For the Love of Boredom |
There are many myths about boredom that need busting.
Boredom won't make you creative.
Boredom is not (at least chronically) good for you.
Everybody knows the story of Phineas Gage. The fascinating and gory tale of the railroad worker who miraculously survived a three-foot eight-inch iron bar shooting through his skull. The story is so ubiquitous that it is hard to choose which of the multitude of YouTube videos that chronicle his fate would be best to watch.[1]
For me, Gage is a good starting point for understanding how myths are made and why they might be problematic, which will eventually lead me to debunking some modern myths around boredom that really get under my skin.
Gage’s story hardly bears summarizing. We have all seen the sepia photographs of the aftermath. What is remarkable to me about his story is the sheer amount of myth-making it has engendered.
The initial, and it should be said, widely differing impressions of Gage’s case, came from his treating physician, John Harlow, and his surgeon, Henry Bigelow. Harlow’s version won the day. We learn from Harlow that shortly after his injury, Gage began acting in a childish manner, not fit for polite society. From there things just get wilder (and more divorced from the truth). Gage apparently struggled to maintain employment (not true, he held several jobs, some of which would have required a high level of responsibility). He had poor relations with his wife and children (not true – he didn’t have either as far as we can tell). Truth did not seem to matter to the myth makers, for them Gage was clearly “no longer Gage”. [2]
And for me, the myth fit with some very personal experiences I was having just as I was being indoctrinated into Gage’s tales of woe. My brother had crashed his car and suffered a traumatic brain injury. As he recovered, he........