Most everyone who has a PC and uses the internet has clicked around simply for the hell of it. Whilst we might answer that we had nothing better to do, which is a reasonable answer, it is more difficult to answer why we let ourselves do it, especially when we have more useful things to do. And because we usually have more useful things to do, we often end up feeling guilty.
This phenomenon is not limited to clicking around in your computer HD or the internet for no apparent reason, and this brief note might have been more prosaically titled “The Benefits of Fucking Around in General”, as such benefits as I am about to highlight are not limited to computer tech. They extend to all areas of life, from listlessly poking around in cupboards and draws all the way to throwing an ice cube into hot oil to see what happens (not in any way recommended as the scientific benefits and/or entertainment value might be outweighed by serious injury).
What drives such urges is of course idle curiosity, emphasis on the idle. One assumes that idle curiosity differs from curiosity in its pure form (a by now well recognised evolutionary endowment that brings positive benefits) in that it grips us not for any obvious or immediate practical reason, such as wondering whether moving your furniture around might give you more space, but simply for something to do to pass the time. Or perhaps to avoid doing something that requires more effort and appears daunting, otherwise known as procrastinating.
Perhaps the brain needs to maintain some level of activity above keeping us breathing, in order to maintain our readiness for action. So, paradoxically, in order not to itself idle along and risk dulling its capacities or being caught unawares, it instead causes us to idle along doing something… anything. That is, the brain keeps its sentinel and practical capacities honed by keeping us busy.
This may partly explain why there is higher mortality among couch potatoes who passively watch sitcoms than among people who go for long walks and idly marvel and wonder at varieties of trees and wildlife and so on. It’s not just the physical exercise that keeps them trim, in shape, and therefore better prepared for fight or flight – and as a (possible) side consequence, in for a longer live; no, their brains are also kept honed through wonder, awe and delight at Nature. Or something. It is no coincidence that some of the greatest scientific insights and many of the classics among literary works have apparently come after long walks, and, I am arguing here, even procrastination of the type common to those who have cupboards and computers and so on.
What then are the benefits of idle curiosity and procrastination, otherwise termed fucking around?*
There are in fact two benefits as far as my limited scientific research over coffee and an internet connection uncovers. First, there is, possibly, the above mental fitness advantage of keeping us honed and ready to tackle serious problems that might come our way. To get an appreciation of this, picture a couch potato trying to out smart a lion or add up a supermarket receipt on the one hand; and a frequent brisk walker or mountaineer who regularly estimates the local population of eagles or wonders why the sky is blue or how the Sun functions, on the other.
And second, there is the everyday practical and ultimately beneficial effect of discovering something useful or delightful in the recesses of a draw, cupboard, your PC, the Internet or indeed the world. The benefits may come through increased convenience or measurable profit, anything from discovering something that makes a task easier (a particularly well designed soup ladle in a forgotten draw for example, or that your internet plan includes SMS and phone calls when previously you thought it did not), to perhaps a Van Goch (let us dream a little) stashed in the attic, or more realistically, an expensive tool that you needed, regarding which you can now save money.
The point here of course is not all these useful outcomes but the feeling of guilt we experience when idling and the vulnerabilities that come with it. Why, if there are all these munificent benefits to fucking around, do we often feel bad about it?
That will not be discussed here more than to recall the saying that “the devil makes work for idle hands”, thus once again uncovering religion as the culprit, perhaps as tool in the service of the real villains: those who would put others to work for their own gain, for whom idleness is up there alongside fornication and other sins that would otherwise endow the sinner (i.e., the worker) with both liberty and health. (This is my nod, and that’s all for now, towards critical theory).
* The benefits of idle curiosity do not stop at the happenchance discovery of long forgotten possessions in cupboards or useful information on the internet. Perhaps the greatest benefit is accessing new situations and people that we would never entertain if always doing something “purposeful” or prescribed by society.
As the authors of a book on evolutionary critical theory state, it may be that “… through idle curiosity… one may encounter people with different ‘habits of thought’ or find oneself in novel situations.” (Evolutionary Critical Theory and Its Role in Public Affairs
Charles Federick Abel, Arthur Jay Sementell, Routledge, 2004 ). All with the attendant benefits of new “knowledge and coping behaviours”, skills useful in navigating the world and all gained, often quite enjoyably, from fucking around.