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Boredom Is Spreading the Coronavirus
People who are rarely bored seem to have an easier time sticking to social distancing behaviors, new research suggests
This past spring, as art museums across the country were shuttering to help slow the spread of Covid-19, the Ryland Museum was opening up. The socially distanced museum launched in April in the hallway of a San Jose apartment building. Its first exhibition, open to a select audience — the building’s residents — was an adaptation of the artist Brian D. Collier’s work Very Small Objects and featured humdrum items such as a bit of lint, an old beam, and a piece of glass.
The co-curator was a grade-school-aged child named Erik whom the museum’s founder, his neighbor Amy Brown, had enlisted by writing him a note. After schools had closed, she’d noticed that Erik had taken to all but living in a tree in the building’s courtyard. “He seemed really lonely. All the kids were in their own apartments, and they weren’t mixing,” says Brown, who like Erik, found herself with some time on her hands. She had worked as an administrative assistant at a local children’s museum but was laid off shortly after it closed because of Covid-19, though financially she’s still okay.
Many people in Brown’s shoes might find themselves, well, bored. No work. A social life mostly constrained to phone, video calls, and long walks. No concerts. No dinners out. No travel. It’s unsurprising then that, according to James Boylan, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Waterloo’s psychology department, during the pandemic “people’s experiences of boredom have definitely increased.”
But not for Brown. “I’m a person that wishes they could be bored,” she says. “I have like a constant dryer load of ideas constantly tumbling around in my mind that kind of drives me crazy a little bit.”
According to a recent preprint study co-authored by Boylan, the Amy Browns of the world may be the quiet heroes of Covid-19, the behavioral opposites of…
