Nowadays it’s extremely common to have your every biological need met. You’re not hungry, you’re rested, you’ve socialized with some friends, there are no threats to your wellbeing, a caveman would call this paradise. So if we just sit back and do nothing to conserve energy, why do we get bored? Why do we have to do something, and not just vibe?
In: Biology
You get used to a certain amount of external stimulus, which then makes you crave more. If you become unfocused on whatever your task-at-hand is at the moment, you take note of the lack of things happening.
Because we didn’t evolve to just vibe; our caveman selves didn’t have the luxuries we have. Long periods of inaction meant you weren’t long for the world. The need to move and to do something, rather than just wasting away, is a super valuable trait.
The philosopher Schopenhauer thought that boredom was proof of the worthlessness of existence:
“[…] Schopenhauer offers in addition not just a definition but a substantive account of what boredom is. Boredom, he says, is the sensation of the worthlessness of existence. Boredom may even be regarded as evidence or proof that existence is worthless. If life itself had any real, positive value, there would be no such thing as boredom. Simply being alive would delight us. But, as things are, we can find no modicum of relief from our misery, except when we are diverted or distracted from our lives.”
Fun stuff, right? Source: https://iep.utm.edu/boredom/#SH3a
An animal like a crocodile can sit aimlessly for hours because its brain has not evolved to comprehend higher thought processes like ours has. A crocodile cares about 4 things: Eating, sleeping, sunning itself, and reproducing. Humans have a far more complex brain, which can form and recreate vivid memories, ponder the origins of life itself, and experience nuanced emotions like guilt, love, and shame, among many other higher functions. That’s not to say the crocodile is lesser than us, but the primitive “reptile” brain works for them due to their lifestyle, so it hasn’t changed. Since humans have the ability to plan for the future and refine our problem solving skills being that we are “higher order primates” than chimpanzees or orangutans, that eliminates much of the existential worry that other animals face. We can store food and wood for the winter, which lets us tell stories around the fire and play music instead of foraging like other apes must to survive. We did these activities and our brains were rewarded for it with feel-good chemicals. We sang and danced enough that it became important to our mental health over tens of thousands of years, so now when we can’t do these things that make us happy, we become bored or depressed.
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