The Harvard Gazette has an interesting piece on Sendhil Mullainathan, and this latest book “Scarcity” (a book I am still unsure on whether or not I want to read it…). The excerpt that caught my eye was this:
A respite [for our minds if they are exhausted from being kept
constantly busy] could be found in an unexpected state. Mullainathan says he asks people, “When was the last time you were bored — properly bored? Really, genuinely, and goodly bored?
“Boredom has enormous value,” he went on, telling of how he once waited long at the airport with his phone battery dying. “I could feel things were happening, connections were being made, random thoughts were being sewn together.” Yet we don’t let ourselves be bored — unless, he says, we’re where most of us say we are when our best ideas come: in the shower.
Fabian Gunzinger 