2019.05.13 Interesting Boredom

A conversation in the middle of the night with me and S, then again the next day with me and Simon.

S recently converted to Catholicism, which is an entire story arc unto itself that we should just take as given for now. The relevant part was how she has been studying the practices and traditions of the Roman Catholic church as part of her confirmation process, and she described how she used to find the mass beautiful bur sort of boring. But now that she understands it more, it's actually rather fascinating and interesting. This lead her to pontificate about the general truth of it:

"Maybe the more you understand about something, the more interesting it becomes."

To which I reflexively wondered if it also worked the other way around:

"Perhaps that means that if you are bored by something, you just don't understand enough about it."

We both felt pretty justifiably pleased about that. So much so that the next day when Simon complained about being bored, as a 9-year-old is wont to do, I smarmily launched into the same contemplation with him. Simon, to his massive credit, immediately started trying to think of ways to falsify it. "What if it's something very very very very very predictable - wouldn't that just be boring?" We had a great time wondering what could be understood to make even that interesting.