is like, those guys really hurt my feelings.

37:32Josh Clark:Tim Cook, I hope he gives me credit when they invent a dumb phone that they can sell you for like$700. Yeah, at least. You can text and get mapped to places and call people, and that'll be$700.

37:48Chuck Bryant:You're paying not to go into cognitive decline. I think that's really what the price reflects.

37:53Josh Clark:All right. So I promised to talk about animals getting bored. animals that aren't us that is and they have done research to and basically kind of said like yeah animals for sure get bored um i think we i mean people that are you know dog and at least dog owners have seen their own dogs get bored and get like get destructive because they're not stimulated enough and i think that's kind of the same thing but they've studied uh mink uh like the animal the mink that's um they house them in non-enriching environments It was terrible. And then they said they definitely experienced boredom-like states because they found that 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's shadow and the noises of a predator.

38:39Josh Clark:The mink was like, well, I'll go check it out. I don't care. Anything but this cage.

38:42Chuck Bryant:Yeah, isn't that 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.

39:27Chuck Bryant: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.

39:35Josh Clark: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, you know, because you're trying to get your steps in, they get more worn out from a 20-minute sniff walk than an hour, like, hardcore exercise walk. And my walks with Gibson, like, they're 45 to 50 minutes long, And I bet half of that is standing around while he smells stuff.

40:05Chuck Bryant:I am so glad you said that, dude, because that is absolutely true. And you see a lot of people who are just like, come on. And that's, yeah, it doesn't, like, that's how your dog, like, enjoys life is by sniffing other stuff.

40:19Josh Clark:Yeah, it's great. And it's a good lesson for me, like, as a person.

40:25Chuck Bryant:I thought you were learning to sniff things, too.

40:27Josh Clark:No, no, no, just to slow down. Like yesterday, another weird example is I got, um, 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.

40:45Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

40:46Josh Clark:But I went out to do that the other day and they paired me with these two old fellers that were probably mid eighties to nineties. Oh, wow. And boy, these guys were slow, slow, slow. And I was like, you know what, Chuck? This isn't that day. You're just going to be there with them. You're going to help look for their balls. You're going to carry the clubs to them when they drop them. And you're going to 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?

41:18Chuck Bryant:They kept dropping their clubs?

41:20Josh Clark:No, like, you know, you carry a pitching wedge and a putter to the green, and you drop your pitching wedge to putt. I would always go like, I would always go caddy their club for them 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, though, but it was still fun.

41:38Chuck Bryant:So, yeah, I think that's great advice, too, just to slow down and stay present and mindful.

41:43Josh Clark:Yeah, and all that, I think, comes around to the boredom thing. It's like there are many ways to keep yourself from being bored, and one might be to just try and look at the circumstance you're in in a different way.

41:53Chuck Bryant:For sure. Um, also I think it's important to, 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. Um, that might not necessarily be meaningful to you. There's something else that's going to 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 know, you don't have to do them all the time. You don't have to become the best at them.

42:33Chuck Bryant:You don't have to drive yourself. You don't have to share your experience with anybody else. Yeah. 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, you know, rescue guppies out of elementary school aquariums. Right. Whatever it is.

42:56Josh Clark: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 him 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 wandered to all these creative things they could do with the cups.

43:29Josh Clark:And beer pong was born. Yeah, exactly. And that 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.

43:50Chuck Bryant: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.

43:58Josh Clark:Right.

43:58Chuck Bryant:And so no surprise, boredom can be a part of ADHD too.

44:05Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And, you know, we're talking about some of the positives. It 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 you're bored can sometimes be like a really bad thing.

44:28Chuck Bryant: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.

45:12Chuck Bryant:That you're going to do something because you've 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, oh, I'll go see what crack's all about.

45:29Josh Clark:Man, you're so preachy.

45:32Chuck Bryant:Some people do find – we get that from time to time.

45:36Josh Clark:Yeah, but you're sitting there encouraging people to like engage with the world and to go volunteer for cancer and not to do crack. Like get off your high horse.

45:45Chuck Bryant:I think that some people don't like being told what to do no matter what it is.

45:50Josh Clark:I know. Yeah.

45:52Chuck Bryant:And I get that. 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 like tell everybody how stupid they are, too. you know?

46:03Josh Clark: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 die on that hill.

46:20Chuck Bryant:And I think also, though, Chuck, it's really important that we pointed out that, you know, there's not some ideal thing you should go be, go do.

46:30Josh Clark:No.

46:30Chuck Bryant:That it's all based on what you find meaningful, and that's the point. Not what we're saying you should go do, but what you think you should go do. The point is to just do something that's going to help you in the long run more than, you know, turning to pot. Right.

46:47Josh Clark:Procrastination is another thing. I know we've talked about that before, but it is definitely a response to boredom. Proneness to 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.

47:07Chuck Bryant:I think they're equating 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 stopped eventually. Right.

47:42Chuck Bryant: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, is the lesson there.

47:55Josh Clark: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.

48:15Chuck Bryant: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. And 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.

48:35Josh Clark:I agree with that.

48:37Chuck Bryant: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 then for a listener menu.

48:48Josh Clark:That's right. This is short and sweet. Hey, guys, long-time listener, first-time writer. This is about the irony episode from Nick. I once had a debate about the song, Ironic, that you guys talked about from Alanis Morissette. Yeah. An English teacher I worked with. I argue 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 meta level. I really think the song is pure irony. Never really thought about that.

49:17Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

49:17Josh Clark: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.

49:28Chuck Bryant:Thanks a lot, Nick. That was just an 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 an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

49:50Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

50:06Josh Clark:The following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grown-ups.

50:11Chuck Bryant:One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Knock, knock, knocking at the door. Knock, knock, knocking at the door. Five, six, who is it? Five, six, who is it? It's Cowie and Elliot. It's Cowie and Elliot.

50:28Josh Clark:Lingo Kids. Only suitable for kids. If it gets stuck in mom's head, that's not our problem. Lingo Kids! Everything kids love.

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51:17Chuck Bryant:This voyage is a culture-soaked escape where pink sand paradise meets curious minds. Sailing round trip from New York City to Bermuda on October 2nd to 7th, 2026, this voyage drops you straight into the iHeart Podcast Stuff universe. On top of the adults-only experience you already love, you'll get live podcast episode recordings, behind-the-scenes sessions, themed activations, and more unmissable onboard moments. Learn more at virginvoyages.com slash stuff. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.