Boredom is prone to myth-making — much like the story of Phineas Gage. This matters. If we believe certain myths about boredom, it could lead us astray in how we respond.
Three ways boredom can actually be a benefit
A little boredom can be good for you.
Why Being Bored Is Good | The Walrus
Technology keeps us constantly stimulated. What do we lose when we no longer have nothing to do?
Bored People Quit
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't ha
Food, foragers, and folklore: the role of narrative in human subsistence
Narrative is a species-typical, reliably developing, complex cognitive process whose design is unlikely to have emerged by chance. Moreover, the folklore record indicates that narrative content is consistent across widely divergent cultures. I have argued elsewhere that a storyteller may use narrative to manipulate an audience's representations of the social and/or physical environment to serve his or her own fitness ends. However, my subsequent research suggests that such manipulation results from a broader selection pressure which narrative effectively alleviates: information acquisition. By substituting verbal representations for potentially costly first-hand experience, narrative enables an individual to safely and efficiently acquire information pertinent to the pursuit of fitness in local habitats. If this hypothesis is true, narrative should be rich with information useful to the pursuit of fitness. One class of information integral to the accomplishment of this task is foraging knowledge. In this paper, then, I present evidence that foraging peoples use narrative to transmit subsistence information: specifically, I demonstrate how various narrative devices (e.g., setting, description, mimicry, anthropomorphism) are used to communicate foraging knowledge.
Cory Doctorow: Stories Are a Fuggly Hack - Locus
I've mentioned before, stories are weird. I mean, really, really weird. Nothing that happens in a piece of fiction has any consequence in the real world. Romeo and Juliet did not live, did not die, and the ''tragedy'' they represent is objectively less important than the tragedy of the live yogurt culture I digested at the breakfast table this morning. My theory is that the parts of our brains that …Read More
Whoops, The Tech Press Mythologized Another Unethical Asshole
Lazy access journalism is pathologically obsessed with helping unremarkable, unethical weirdos cultivate elaborate supergenius engineer mythologies while covertly undermining the public interest.
Idle Skilling
Idle Skilling is the ultimate Idle Game with years of content! Meant to be played for 5-10 minutes a day, you gradually unlock new skills like mining, fishing, pet breeding, crusading, potion-making, lab-research, construction, and more! With new updates coming, you'll never run out of stuff to do!
Selective Mythology
defining open source for fun and profit, in the shadow of the enterprise
Are We Having Too Much Fun?
In 1985, Neil Postman observed an America imprisoned by its own need for amusement. He was, it turns out, extremely prescient.
What Did Folklore Do?: The Social Functions of Tradition
Cambridge Core - Cross-Discipline History: General Interest - What Did Folklore Do?
Sleep as a Competitive Advantage
Too many of us live by the myth that one less hour of sleep gives us one more hour of productivity, Tony Schwartz writes in the Life@Work column. In reality, lost sleep not only leaves us more fatigued, but also takes a toll on our cognitive capacity.
In Favor of Enjoying Things on Purpose
The human being is an enjoyment-seeking creature. There’s a reason people are always trying to restrain themselves from excessive eating, drinking, scrolling, and shoppin...
Do you believe that everybody should have fun or that only a few people should have fun?
Which side are you on?
The AI productivity myth is more harmful than you think
Perceived productivity may be up thanks to AI, but there's debt collecting in the shadows.
Whale Hunting
Discovering the hidden stories of how the world really works — by Project Brazen.
Anthropic's Mythos is a wake up call, but experts say the era of AI-driven hacking is already here | Fortune
Anthropic is limiting access to Mythos, but experts say similar capabilities are already in reach.
