When Hanging Out With Bono No Longer Cuts It, You're Phone Will Fill In That Boredom Gap

What's wrong with boredom? For some, or many, everything!

How many innumerable adventures, business ventures, and side-ventures, not to mention restless hunts in antique stores or dollar stores or garage sales, or meetings at a cafe, or boat rides and fishing trips (or hunting trips for that matter) or movies no one really wants to see or books the meaning of which no one can find, or the umpteenth video game on your phone or iPad, or dropping and re-taking that university course on the Psychopathology of Bob Dylan, or Beatles records you tell yourself you like, or seeing U2 in its geriatric glory fumbling on stage,  or selling your house, or renting out your apartment, or cutting your hair and trimming your beard and shaving for the second time that day...or or or... (fill in here) all for the sake of removing boredom?

Well, according to MIT Tech Review there's an app for that--or soon to be... It uses your mobile phone to detect, based on a series of algorithms, your level of boredom, and will send you push notifications of things to do to remove it. It will determine your boredom level by how much time you've spent on your phone, what kinds of things you've done, the time of day, the number of calls or texts you've received, etc; and it will send you push notifications of apps you've pre-set in your phone.

This is put together by a set of researchers at Telefonica, a technology think tank that provides various technological solutions for, as it were, the improvement of human life. But does a boredom buzzer ensure the improvement of life? Does removing boredom in your life by that fact make it better?

That said, boredom is as vital to solving problems, coming up with new innovations and ideas, and learning as water is for quenching thirst. When we're bored, our brains are working at a different level, we're seeing the world differently, and we're doing everything we can to creatively break out of the state we're in. There's actually nothing wrong with being bored, and more people should try it rather than control it or fight it or distract from it.

Such a 'solution' for boredom using the smarts of a phone is just another uncritical way you're giving your phone the power to solve your problems for you--to what end? Sure you could get push notifications from the app that teaches you Spanish, but what if it's to something more damaging, such as an activity more addictive or compromising of healthy relationships, marriages, families, etc? When we're bored, we have choices based on what's around us; but when something else is directing us to other areas, and those that have greater third-party interests to boot, we have the makings of a, at the very least, conflict of interest on our hands (pun not intended).

Better to stay bored...