Answer the given questions based on the passage given below:
The thumping of valves. The cacophonous rumbling. The powerful kick in the back as the rocket’s engines ignite. The alarmingly realistic possibility that these will be your last precious moments alive.
By all accounts, the journey into space is a thrilling ride. During the second launch of his career in 1982, the cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev sensed the rocket swaying to the right and the left,
as if it were losing balance… then finally, he felt himself leave the ground. As the crew soared into space, they yelled “G-o-o-u” - it’s not entirely clear why.
But though Lebedev’s space adventure began with a hit of adrenaline,
this soon wore off - and just a week into his seven-month mission aboard the space station Salyut 7, he was bored. In reality, hurtling through low-Earth orbit at around 8 km/s (17,900mph) in a small aluminium can, was not enough to absorb him. As he wrote in his diary, “the drab routine has begun”.
We tend to think of boredom as a fairly straightforward response to tedious activities. After all, it’s rare to find someone who claims to enjoy washing up or doing their taxes - and it’s deeply suspicious when you do. Except that boredom isn’t quite this clear-cut. Decades of research have revealed that it’s as mysterious as it is agonising, and there’s a surprising amount of variation in how much monotony each person can handle.
“I think everybody gets the boredom signal,”
says James Danckert, who heads a boredom lab at the University of
Waterloo, Ontario. “Some people are really, really good at dealing with
it though.”
In 2014, a team of social psychologists from the University of
Virginia discovered during a series of experiments on mind wandering
that many participants - around 25% of women and 67% of men - were deliberately electrocuting themselves
when they were left alone in a room for just 15 minutes, purely for
something to do. One person shocked themselves nearly 200 times.
And from the man who diligently recreated a Babylonian feast from a recipe on a 3,750-year-old clay tablet to the woman who resat her school exam paper from seven years ago
out of mild curiosity, the recent lockdowns have revealed that peculiar
and desperate strategies for dealing with boredom are very much not
limited to a lab environment.
At the other end of the spectrum, some people actively seek out situations which might normally be considered tedious. The hermit
Christopher Knight, who drove to a forest in Maine in 1986 and didn’t emerge for 27 years, claims he never got bored once - though by his own admission, for the majority of his time there, he was occupied with doing absolutely nothing.
So, why is that?
One of the earliest accounts of boredom dates back to Roman times,
when the philosopher Seneca may have begun the long tradition of moaning about it. During a ponderous exchange of letters with a friend, he asked, “Quo usque eadem” - “How much longer [must we endure] the same things?”, and followed up with, “I do nothing new. I see nothing new. Eventually, there’s a nausea even of this”.