Folding space time

August 19, 2016 1:59 AM

The most boring video ever?

If you are a man then self electrocution is often preferable to being left alone with one's thoughts, study finds.

posted by asok (22 comments total)

The guy in the room was clearly like, "Hey, lookit how much less my skin conducts electricity. That's so interesti--ow! Huh."
posted by darksasami at 3:46 AM on August 19, 2016

I watched (then quickly skipped to the end, the first video)... why did I skip ahead? Not out of boredom, but because rick-rolling is a thing. I then watched the second one, which was educational, and interesting. I then went back and watched the first video in total.

The drying rack is cool... you could get all set up inside, and then fold it, take it outside, and viola - all out in the nice drying breeze, at least if it folds the way I think it does.

Why does he decide to turn the jeans inside-out at 1:47? It's a mystery.

I watch train cab ride videos, and people machining on lathes... I have a pretty high boredom threshold, I guess.
posted by MikeWarot at 4:13 AM on August 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

Boredom also motivates creativity, so it's not all self electrocution!

I wonder where boredom and ASMR cross over?
posted by asok at 4:20 AM on August 19, 2016

> I have a pretty high boredom threshold, I guess.

Boredom is not an overabundance of some substance which needs to be tolerated. It is a deficiency in someone's ability to find interest. There are no boring experiences, only boring people.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 5:00 AM on August 19, 2016 [12 favorites]

A confession. I’ve been bored for very large tracts of my life. Habitually bored. I suspect and I hope, but I cannot prove it, that boredom has done me no harm. That’s beyond, perhaps, a lingering, but perfectly tolerable sense of uneasiness. But one thing I hope this book will illustrate is that boredom is, in the Darwinian sense, an adaptive emotion. Its purpose, that is, may be designed to help one flourish. In that sense, I can’t help but feel that boredom has in some ways been a blessing.

An extract from Peter Toohey's Boredom: A Lively History (Yale University Press, 2011).
posted by Sonny Jim at 5:09 AM on August 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

Boredom is not an overabundance of some substance which needs to be tolerated. It is a deficiency in someone's ability to find interest.

That is a good way to look at it. I always just assumed I had ASD (Attention Surfeit Disorder).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:49 AM on August 19, 2016 [3 favorites]

Boredom is not an overabundance of some substance which needs to be tolerated. It is a deficiency in someone's ability to find interest. There are no boring experiences, only boring people.

Yeah? Here's 10 hours of riveting excitement for you folks.

I'm gonna go snort some pixie sticks and run in circles till I throw up.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:32 AM on August 19, 2016 [3 favorites]

If that's too stimulating for you ASD folks, try this.

Make sure to turn your volume down first.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:34 AM on August 19, 2016

Dammit, now I'm starting to like these things.

Golden Wheat Field

Sunflowers

Woodland Stream
posted by leotrotsky at 8:40 AM on August 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

Previously on Mefi: Joseph Brodsky on boredom. My guess is that these guys are dramatizing Brodsky's speech.
posted by Lyme Drop at 9:19 AM on August 19, 2016

I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action.

The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
posted by Mayor West at 9:45 AM on August 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

What is it really? For one thing, the clothes are dry. Is this a video, showing someone that a hostage is alive, drugged, but alive. It it a nuclear scientist we are watching?
posted by Oyéah at 10:02 AM on August 19, 2016

This video won't load for me, showing that "loading circle going around" icon, so I left the tab open, and when I came back Youtube had moved to another video, and I pressed back, and then I thought, wait, the loading circle IS the video, the "most boring video ever"? is that the joke? Haha, good one. I'm so confused.
posted by sylvanshine at 10:46 AM on August 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

oh she just reminded me to check if the pokestop near my office is blue again yet.
posted by numaner at 12:04 PM on August 19, 2016

leotrotsky, pixie sticks are a performance enhancing drug!
posted by I-Write-Essays at 1:58 PM on August 19, 2016

Gosh. I bet if someone put out a study saying that about women, not only would it not be funny, but the tsunami would knock Trump outta the news.

Hmmm. Almost worth it.
posted by Twang at 2:27 PM on August 19, 2016

The guy in the room was clearly like, "Hey, lookit how much less my skin conducts electricity. That's so interesti--ow! Huh."

Similarly, I became bored of that video when it became clear that I wouldn't get actual study footage of the man shocking himself repeatedly. I briefly pondered the dollar value I would attach to the opportunity to avoid not seeing him get shocked.
posted by FatherDagon at 3:38 PM on August 19, 2016

Wait. You want me to do two things?
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 7:04 PM on August 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

> Boredom is not an overabundance of some substance which needs to be tolerated. It is a deficiency in someone's ability to find interest. There are no boring experiences, only boring people.

This is not true. We are not self-sufficient entities; we need connection and stimulus to be fully ourselves.

I love Pale King. I got through a tremendously tedious job at a tech industry subcontractor doing boring and repetitive work of no interest or value to anyone with that Pale King quote. Even so, one must remember that the character who most fully lived that ethos in PK ended up becoming an ethereal detached entity simultaneously much more and also much less than fully human; his boredom-derived ability to hover a couple of inches above any chair he appeared to be sitting on was no consolation for his total detachment from all experience.

Also remember that wrestling that book into shape killed David Foster Wallace (well, that, and a very sad misguided attempt to wean himself off his meds).

Becoming immune to boredom, experiencing second-by-second the waste of human potential for life and love that comes of doing work that no one likes and that no one needs, and letting that waste neverendingly wash over and through you as if time and tedium were a great wave that never breaks, is what the world we have built for ourselves demands. it is the way to thrive under its rules.

And it will kill you dead.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 8:18 PM on August 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

That's pretty much what I do for work, YCTAB. This is why I am here on MetaFilter right now.

I've always been bad at boredom, which is to say that I would definitely have shocked myself in that room. (And then started trying experiments. Can it shock me through one layer of my clothing? Two? What if I dampen my skin with spit? How far away from my skin can the shock jump?)

Me, I say sensitivity to boredom is at least as useful as the ability to endure it. If it weren't for all the people sitting around saying, "Man, this is boring. I wonder what happens if I rub these sticks together as fast as I can?" where would we be today?
posted by Scattercat at 9:29 PM on August 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think the trick is that whichever well-connected person got the contract for the consulting firm has to provide something like proof that x number of hours of work have been provided — and for the love of god no more than x number of hours of work! if you put anything but straight 8s on your timecard you will be frogmarched out of here so quick! yes we say you're salaried, but you should know without being told that nothing about your position makes you exempt from overtime law! — but it doesn't actually matter what that work is. It just has to be something so, that the well-connected person's FTE patron in the firm being consulted for can keep channeling money to the consulting firm without complaint from their highers-up. and that's why we're sitting in a tiny room with too many other people in it packed in too tight doing things that no one wants and that we're not qualified for, in-between bouts of reading metafilter.

it's pretty awful. but not as awful as that "only boring people get bored" cliché.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:02 AM on August 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Laundry is my religion and my clothesline my temple.
posted by sonascope at 8:42 AM on August 20, 2016 [2 favorites]