Bored With Boring Boredom

Psychopathy and boredom

Boredom and psychopathy are rather synonymous with one another. People mention our boredom like it is some great anomaly in the world, when to us, it is simply the way life is. Some people actually think that our boredom would make life less fulfilling than that of neurotypicals, and I cannot see how that is the case. Life for a psychopath is quite fun, boredom aside, and I don’t give much thought to boredom as it is something that has been in my life like a boon companion since I was too young to know what it was.

That did not, however, remove its influence from my life. Imagine being a child, dealing with boredom, having no fear, and being punishment-immune. It was a whole thing for my parents. It was suggested to me recently that perhaps a party for the survival of my childhood was a good idea, and I am not certain that I disagree.

Let’s talk about boredom for a moment. I found this article that speaks about eight reasons why people get bored. Granted, this article means to address neurotypicals, and therefore a lot of what it has to say is going to be directed toward neurotypicals, but going through it and seeing how much can be applied to psychopathy sounds like fun to me.

Eight Reasons Why We Get Bored

The article subheading reads:

“Boredom can be viewed as a crisis of desire”

That is super interesting to me. Psychopaths live in a state of self-interest. What will entertain me right now, or keep my mind occupied? This subheading is a bit dramatic in its wording for me, but all the same, it’s a good choice to describe boredom. It isn’t a lack of things to do, it’s a lack of wanting to do those things.

Boredom is predictive of loneliness, anger ("cabin fever"), sadness, and worry. As Kierkegaard remarked, boredom is “the root of all evil.” Boredom is such a motivating force that people do all kinds of things to ease the pain. The chronically bored are at higher risk for drug addiction, alcoholism, and compulsive gambling.

All right, psychopaths won’t get lonely, or feel angry due to boredom. Sadness and worry aren’t concerns either as we cannot feel those. However, boredom can certainly be a little bastard that can get us in trouble if we haven’t the internal mechanisms in place to be stopgaps between us and impulses that might cross our minds.

I have never felt the need to “ease the pain” of boredom, as that isn’t what it is for me. Rather there is a desire to do something entertaining. I have a decently high threshold for dealing with my boredom, probably because it has always been there so it isn’t like it’s something new. It doesn’t magically become this oppressive force. Instead, what happens is that something mildly interesting crosses my path and I think, “Ooo let’s do that” when “that” is a bad idea. It isn’t so much that I can only think of being entertained by things that are breaking the law or stepping over social boundaries. It’s that I don’t have the internal wiring that tells me that those things aren’t worth the trouble, and even if they aren’t exactly a wise idea, there isn’t a high chance of getting caught… right?

Boredom is a conveyance into the realm of naughty. Let’s see what the article has to say about it.

Here are a few main causes of boredom:

Monotony in the Mind

Boredom is similar to mental fatigue and is caused by repetition and lack of interest in the details of our tasks (such as tasks that require continuous attention, waiting at the airport, prisoners locked in cells). Any experience that is predictable and repetitive becomes boring. In general, too much of the same thing and too little stimulation can cause in its victim an absence of desire and a feeling of entrapment (Toohey, 2012).

I can agree with the notion that boredom can feel tiring. It is tiring because the brain is seeking stimulation and cannot find anything that will suit its definition of what that is. I also agree that predictable and repetitive things are boring, but that is true for everyone. I tend to have several things going on at once to deal with that sort of problem. Boredom is one of the main reasons that I do not like exercise. It is terribly boring for me, and unless I have something to keep my mind occupied and entertained, it’s like torture because it is so boring.

However, if I can do something else to keep my brain occupied while doing things that don’t keep all the parts of my brain entertained that I need entertained, then I am a much easier person to deal with.

Lack of Flow

Flow is a state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities, akin to “being in the zone.” Flow occurs when a person’s skills match the level of challenge presented by the environment and when a task includes clear goals and immediate feedback. Tasks that are too easy are boring. In contrast, tasks that people perceive to be too difficult lead to anxiety.

…flow is exactly where I get bored. This is a total divergence from how it works for a psychopath. Learning something is entertaining. Flow is where that part of my brain that is engaged while learning something needs something else to focus on so I can stay with that flow and do what I need. It is rare that you will find me in the kitchen cooking without some sort of other entertainment for exactly this purpose. I like cooking, but in order for me to continue liking it, it has to be filled in with other things, like scary stories.

Flow for me indicates that I have the necessary skills to do something without really needing to have all of my brain focused on it. As mastering things doesn’t provide me any sort of emotional feedback like pride, it is simply something that I move on from and find something else to do.

I don’t have anxiety when things are difficult, I have determination and stubbornness. Probably to a degree that isn’t healthy, it certainly isn’t normal. I like when things are hard, so long as those things are interesting. If it’s hard and holds no interest for me, you couldn’t do anything to engage me. It is a dead end.

Need for Novelty

Some individuals are more likely to be bored than others. People with a strong need for novelty, excitement, and variety are at risk of boredom. These sensation seekers (e.g., skydivers) are likely to find that the world moves too slowly. The need for external stimulation may explain why extroverts tend to be particularly prone to boredom. Novelty-seeking and risk-taking is the way that these people self-medicate to cure their boredom.

Yeah, that first couple of sentences is pretty much psychopathy in a nutshell. The third sentence is where it sort of divorces for me. I don’t find that the world moves too slowly, I find that I get to the end of something and don’t have a new thing to pick up in its place. This is my own fault. I should have planned ahead, and I failed to do so. However, I can say that even when I do plan ahead, there can often be difficulties with my brain wanting the thing that I have lined up as next, which means that I had best have several options for it to choose from. If none of them are engaging, then I will be bored.

Side note, if Grammarly doesn’t stop being a dick by trying to rewrite my sentences because it wants me to sound more like AI and not how I actually write you all are going to get some posts that are going to make grammar nazis mad, because Grammarly is working very hard to have itself be shown the door. I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to have it start making suggestions that totally change the tone of my writing, but they are an egotistical ass who needs to sit down immediately. Or, give the option to turn off the blue underlining. It’s obnoxious.

Rant over. Next.

Paying Attention

Boredom is linked to problems with attention. What bores us never fully engages our attention. After all, it is hard to be interested in something when you cannot concentrate on it. People with chronic attention problems, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, have a high tendency for boredom.

Oh, this is basically my entire educational experience. Nothing in school entertained me, so I would read all the time. I didn’t care what was being taught, it was all too boring and too slow. I didn’t even put in the effort to try to concentrate. I couldn’t or wouldn’t be bothered. I have had a lot of people tell me, “You should go to school to be a lawyer, a psychologist, a neuroscientist”, or whatever else they think I might be good at, and the answer is always going to be the same. Nope, I cannot stand school. It does not engage any part of me, and I can’t be bothered trying to pay attention to any of it.

Emotional Awareness

People who lack self-awareness are more prone to boredom. A bored individual is unable to articulate what it is that he or she desires or wants to do. They have trouble describing their feelings. An inability to know what will make one happy can lead to a more profound existential boredom. Not knowing what we are searching for means that we lack the capacity to choose appropriate goals for engagement with the world (Eastwood, 2012).

Ooo, now this one is interesting. Removing the heading about “emotional awareness” and focusing on a lack of self-awareness leading to more boredom makes me think about what a lot of psychologists have insisted is true about psychopaths. A great number of people in the field will claim that psychopaths do not have the ability to be self-aware. This is silly nonsense, but if you think about where they are gathering information, this makes sense. They are gathering information from the world of criminals. Not a lot of criminals are terribly self-aware. They tend to be focused at the point closest to the end of their nose.

This isn’t just true of antisocial psychopaths, but criminals as a large group. They aren’t exactly lining up normal psychopaths for their studies, and so long as they make ridiculous claims such as this, and believe in them like they would believe in a lifejacket in the middle of the ocean after a shipwreck, they aren’t going to be changing their minds any time soon.

What they fail to consider is what makes normal psychopaths different than the criminal ones. Remember, we are the vast majority of psychopaths, but are not studied at all. So, what makes us different? Self-awareness for one. In fact, I find the process of thinking about how I think and how that interacts with the world to be rather entertaining. It allows me to see where I can be a better version of me and also gives me insight into how I might be failing to understand the world around me due to only seeing something through my lens. Everyone does that, psychopaths are no different.

Inner Amusement Skills

Individuals lacking the inner resources to deal with boredom constructively will rely on external stimulation. In the absence of inner amusement skills, the external world will always fail to provide enough excitement and novelty.

I definitely have inner amusement skills, and I still have a great deal of boredom. So, while that may be true for some neurotypicals and psychopaths, that isn’t the source of my boredom.

Lack of Autonomy

People feel boredom a lot when they feel trapped. And feeling trapped is a big part of boredom. That is, they are stuck or constrained so that their will cannot be executed. For example, adolescence is a peak period for boredom, largely because children and teenagers are not given a lot of control over what they want to do.

This one also doesn’t apply to me. There was never the sense that anyone had any sort of control over me whatsoever, much to the chagrin of my parents. They very much wished that I could be controlled or at the very least, reasoned with, but that was a nonstarter. It was my boredom that motivated me to do what I wanted when I wanted, it certainly was never due to feeling like I had to break out of some imaginary prison. I would hazard a guess by saying that my parents would have genuinely considered building a jail cell around my room if they thought that would have had an impact, but they also knew that I would find a way out of it.

The Role of Culture

In many ways, boredom is a modern luxury (Spacks, 1996). Boredom was literally nonexistent until the late 18th century. It came into being as the Enlightenment was giving way to the Industrial Revolution. Early in human history, when our ancestors had to spend most of their days securing food and shelter, boredom wasn't an option.

This is just not true. People may have been busy having to do all that they had to do in order to survive, but that can still be monotonous. They can try to sell the notion that boredom is a new thing, but that is just assuming things about the past that do not play out when thought about in modern context. There are people who literally work all day long to do things that they must achieve in order to eat or have water, but the assumption that those things so overly occupy the mind that they cure boredom is not realistic.

Having to struggle to live does not negate boredom.

Boredom also has its benefits. It is important to see boredom as a “call to action” (Svendsen, 1999). Nietzsche suggested that men of rare sensibility value boredom as an impetus to achievement. Boredom can be a catalyst for action. It can provide an opportunity for thought and reflection. It can also be a sign that a task is a waste of time—and thus not worth continuing.

Yeah, and idle hands are the devil’s playthings. Boredom is something that needs to be sorted cognitively. It is a weighing of the pros and the cons that should be determining how you deal with boredom. I will speak about how I deal with it in the next post.