Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and a never-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Well, according to Arthur Brooks, you need to be bored.

A short, straightforward YouTube mini-talk, the Harvard professor and best-selling author insists

that far from being something to overcome, boredom is necessary for human flourishing.

It is, in fact, a practice we need to cultivate.

And the commitment we seem to have to avoid boredom at all cost is what is behind many of our

worst habits, worst problems, and biggest anxieties.

Now, to say that that kind of thinking runs against societal norms, quite the

understatement. In fact, according to a Harvard study from 2014, most people would prefer even pain to

boredom, placed in a room with nothing to do for 15 minutes, but push a button that delivers an

electric shock. A big majority of the participants gave themselves shocks instead of

thinking about nothing. In the video, Brooks first described how boredom works on our minds.

Quote, boredom is a tendency for us to not be occupied otherwise cognitively, and that switches

over our thinking system to use a part of our brain that's called the default

mode network. It sounds fancy, it's really not. The default mode network, he said, is a bunch of

structures in your brain that switch on when you don't have anything else to think about. So,

you forgot your phone and you're sitting at a light, for example. That's when your default mode

network goes on.

In quote, in other words, boredom cannot just be explained by a desire we have, especially in

modern Western culture, to be entertained. After all, movies, music, plays, games, these are

often welcome respites for the weariness of work and stress. Instead, Brooks argues, it is essential

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