The effects of boredom
People may work from various reasons; they might do it in order to support their families, to gain some extra money; the reasons are different depending on the persons. A new study has been conducted and it has revealed that the people work in order to escape boredom. The researchers say that we are so terrified of being bored that in many cases we do meaningless tasks as long as we can find a way to justify them to ourselves.
However, this does not mean that we are crazy about working. The study clearly showed that we would rather do nothing than do a job which has no meaning to us. If the task has no importance then we prefer not to do it. It seems that the reason why we chose to be active and not idle in certain times is because of happiness. When we work, we are happier than we are idle. The results revealed the fact that people should stay active even when they do not have a very important task to do. The researchers believe that when people are busy, they are less likely to engage in various activities which can be destructive for them, such as committing crimes. Because of this, they suggest that we should keep ourselves busy when we are extremely bored. We should for example make a mess in order to have to clean it, or to take something apart in order to have to put it back together. These findings are based on two different experiments.The first one was performed in 1998, when students were told that they would have to perform a survey about their school. They were told to leave their personal belongings outside. Once they finished the survey they were told that the next survey will begin in 15 minutes.
They were then asked to deliver the survey. They had two different choices: whether they had to deliver it to a nearby location or to a location farther away. They were told that the farther location will take them about 12 minutes to deliver the survey and to return. Once they turned in the survey, they would receive candy. The students weren’t too picky when it came to chocolate, as they liked both milk and dark chocolate. In some instances, delivering the survey to one of the locations would result in a certain kind of chocolate, delivering to the other location would result in the other kind of chocolate, and in some cases the students had the possibility of choosing what type of chocolate to choose.
The students really had no choice of choosing the second location. Since they got to choose the type of chocolate which they would receive, they could have chosen the nearest location. Even the ones who were told that they would receive a certain type of chocolate at a certain location did not have to go to the second one since they weren’t picky when it came to the sweets. The results revealed that the people who chose to go to the farther location were happier than the ones who simply had to wait for 15 minutes. The reason for this might be the way in which we perceive the time. “Time flies when you’re having fun.” The saying is somewhat true because depending on the activity, the time might seem to go slower or faster. This is why the boring or painful situations seem to go way slower than the euphoric ones. The second experiment was similar to the first one, the only different being that they were told where to deliver the survey. The students who kept themselves busy in the last 15 minutes of the test were happier than the ones who did nothing.
The researchers explained to the participants that being busy will make them happier, which means that they knew that they will be happier if they would choose not to be idle. However, even when they had this information, they chose to be idle when the task they had to perform was a useless one. There might be evolutionary underpinnings why we might justify everything we do. Our human ancestors had to conserve energy if they wanted to be able to survive. This is why they did not engage in any activity they saw; because they knew that the lack of energy might have resulted in their death in certain cases. The ancestors performed an activity only when they knew that it would be with rewards, otherwise they ignored it. The problem is that in many cases we do not know what is good for us. We might be bored but we do not know what to do. One researcher joked, stating that the governments should allow the people to build bridges which have no purpose, in order to prevent the boredom in the case of some people.
There are different similar interventions. The airports tried to reduce the bareness or to increase the happiness of the people by increasing the distance between the gates and the baggage claim area. As a result the people had to walk for longer periods of time instead of having to wait. The results showed that the increased distance did not really make a difference when it came to the overall happiness of the people. Maybe they were just not in the mood for performing a walk.
