Shuffling Deck Chairs on the Titanic
By Ross Rogers
Colby College. August 5, 2021.
About 30 minutes after the Titanic collided with its fateful iceberg, in 1912, Captain Edward Smith ordered the cruise liner’s two bands to begin playing lively dance music, to prevent panic by busying the passengers—keeping them positively engaged, as long as possible, with something other than an awareness of their impending demise. Survivors reported the band played ragtime tunes in the lounge, the boat deck level, and the main deck, and several reported that they continued playing for nearly two hours—until the sinking vessel had tilted too steeply for anyone to stand (Barczewski, 2006).
Over a century later, there emerged a similar spate of uneasy busyness in the face of existential threat. During the Covid-19 pandemic, people were ordered to stay at home to minimize the spread of the deadly virus. Some folks worked from home, supported their kids’ remote learning accommodations, and/or otherwise had their hands full. But, according to the US National Pandemic Emotional Impact survey (June 2020), over half the population reported feeling both bored and anxious. The consequence, for many, was a motivation to do something—anything—other than despair at the rising cases and death rates. The internet came alive with #stayathomechallenge fads: people taught themselves to juggle rolls of toilet paper, played “the floor is lava” with the furniture in their living rooms, and taught their dogs to dance (Blades, 2021).
These are some dramatic examples, but the general pattern seems to pop up in everyday life everywhere we look: “idle hands” seem to cause existential concerns, existential concerns seem to cause “itchy feet,” and being busy seems to help keep those concerns out of mind. To learn more, my colleagues and I have begun studying the relationship between boredom, existential concerns, and busyness.
Why idleness leaves us feeling “bored to death”
Like all other animals—from dung beetles, to dolphins, to those dancing dogs—we humans evolved adaptations oriented toward survival and reproduction. Both a penguin and a human will take steps to avoid a polar bear on the hunt. However, we humans further evolved an incredibly sophisticated set of cognitive capacities, one consequence of which is that we became aware of the more abstract concept of mortality: the reality that—whether or not we evade life’s polar bears—our existence will nevertheless end with death. Yet, whereas one might physically evade a hungry polar bear, there is no way to similarly physically evade the abstract concept of mortality. Thus, humans evolved psychological ways of mitigating that abstract existential dread (Routledge & Vess, 2019).
People are often impacted by an existential motivation to avoid sitting idle and, instead, be behaviorally busy.
This is where culture and action come into the picture. In response to our abstract awareness of our impermanence (i.e., mortality), humans maintain and participate in a variety of cultural ideas that offer ways of attaining some form of permanence. Some cultural ideas offer legacy (through family, business, sports, science, etc.) and some offer the possibility of literal immortality (e.g., religious ideas of afterlife). Each cultural domain outlines its path to permanence—provide for your family, win the most basketball games, be faithful to the right god—and within each cultural domain one can take meaningful actions toward any of those goals.
In that context, it becomes clear why idleness can be an existential problem: Being idle typically means we’re not making meaningful progress toward our cultural goals and values—it can feel as though all we’re doing is waiting while the slow crawl of time brings us closer to our inevitable demise. Thus, idle time can leave us feeling “bored to death.”
In contrast, managing our existential concerns about mortality often means taking action because, most of the time, we need to do something to live up to our many, many abstract cultural values. If we want to provide for our family, we need to work hard to earn money, build intimacy and be emotionally supportive, and otherwise bend over backwards to build a future for them. If we want to win basketball games, we need to practice our dribbling, passing, and shooting skills, join a team, and rehearse our game strategies together. Whether it’s these things, values such as being presentable, creative, faithful, educated, compassionate, or any other abstract cultural values—we often need to do something to live up to them.
Research on the existential aversion to being idle
To test whether these ideas hold any water, my colleagues and I conducted a series of experiments (Rogers et al., 2018) to explore whether there really is an existentially motivated aversion to being idle and a preference, instead, for action.
Data from Study 1 of Rogers et al., (2018) show that those who were reminded about death chose to be busy by taking a walk, rather than to sit idle.
In one such experiment, each participant was randomly assigned to either a baseline condition in which we reminded them of pain or assigned to a target condition in which we reminded them about their mortality (the existential concern condition). After that initial task, the experimenter then explained it would take a few minutes to prepare some additional materials for the next task and that the participant could choose one of two ways to spend that time. One option (the “idle” option) was to simply hand in their completed materials and wait quietly, seated in the lab. The other option (the “busy” option) involved walking down three flights of stairs, depositing their completed materials in a door slot, and returning to the third floor lab. Critically, no participants had access to books or mobile devices during the study. Data patterns showed that, compared to the baseline condition, those who were reminded about death got “itchy feet” and chose to get busy taking a walk rather than to sit idle.
In another study, university students were randomly assigned either to a baseline condition or a mortality reminder condition. Then, they were also randomly assigned either to sit idle during the wait time (again, no books or mobile devices were available) or to take a walk to deposit their completed materials. After the wait time was over, each participant rated the importance of their identity as a student at their university. Assuming that education is a relevant cultural value to students, any participants still experiencing elevated existential concerns should show heightened importance of their student identity. Indeed, data patterns showed that, compared to the baseline condition, participants reminded about mortality strongly identified as university students—but only if they sat idle during the intermediating wait time. When participants got up and made themselves busy during the wait time, they no longer felt the need to manage their existential concerns with the extra step of increasing the importance of their student identity. This result suggests that sitting idle did nothing to mitigate existential concern, but that getting up and taking meaningful actions—even if it were only menial action to complete a research study on campus—helped mitigate those existential concerns.
Get busy living
This research indicates that being idle fails to help address existential concerns, whereas being behaviorally busy does, and the implications can help us better understand so much about our life experiences—from air travel, to advertising, to social status.
At a Houston airport, passenger complaints remained high even after baggage claim wait times were reduced. The solution to improved satisfaction was, perhaps counterintuitively, to move the baggage claim farther away. Thus, passengers were no longer idle as they spent the wait time “productively” walking to the baggage claim area.
For example, as scholars have observed, air travel can evoke a fair amount of existential concern (Harvell-Bowman, 2021); and, as in our research studies, the time after landing can be spent either sitting idle, simply waiting for one’s bags, or behaviorally active and positively engaged in a task. With that in mind, consider that a few years ago the vice president of operations at a Houston airport faced a curious puzzle: following passenger complaints, airport authorities had successfully reduced the wait-time at baggage-claim down to just eight minutes, yet passengers remained dissatisfied. Their eventual solution may seem a bit paradoxical: passenger satisfaction increased by simply moving baggage-claim farther from the terminals (Larson, 1987; Stone, 2012). Instead of one minute walking to the conveyor belts and seven minutes idly waiting for their bags, passengers now spent seven minutes actively walking to baggage claim where they picked up their bags in only one minute. As it turned out, passenger satisfaction wasn’t impacted so much by the reduced time between landing and collecting their bags as it was impacted by whether passengers were occupied during that wait time.
More broadly, existential concern is not just limited to ill-fated cruise liners, global pandemics, and airport baggage claims—it’s everywhere in our daily lives: transportation safety, nutrition labels, health concerns, religious and political issues (abortion, terrorism/war, gun control, etc.), and climate change are just some of the many day-to-day topics that evoke an abstract awareness of our impermanence. Because managing those existential concerns typically means taking action to live up to our cultural values—thus taking steps toward a potential legacy or religious afterlife—being busy takes on a culturally-valued characteristic. Proverbial nuggets of cultural wisdom urge us to “get busy living or get busy dying,” warn that “idle hands are the Devil’s workshop,” suggest that “busy hands are happy hands,” and emphasize the desirability of action with slogans like “Just do it!”
Research shows that people who are busy, and lack leisure time, are regarded by other people and themselves as having higher social status and cultural importance.
Not only does the pervasiveness of such messaging suggest that busyness is desirable and idleness undesirable, but research backs that up: data show that people who are busy, and lack leisure time, are regarded by others as higher in social status and cultural importance (Bellezza et al., 2017; Kim et al., 2019). The inference is that, compared to people with greater time for leisure, busy people are so valuable that they’re scarce and in high demand. Furthermore, when participants perceived themselves as busy, they also thought of themselves as more important.
Together, all these patterns are well-informed by the idea that existential concerns, driven by the concept of mortality, motivate an aversion to idleness and a preference to take action.
Ross Rogers is Associate Professor of Psychology at Colby College, where he runs the Mortality Concerns and Moral Decision Making Lab. He received his BA and MS in Psychology from Shippensburg University and his PhD in Experimental (Social) Psychology from Ohio University. His research interests broadly cover two main areas: 1) How concerns about meaning and individual significance stemming, in part, from human awareness of personal mortality impact cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors; and 2) How situational factors (such as the extent to which an actor was forced to act) and/or individual factors (such as an actor’s prior character) impact moral decision making, specifically assignment of blame to actors for actions that result in negative social consequences.