Stream of Consciousness #8

It's 9:03 A.M in Rome on my third of twelve days in Italy as I write this. The prospect of not being able to have my iPad with me on vacation as part of my family's efforts to teach me "the value of boredom" (which to me sounds like complete bullcrap) made me think of the nature of boredom. Why do people get bored? Why do they have to put up with boredom? Prairie dogs can stand watch over their coteries for hours and they don't seem to complain. Boredom isn't unique to humans - it's exhibited in a lot of animals of higher intelligence, like dolphins and apes. I think boredom is your body/brain's way of telling you that you're wasting your time and should be spending it on something else. That's why if there is nothing else to do, you have to make something else to do, or else you start going bonkers. And that leads to dolphins rubbing their noses on their cages (which hurts the dolphin, by the way) or hooligans trashing the neighborhood. Boredom is meant to drive an animal to engage in constructive behavior, but in the absence of constructive activity, destructive activity feels better than doing nothing.

Thinking about boredom also made me think about apathy. There is a famous quote (I forget by whom) which goes something like this: "Hatred is not the opposite of love - apathy is." This sounds oxymoronic at first. Hate is the opposite of love. More specifically, it is love's polar opposite. But like the north and south ends of a magnet, being polar opposites means that hate and love are on the same axis - which means that even though they are opposites, hate and love have something in common. In this case, both hate and love involve caring about someone or something's fate, or having a vested interest in him/her/it. If you hate someone or something, you want to see him/her/it destroyed. If you love someone or something, you want to see him/her/it prosper. But either way, you care about what happens to him/her/it, and will likely keep tabs on them (which brings the quote "There's no such thing as bad publicity" to mind). Actually, the quote "no such thing as bad publicity" has some basis in reality. Children who feel neglected will often misbehave just so that they get scolded - being scolded means that their caregiver is actually paying attention to them. (This is also why time-out is perhaps the ultimate disciplinary technique to use on little children - it forces the child to sit around feeling bored for a while, which, as previously mentioned, is really unpleasant. And don't get me started on solitary confinement.) Which gets me back to whether hate or apathy is the opposite of love. Hate and love have something in common, but apathy and love have nothing in common. Apathy is complete indifference - not caring about something at all. As people are "programmed" to desire attention, having someone not care about you is in some ways even worse than having them want to ruin you. So in this way, apathy is also the opposite of love, and perhaps even more so than hate. So, in a roundabout way, the old quote is correct after all.