This is Ruining Our Lives
The year is 1665, and Isaac Newton is looking out his window at an apple tree standing tall in his orchard in Lincolnshire, England. All of a sudden, a ripe and lonely apple falls from the tree and makes its way to the ground. While most people would consider this a mundane event, Newton followed its trajectory with great interest. What young Isaac didn't know at the time was that this apple would become the most famous piece of fruit in human history, as its natural attraction to the ground would spark a moment of genius, leading him to create the laws of motion that revolutionized modern physics.
Newton wasn't conducting an experiment when he discovered the laws of gravity; he wasn't overloading his brain with information trying to figure it out. He was simply looking aimlessly outside his window. He was bored. But that was in the 17th century. Times have changed a lot since then. These days, we hardly ever allow ourselves to just stare out a window or sit in our backyards, doing nothing but staring at the sky. We never pause for a moment and just let our minds wander into deep, unexplored territories.
Turns out that diving deep into our own thoughts is something that we don't really like to do. We find it boring and will do anything to alleviate boredom, even if it means subjecting ourselves to self-inflicted electric shocks. This sadly is not an exaggeration. In a study conducted at the University of Virginia, a social psychologist named Timothy Wilson recruited hundreds of student volunteers to take part in what he called "thinking periods." Individuals were placed in small rooms with blank walls and no personal belongings; they were asked to entertain themselves with nothing but their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes.
When asked to rate their experience afterwards, about 50% of the volunteers did not like being alone with their thoughts, citing that it was boring. Then researchers left the volunteers in the room for another 15 minutes. This time, though, they introduced a button that participants could press to shock themselves if they wanted to. Around 67% of men and 25% of women chose to voluntarily inflict pain on themselves rather than just sit and do nothing. This research suggests that, sadly, a lot of us would rather experience physical pain than sit in our own thoughts when left with nothing else to do.
Most of us immediately grab our phones, switching from one app to the other, as the algorithms of the internet feed us with the exact content that'll keep us from being bored. What we fail to realize is that for these algorithms to understand what makes us tick, they take so much of our information. Companies then sell that information—things like your name, phone number, and home address—to data brokers who sell them to other companies. What's worse is that sometimes these data brokers are involved in data breaches where all the information they have about you is stolen by nefarious actors.
A few months ago, my friend got this message from Google telling him that some of his passwords were found in a data breach from a company that he'd never heard of before. Right after, he started getting personalized email ads from scam companies. This is how scammers are able to figure out your personal information. It's completely risk-free for 30 days, so I encourage every one of you to at least give it a try. If you're not happy, you get a full refund. But I can assure you, when you see just how many data brokers have your information, you definitely want to keep your subscription.
Back to our story: in the spring and summer of 1665, an outbreak of bubonic plague spread through London, and by July, it had claimed more than 177,000 lives. Almost at once, people throughout the city began fleeing to the countryside, isolating themselves in fear for their lives. Among those who fled was none other than Sir Isaac Newton. Of course, at that time, Newton had not yet been knighted; in fact, he had not yet even witnessed the famous apple falling. Interestingly, though, his two years spent in isolation away from the bells, whistles, and distractions of the city was the time when Newton's genius...