Society Needs More Boredom

Thanks to a dizzying array of gadgets, mankind has finally “won the war on boredom”—and that might not be such a good thing, Scott Adams argues in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. Boredom, after all, gives our brains time to process things and be creative. “My period of greatest creative output was during my corporate years,” he writes, “when every meeting felt like a play date with coma patients.”

What would happen if our dwindling boredom resulted in dwindling creativity? Well, “you might see people acting more dogmatic than usual,” hewing to party lines instead of having original thoughts. You might see more sequels, more reality TV, an economy starved for new ideas. Sound familiar? This is “the sort of trend that could literally destroy the world without anyone realizing what the root problem is,” Adams argues. “A lack of creativity always looks like some other problem.” (More Scott Adams stories.)