The elf inside the post

I can’t imagine there is any parent in the western world who has not had this experience. You walk your child (in the 3 – 6 year old range) along the street and come up to a cross walk. Over they go to the button to begin mercilessly pushing it as hard and as often as they can. “Stop that,” you say, “Once is enough.” But your child does not believe this hideous lie. Buttons are there to be pushed (including your own). You get more insistent and anxious when you and your child are in an elevator and they get dangerously close to pushing the alarm button!

I once told my kids a story intended to get them to stop pushing the cross walk button. Inside that post, I told them, lives a little Elf. See the little panel here? That’s his door to get inside. Now it’s his job to re-jig the wires inside the post to make the “walk” signal appear. He waits for you to push the button and then gets to work. But, as you might imagine, there’s not a lot of room in there, even for an Elf. And sometimes hours can go by without anyone pushing the button, so an Elf will sometimes drift off to sleep. So the way the button actually works is that it pokes him in the nose, wakes him up and gets him into action to make the lights change. But can you imagine how he feels if you stand there and keep poking him in the nose? He will get mad and he might just refuse to do his job for you.  So you’d better stop pushing the button or we’ll never get across.

They weren’t stupid (I think they were substantially older than the 3 to 6 range by this stage). They weren’t buying it. So they pushed the button more just to torment me and the mythical Elf.

It turns out though, that those buttons and many others like them – the close doors button inside elevators or on the London Underground – are all a big lie. They do precisely nothing. I first heard about this when I heard a talk on agency from Dr. James Moore at a conference in Banff in 2015. But it has become relevant to me in my own work on boredom. The useless buttons are there to placate the masses, to make us think we have agency. We push the button, the door closes, the walk signal appears and we are lulled into the belief that we made it happen. We didn’t, but it feels good to think we did.

Robert White first talked about this in the late 1950’s. He called it effectance motivation – that we are driven to act on the world not just to do stuff, but to show to ourselves that when we do stuff it matters. There are consequences to our actions, we can affect change in the world. It’s a powerful desire, one that White thought was as primal as appetitive drives to reduce thirst and hunger. His paper was a theory piece. No hard evidence that we are driven to satisfy our need to be effective agents in the world. Instead he marshalled evidence from infant research and work with monkeys to show that we work for the reward of discovery. We will strive to achieve things when the only reward is gaining new information – a nuanced story about agency and curiosity and exploration. Too nuanced for me to do it justice here.

And what of boredom? Boredom is actually a threat to our sense of agency. Let me see if I can unpack this. When we’re bored we’re looking for something to do. Two things are important about our search – one, we are not stupid, we can see that there are any number of options for us to do something. It’s just that right now, bored out of our skulls, we don’t want those options, we want something else. Two, and this is the doors close button link, if we think carefully about it, boredom is showing us up as ineffective agents. We recognize that we want something – but we also recognize that we’re failing to satisfy the want! So we are ineffective agents in that moment. We need a button to push that has a consequence we can believe in and that matters to us in some important way.

That’s what makes boredom so uncomfortable – not only is our desire for something to do feel like facing down a great big empty void (if it wasn’t we’d just choose something), but it also comes packaged with a feeling that we are failing to satisfy a primary drive.

I guess if my kids were still young enough to want to assault the cross walk button, I might now let them do it. And in that sickly modern parenting way, I might praise them when the light turns “Look what you did!?” to encourage their sense of self-efficacy. 

Or perhaps not.