Look who's bored: Us vs Them

NEW DELHI: It''s time to get boredagain. The Americans have finished celebrating July as Anti-Boredom Month - anannual event for 16 years - and gone back to yawning their way through thepresidential elections, Olympic golds, reality horror shows, Saddam Hussain''strial....When in India, do as Americans do. So what if we missed thecelebrations: how do we perform on the boredom meter? We could beat them handsdown here. We''ve already elected a new government that''s snailingalong, won no Olympic golds, lost cricket and hockey matches to Pakistan, andevery evening sit through family serials that, like Jassi, refuse to get amakeover.Doesn''t match up? Just the reason, say psychologists, why''we'' may not be as bored as ''them''.Americans "... are bored despiteliving in remarkable times," said an annual survey by a market research concern,Yankelovich Partners. Seventy-one per cent of 2,500 respondents yearned for morenovelty in their lives, up from 67 per cent just a year earlier.Reason: "Just as a drug user develops a tolerance and needs largerdoses to achieve the same effect, so too have we developed a tolerance toamazing events."Are we in urban India close to this restlessboredom? Yes we are, says Jitendra Nagpal, psychologist, Vimhans Delhi."Earlier, only high-flying, early-achieving corporate executiveswould face this problem. It''s now filtering down to the young. They get the best- in terms of commodities, information, even entertainment - without having tomake any real effort. The thrill of personal achievement is missing. Boredombecause of excess is a real downer. It could lead to depressions, addictions,suicides, a life in the fast lane... that can end in disaster."Asignificant hallmark of the Internet Age is not individual loneliness, but massboredom. In Overload and Boredom, sociologist Orrin E Klapp saysthat "a society could become boring in spite - indeed because - of huge loads ofinformation." He adds: "In our high-input society we try not towaste a minute in consuming commodities and communicating with as many people aspossible. But in a Babel of signals, we must listen to a great deal of chatterto hear one bit of information we really want. We discover that information canbecome noise-like when it is irrelevant or interferes with desired signals, sotending to defeat meaning.... And so we get bored."The boredomboomers hit the US in the ''90s. There was an increase in cases of depression andsuicides, greater school drop-outs, rise in crime rates, more sexual promiscuityand loss of productivity. Many institutes, sites, blogs were createdto fight the malaise.A decade later, the advice coming out isconventional wisdom: boredom is nothing new. And not all of it is bad. If youhave time on your hands as a child, you learn to be creative with it. It is, infact, a prerequisite to attaining heightened levels of perception.Bored? That''s fine. Indulge in it. Like Dunbar in Catch-22, whocultivates it to increase his lifespan - on the grounds that when you''re boredtime passes slower. So if you could achieve a state of total andabsolute boredom you would be, for all intents, eternal.