B.L.U.E. revisited…

In today’s issue of my newsletter, The Brad Berens Weekly Dispatch, I revisited a piece I wrote on this blog back in 2019: Am I B.L.U.E.? (Bored, Lonely, Uncomfortable… Ever).

Here’s the context from The Dispatch:

Last week, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes had a peculiar op-ed in The New York Times about the value of boredom that’s a promo for his new book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. (H/T Peter Horan.)

Why peculiar? Hayes seems more interested in impressing his readers—name dropping Pascal, Kierkegaard, obscure anthropological articles about the Walpiri aborigines in Australia, and a well-known psychology study where people preferred to shock themselves than be alone with their own thoughts—than in making clear points.

I confess that I went into the article skeptical of Hayes because he is the lowest-ratedMSNBC host on the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart—basically a left-wing counterpart to Bill O’Reilly on the right—whose program features hyper-partisan propaganda.

So, I was a bit uncomfortable to find myself agreeing with Hayes, albeit in a less histrionic way.

Then, I remembered that I wrote a similar piece back in 2019 (long before launching The Dispatch) in which I coined “B.L.U.E.” as a way of discussing the value of boredom: “B.L.U.E.” stands for “Bored, Lonely, Uncomfortable… Ever.”

After rereading my piece, I think it holds up enough to reprint below. If I were writing it today, I might have added how alarming I find it when parents hand their children smartphones or tablets to pacify the kids at any moment when they might be bored. I’d work to connect B.L.U.E. with our polarized society. I also don’t think my comparison to dating apps made enough sense (see for yourself). Finally, I was amused to see a line about how medical science might someday make it easy for people to crave less food, anticipating my own journey (and those of millions of others) with Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs.

Here, then, is my piece from 2019. Please let me know what you think.

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