I will always remember / my son's first day of school. // Lucas was five years old / and he was going to kindergarten, / and he was so excited. // He was going to take the bus, / and we were excited for him. // And I’ll never forget / that day / when I came home, / I was eager to check in with him / to hear, "How did it go?" // And Lucas's response was, / "Dad, / I'm tired of hearing about hallway procedures." // I found his / response / both / amusing and sad. // Amusing because I thought, / oh my gosh, / you have a lifetime of hallway procedures / you're going to have to work through. // And also amusing / because it captured so well / how schools and institutions can just grind us down / with their bureaucratic rules and monotonous procedures. // But I found it sad because / this was his first day of school, / and his takeaway / on that very first day, / was that / school is boring. // This is a boring place. // However, / he's going to have to learn to deal with boredom. // It's something we all / learn to deal with. // Boredom is / a common and familiar problem. // And I think / at first it can seem like a trivial problem. // If you're bored, / just find something interesting, / move on to the next thing. // But actually, / I’m going to argue that it’s far more complex. // And that it needs our attention. // And I'm going to offer three takeaways / for how to contend with boredom well. // In schools, / boredom is a big problem. // An overwhelming majority of high school students / report being bored in school. // And this is a problem because / when students are bored in school, / they begin to lose interest, / they can't focus. // And when students are bored in school, / they start to misbehave. // I was a high school teacher, / and if my students were bored, / I was petrified because I was going to have problems. // This was going to be a disaster. // And if students are chronically bored / year after year, / eventually they just drop out / and peel away from school altogether. // But boredom is not just a problem in schools, / it's a problem that tracks us beyond schools. // There are several troubling addictions / that are linked to boredom. // When we're bored, / we drink too much, / we eat too much, / we / spend too much / money, / we buy things we don't need. // There are entire industries that are designed around / making us bored. // And so boredom has some really problematic behaviors linked to it, / but even more than these troubling addictions, / there are also these smaller / things. // The half-listening to friends and acquaintances when we’re bored. // Or just the way we idle our time when we’re bored. // I'm dating myself, / but if I could take back the 10,000 hours I put into Tetris / and put that into actually playing guitar, / I'd be a professional musician right now. // That was kind of a joke, / anyway. // So, / boredom is something we need to look at, / and we look at boredom, / we tend to think about it objectively. // I’m bored by this teacher / or I’m bored by this book I’m reading / or this person I'm talking to. // And boredom tends to objectify things / and actually be quite judgmental / and arrogant. // That's a boring person, / that's a boring book. // But in truth, / boredom is both objective and subjective. // We're actually making a judgment call, / deciding whether something is boring / or not. // And we know that / what bores one person / could actually be very interesting to another. // So in this respect, / boredom is kind of a curious and perplexing mood state. // What do we make of it? //