Boredom and dumbdom.

Many commenters, including our commenting pal P.L. Woodstock, have surmised that one reason the recent peaceful protests turned into an orgy of violence and destruction so quickly is that being holed up for months due to Chinese Death Virus caused a crush of animal spirits to be sprung on the cities of America. People have been so frustrated and angry at things beyond their control that something, somewhere had to give. I believe it. I also believe there are bad actors who wanted to use the genuine outpouring of outrage to vicious ends, but let's give frustration its due as a major contributing factor. That and boredom.

I am convinced that boredom is very much underestimated as a motivating force for humans, both human achievement as well as human destruction. It sure doesn't look pretty.

Get a job, kid.

Just on a small, personal scale, boredom can cause all kinds of trouble. Bored with eating healthy (as who wouldn't be)? Obesity and diabetes and such. Bored with your spouse? Infidelity and lawyers and court orders. Bored with the ol' nine-to-five? Embezzlement and arrests and lawyers and ugly orange jumpsuits.

Boredom can be a positive thing, too. Maybe some theoretical scientists would enjoy thinking deep thoughts for laughs, but I suspect that if engineers weren't bored by regular tasks they wouldn't tinker and try to make new and useful inventions. Really, if you have food, clothing, shelter, and a reasonable expectation you won't be killed, why bother with anything? You could lay around in your spare time. But boredom impels us to find something interesting.

An article in a former newspaper called the New York Times made me think a little more about this; it examines the benefits of repeating familiar experience vs. encountering novel experience. And there are benefits to the former, because we do not process everything the first time around. I dislike seeing movies over and over, but if I watch one I haven't seen in a while I always see something I'd missed. That's even more true for day-to-day experience, as no day is exactly like another, as much as it may feel that way when you pull into the company parking lot on Monday morning. Heraclitus's famous quote, that you never step into the same river twice, still applies. Everything in life is in flux. But it doesn't feel that way, especially when you've stepped into that not-same-but-kind-of-same river a hundred times.

Boredom seems like it should be just a non-motivator, a big nothing. And indeed bored people can find it hard to get motivated by almost anything, a situation that smacks of depression. But boredom is not a mere nothing. It feels like a heavy weight, and that's something. It also has a powerful partner in frustration. Where one is the other generally follows.

It may be that boredom is the main impulse for so many of our advances. Maslow's hierarchy of needs tells us Safety First, but something impels us past the point of safety. Those upper tiers of the pyramid must allow for the fact that boredom and other impulses may drive us to sacrifice the lower basic needs.

Why did the human race ever keep moving till it covered the globe? Was it all just because food ran out here or the weather got bad there? Was it turf wars with other tribes, or resentments within our own? Or were we sometimes just sick of looking at one another and wondered what else might be over yonder?

The problem is, the really creative ways of relieving boredom, the ones that lead to advancement, are difficult, and may require talents and skills we don't have, like musical gifts, analytical thinking, navigation, a knack for math or looking at problems different ways. But setting crap on fire, beating someone to a pulp, or breaking windows? That stuff is easy.

Like so many things, it's hard to build straight with the crooked timber of humanity. Our flaws are inextricably tied to our virtues. Sometimes I wish things were better than they were, but a lot of the time I'm surprised things things aren't a lot worse.