{ Credit goes to a conversation with my friend and ex-roomie Ryan Hawe for sparking the idea for this article. Good luck with Jenn in the new place, Ryan! }

Boredom is a negative emotion. We spend a great deal of the time we do not spend earning a living on things to avoid boredom. As a curious, neophilic, stimulation-seeking species, human beings need a constant variety of things in order to be happy and avoid the dreaded boredom. Even the most stodgy reactionary conservative old people doesn’t read the same newspaper over and over again.

In fact, boredom’s pain is so increase that it can lead some people to do things which seem downright counter-evolutionary. Without an understand of boredom, an alien race would be at a loss to explain why we Earthlings are willing to do extraordinary things like climb mountains or jump out of airplanes just for the excitement of it.

But hell, sure beats being bored!

In fact, it is possible that one might use boredom as a useful metric for intelligence. The more mental effort it takes the individual to stave off boredom, the more intelligent they are. Certainly, I’ve noticed that my fellow intellectuals and I share the characteristics of low boredom tolerance and a tendency to prefer activities which offer a great deal of mental stimulation and/or require a great deal of mental effort in order to keep the boredom at bay.

And it’s precisely this combination of boredom intolerance and hunger for mental stimulation that gives boredom such amazing power. Because when we smart types get bored and set out in search of something interesting to do, the gates of possibility are thrown wide open and anything might happen. And as luck would have it, some of that something usually turns out to be useful.

It was boredom, after all, that led the first nomadic primitive man to find out what it was like in a cave and then come back to the tribe and grunt “wouldn’t it be cool to sleep someplace dry for a change?”. It was boredom that led a bedridden Descartes to stare a fly crawling across the ceiling of his bedroom and get the inspiration for inventing a little thing called calculus. (Trust me, that was a good thing. ) And it was sheer boredom that led many an imaginative child to create worlds in their minds, populate them with characters who had grand adventures, and some day become our greatest writers.

Of course, you cannot have boredom without its root cause : leisure. If it takes absolutely every bit of your energy and your concentration and your mental effort just to barely scrape by in subsistence living, then you are unlikely to have an opportunity to get bored. You might even forget what bored was like.

But for most of human history, human beings have had a little leisure time at least, even if it’s just that brief, blissful period in between collapsing onto your straw pallet at night and actually falling asleep, and boredom has always been there, pushing us to wonder why things are how they are, and how they might actually be better if they were different.

So boredom spurs innovation, innovation spurs progress, progress leads to greater leisure time, and that leads to more boredom. And so the cycle continues.

And now, it’s the Internet age, and the true power of boredom has truly been unleashed by the power of what I call the One Bored Nerd factor. With the power of the Internet, all it takes is one bored nerd to create a program that makes millions of people’s lives easier, or come up with a solution to a problem that without the Internet they might have never heard of, or an invention that bring fresh water to millions.

The efficiency of innovation has never been higher in the history of the world, and it’s still on the rise. In recent years, people have even begun creating video games that allow people to help find a cure for cancer by applying their gamer’s ingenuity to various protein-folding solutions.

So clearly, the boredom of the masses has never been more powerful. Nobody likes to be bored, but without boredom, we would not be spurred into so much innovation and discovery, and we would likely still be sitting in the cold gnawing on raw meat, shivering from the cold with a cave right next to us.

And we certainly wouldn’t be here on the Internet, reading one another’s blogs, would we?