Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Kids complain all the time about being bored. Adults complain far less on that front. Here’s an interesting explanation of why that might be the case. The authors of The Power of Moments point out that the most important events in a person’s life fall overwhelmingly in a “relatively narrow window of time: roughly age 15 to 30”. Psychologists even have a term for this period of life, the “reminiscence bump”. But why does such a narrow window “dominate our memories”? In her book, Time Warped , Claudia Hammond says the reason is that’s the “time for firsts”. First crush, first job, first time living away from home, first time we get to make choices about our lives. And novelty changes our perception of time. Anything new feels like it lasts last longer. Experiments show that when successive images are shown for the same time, say lots of brown shoe images with the odd alarm clock image inserted in between at random, people will insist that the alarm clock was shown longer. Ye...

As a kid, one got bored very easily. Especially during summer vacation in Delhi, when it was boiling hot outside which meant going out to play was not an option for much of the day. There was only Doordarshan on TV, and even that started at 6 and had horribly uninteresting programs, except for the cartoons on Sunday! The playing outside part aside, I guess life must have been pretty much the same for adults as well back then. Fast forward to today and you have 24x7 TV channels: even if none of them has anything worth watching, you can keep surfing endlessly through the channels. There’s also the Internet which offers even more variety than TV. And smartphones have brought the endless stuff of the Internet to your fingertips even when you are stuck in traffic. And that pretty much means the end of boredom. Which should be a good thing: after all, who wants to be bored, right? I sure thought so, which is why I found Clay Shirky’s comment interesting: “It was only later that I realize...