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Comment by mwfunk | Hacker News Reader

This is good advice, but the question here is who's the outlier. I had the same reaction and I'm pretty sure just about everyone I know would too. Or perhaps the point I'm missing is that everyone should assume that everyone, including themselves, is an outlier.

I wonder if age has anything to do with it. As I've gotten older, not only has the idea of being bored evaporated, but the idea of other people feeling bored is borderline offensive. Life is short, time is precious, there's always a zillion more things that could be done (maybe productive things, or maybe just fun time-wasting things) than there is ever time to do those things. And then someday it's all over. I associate being bored with when I was a little kid, or even when I was in my 20s and it still felt like my whole life was ahead of me. When you've convinced yourself that your whole life is ahead of you, time feels a lot less precious.

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As I've gotten older, not only has the idea of being bored evaporated, but the idea of other people feeling bored is borderline offensive.

As long as we're batting the n=1 ball back and forth, I have the opposite reaction to you. When I was young and an arrogant go-getter, I found the idea of other people being bored, or unproductive, or non-curious to be offensive.

Sometimes I was tactful about it, but that's how I felt, especially when I was consuming a large diet of hagiographies describing successful people as burning the entire candle factory, not just burning the candle at both ends.

Then I obtained two important and (for me) correlated things: Life experience. And empathy.

The former has shown me that I was the outlier. The latter has shown me that these are good and worthy people, they're just good and worthy in ways that my former Cult of Productivity does not value.

And even if I am still interested in productivity and so forth, empathy has helped me see them as they are without judging them.

You just captured my feelings exactly. As I get older it's not about finding something to do - it's about filtering down on the things I want to try and do.

As a 4-months-to-40 person and I know they are tropes but hiking, exploring wilderness, learning survival techniques, building things from wood, inventing strange useful objects and growing food and many other things are up my alley these days.

What I would do as a kid if I was bored are all things I can't stand anymore: Going to an amusement park, a movie, playing or watching sports, anything generally involving a lot of seeing or working with humans... hearing screaming kids, listening to music (especially if it's forced upon my ears without my ability to stop it), smelling perfumes... oh gawd keep it away.

I'm also curious if I'm an outlier at my age (or beyond?)

Perhaps you live in a bubble of remarkable people.

Try listening to conversations between coworkers, people in coffee shops, and at the grocery checkout.

Most people operate their lives like a smartphone has conditioned them to: never pull relevant information, only receive what's pushed.

One thing I realized about this is that when I was younger, I had a million ideas of what to do, but most of them were out of reach. I either didn't have the necessary knowledge, the necessary skill, or the finances to do the things I thought up. Now that I'm older, I often have many of those things. So I'm a lot less bored than I used to be. In fact, I have to pick and choose like you say - there are more things I'm able to do than I have time for. I better do something meaningful (even if that's just watching a really moving show or reading a good book).

Boredom is a state of mind, no surprise it can be viewed differently from person to person. For me personally, boredom allows me time to reflect and meditate. I don't mind it.

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