One of the easiest ways to be unhappy is to be bored. I noticed this at the weekend. Overall my interest threshold is very low - it takes very little to get and keep my attention - but when I'm bored I'm miserable. I got bored waiting for people to say goodbye to each other at a gig the other night, and had to leave. So I pulled a proper teen strop and stomped outside by myself, just 'cos I was bored. And if you think about it, a long, dull bus journey is as likely to make you unhappy as, say, dropping your sandwich on the floor or losing a fiver. That unhappy.
Tibor Scitovsky was a Hungarian American economist, and he noticed this in the 1970s. He wrote a book called The Joyless Economy about how people could be rich but not happy. Which kind of means I should just read that book and then we can all go home. Anyway, his argument was that we need interesting, novel experiences to keep us happy. Note: not things, not objects, but times and "pleasures", in his words. The reason for this is that we cannot habituate - get bored with - experiences in the same way as we can, and do, with things.
Which makes me think two things. Firstly, shopping is now double bad. Firstly, it's a boring thing to do, as has been proved decisively in a previous missive, but the end product of shopping is stuff , to which we habituate, and won't ultimately make us any happier.
Secondly, having a hobby would sort all of this out, and there aren't enough hobbies for grown ups. I went to an art gallery at the weekend and looked at a boat that was made of old dressing tables. It was great. Sat around the boat were groups of pre-schoolers, making their own boats from old easter egg and cereal boxes. No way was that boring. But if there's no football on, really, what is there for a grown up to do on Saturday afternoon? It's shopping again, isn't it?
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