I have a high pain threshold. In fact, it's more of a large and tastfully decorated foyer than a threshold. But I do get easily bored

I am terrified of being bored.

In an episode of boredom, our current goal or situation is perceived as unpleasant and unappealing, often as devoid of meaning or significance; on the contrary, alternative goals and situations are made salient and appear to us to be attractive. Boredom thus facilitates the pursuit of alternative goals: it “pushes” us out of this non-stimulating, uninteresting, or unchallenging situation and into another. In motivating us to pursue a situation that is different from our current one, boredom ultimately promotes the restoration of the perception that one's activities are meaningful and congruent with one's overall projects.

After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically.

Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom.

The pain is kind of challenge your mind presents - will you learn how to focus and move past boredom, or like a child will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction?

We define boredom as the pain a person feels when he’s doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something he wants to do but won’t, can’t, or doesn’t dare. Boredom is acute when he knows the other thing and inhibits his action, e.g., out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just the chronic boredom, for a person can’t learn, or be intelligent about, what he’s not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere. (Another large part of stupidity is stubbornness, unconsciously saying, “I won’t. You can’t make me.”)

How dreadful boredom is — how dreadfully boring; I know no stronger expression, no truer one, for like is recognized only by like… I lie prostrate, inert; the only thing I see is emptiness, the only thing I live on is emptiness, the only thing I move in is emptiness. I do not even suffer pain… Pain itself has lost its refreshment for me. If I were offered all the glories of the world or all the torments of the world, one would move me no more than the other; I would not turn over to the other side either to attain or to avoid. I am dying death. And what could divert me? Well, if I managed to see a faithfulness that withstood every ordeal, an enthusiasm that endured everything, a faith that moved mountains; if I were to become aware of an idea that joined the finite and the infinite.

Think of boredom as an internal alarm. When it goes off, it is telling us something. It signals the presence of an unfulfilling situation. But it is an alarm equipped with a shock. The negative and aversive experience of boredom motivates us – one might even say, pushes us – to pursue a different situation, one that seems more meaningful or interesting, just as a sharp pain motivates us not to put pins into our bodies.

Suppose then that you began with the proposition that boredom was a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents, and was accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capacities. Nothing actual ever suits pure expectation and such purity of expectation is a great source of tedium. People rich in abilities, in sexual feeling, rich in mind and in invention - all the highly gifted see themselves shunted for decades onto dull sidings, banished exiled nailed up in chicken coops. Imagination has even tried to surmount the problem by forcing boredom itself to yield interest.

Boredom is a flight from what is important. Like workaholism and perfectionism, it is a way of distracting yourself from inner experiences. It occurs when you look outward and do not find anything to engage your attention. Instead of feeling your emotions - becoming aware of the functioning of your energy system - you become bored. Boredom ... is a flight from your higher potential. It is fear of the transformation that wants to occur, and will occur in you, when you explore your emotions. It is your resistance to spiritual growth.

Boredom is just “What’s the use?” in disguise. And “What’s the use?” is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair.

Patience and boredom are closely related. Boredom, a certain kind of boredom, is really impatience. You don't like the way things are, they aren't interesting enough for you, so you deccide- and boredom is a decision-that you are bored.

Finally, one learns that boredom is a disease of civilization. It seems to me that what boredom mostly is is that people have to keep themselves entertained or occupied, because if they aren’t, then certain anxieties, frustrations, discontents, and so forth, start coming to the surface, and it makes them uncomfortable. Boredom is almost nonexistent once you’ve become adapted to life in the woods. If you don’t have any work that needs to be done, you can sit for hours at a time just doing nothing, just listening to the birds or the wind or the silence, watching the shadows move as the sun travels, or simply looking at familiar objects. And you don’t get bored. You’re just at peace.

Boredom is connected naturally with time, with the horror of time, with the experience and the consciousness of time. Those who are not aware of time do not become bored. Basically life is only possible if one is not aware of time. If one should happen to want to experience consciously one of those moments that pass, one would be lost; life would become unbearable.