Boredom Click Quotes

What we are experiencing is experiential poverty. Such poverty may not only be about a lack of experiences, where nothing is happening. An abundance of activities can also create a feeling of experiential poverty. And this last point is interesting. Things just get to be too much. the problem, according to Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, is that we carry on seeking "increasingly more powerful experiences" instead of pausing to breathe deeply, shut out the world and use the time to experience ourselves. The idea that boredom can be avoided by constantly pursuing something new, being available around the clock, sending messages and clicking further, watching something you haven't yet seen, is naive. The more you try to avoid boredom, the more bored you become. Routine is like that too... Busying oneself becomes a goal in and of itself, instead of allowing that same restlessness to lead you somewhere further.

I am scared of snapping. That something, some random day, it will simply make ‘click’ in my mind and all of the sudden I will absolutely lose my mind. In other words having gazed into the abyss for too long. Go completely and totally insane! How does one decent into madness? What makes one click so all of the sudden life is upside down and people don’t know themselves anymore?

Yakov spent the whole day playing his fiddle; when it got completely dark, he took the notebook in which he recorded his losses daily, and out of boredom began adding up the yearly total. It came to over a thousand roubles. This astounded him so much that he flung the abacus to the floor and stamped his feet. Then he picked up the abacus, again clicked away for a long time, and sighed deeply and tensely. His face was purple and wet with sweat. He thought that if he could have put that lost thousand roubles in the bank, he would have earned at least forty roubles a year in interest. And therefore those forty roubles were a loss. In short, wherever you turned, there was nothing but losses everywhere. - Rothchild's Fiddle

He leaned against the chair, his muscular arms relaxed. “Is yer name Rose Amy.” I gave him an impressed look. I hadn’t expected him to catch on to the vague alphabetical clues to my initials. “Wrong.” “Curses.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth a few times, and I wanted to lean in and kiss him, hard. “Renee… Antoinette”. “I’d kill my mother if she named me Rene Antoinette.” I took another drink of my beer, wishing I hadn’t mentioned my mother. He gave a throaty laugh. “It’s god-awful, that’s fur sure.” “Quit stalling,” I sighed in mock boredom. “Rachel Anne.” My blood slopped to a halt in my veins. “Uh-No.” I lied, hiding the shock in my eyes.

Back in my room, I decide, out of boredom or reflex (or some perverse combination), to log on. I’m clicking away, mindlessly, when it dawns on me: the Internet is Schopenhauer’s Will made manifest in the digital age. Like the Will, the Internet is omnipresent, and purposeless. It is always striving, never sated. It devours everything, including our most precious resource: time. It offers the illusion of happiness but delivers only suffering. As with the Will, the Internet offers two ways to escape its clutch: the path of the ascetic and that of the aesthete. Meditation or music.

Being Motivated by Shame: Neurodivergent people don’t learn as others do and are shamed for how they learn and their choices in life. So, they discover that shame is a driving force for learning and other accomplishments. This shame isn’t something neurodivergent people are born with. Instead, it’s something that is beaten into them as the years go by, and society continues to tell them they’re broken — which is not true. Stimming: Stimming refers to any action that’s meant to help the neurodivergent person feel stimulated for whatever reason. There are all kinds of stims, from vocal to tactile. Stimming helps to alleviate boredom and to regulate and express emotions as needed. Examples of stimming include throat clicking, finger-snapping, rocking back and forth, running hands through hair, pacing, repeating sounds or words, and so on.

We scroll, we click, we swipe, racing through digital static, each distraction a fleeting sedative, numbing the quiet dread gnawing at the edges of our withering hearts. We remain distant, mere spectators to our own lives, as the hours slip like grains of sand through the hourglass, and only now, in the suffocating silence, do we sense the weight of all that’s slowly slipping away.

How do these online distraction systems work? They start with an external trigger or notification. You may visit a Website or sign up for a service. They will then send you an email, follow you on the Internet with ads, or send you a push notification with very specific language that has been tested to get you to click on it. You click on the link and your attachment or connection to that distraction system gets a little bit stronger. You, unintentionally, provide that system with more information when you read an article, add a friend, or comment on a photo. Without realizing it, and behind the scenes, the machinery of distraction is starting to turn. On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being completely attached, you are a 2 at this point. These companies know that you don’t really care about the company itself, but you do care about your friends, family, and co-workers. They leverage these relationships by showing your profile to these contacts. These people are then asked to add you as a contact, friend, or to comment on your photo. Guess what this does? It brings you back to the site and increases the attachment. Think about this just for a second. If a company wants me to come back to their site, then they have a much higher chance of getting me back if they tell me my nephew added me as a friend, or posted a new pic. I care about my nephew. I don’t care about the company. This happens a few times and the attachment goes from a 2 to a 5. Soon, you have more and more connections on the site. Many of these sites have a magic number. Once you cross that threshold they know they really have you. Let’s say it is 10 connections. Once you have 10 connections they know with a level of statistical certainty that they can get you coming back to the site several times a week. Your attachment then goes from a 5 to a 7. All this time they are still pinging you via email, ads or push notifications to get you back to the site. The prompts or triggers to get you back are all external. You may be experiencing uncomfortable emotions like anxiety, sadness, or boredom, but you are not yet feeling these as triggers to go to the site and escape these feelings. Instead, what happens gradually, is that the trigger moves from being external like an email prompt and moves internal. Soon, they do not have to remind you or leverage your relationships to go back to the site. You are now doing it on your own. You are checking it regularly on your own. Your attachment has moved from a 7 to an 8. They’ve got you now, but they don’t completely have you. The tendrils are not yet deep into your brain and that is really where they want to go. They want to get as wrapped around your brain as possible, because the deeper they are - the more unconscious this behavior of checking the site - the more time you spend on the site and the more money they make. When you start living your life, not for what you are actually experiencing at the moment, but instead for how you imagine it will look to other people on these sites, then they really have you. When the experience itself is less meaningful than the image of you on the site and the number of likes it gets, then they are getting really deep. They have moved the center of your self from your actual life and transferred it to the perception of your life on their site. You now mostly live for reactions from other people on these company’s sites. By this time, you are likely refreshing the page, habitually looking at your phone, and wondering why your pic or video has not received more comments or likes. By this time you are fully hooked, as my good friend Nir Eyal would say, and your attachment has gone from an 8 to a full 10. They’ve got you hook, line, and sinker. Scary

Social media, smartphones, gaming, and computers have created an alternate reality for most people. We don’t need to use our imaginations anymore because everything we desire is available to us at the click of a button. Instant gratification is the norm, and there’s no such thing as boredom because we can find something on the Internet to entertain us for hours at a time. Technology has made us so comfortable that we despise being uncomfortable. We want our children to have the best lives possible; we don’t want them to suffer. But in our quest for this, we are actually handicapping our children.