But he can make other boys pay him apple-cores and
jackknives for the fun of wielding the brush.

What we call the feeling of boredom depends principally
upon the too repeated stimulation of one set of activities to
the exclusion of all others, the continuous presence of a kind of
stimulation to which we have been rendered unsusceptible, as,
for example, bad popular music to a cultivated musical taste,
or intricate chamber music to an uncultivated one. The
feeling of boredom may become physiologically acute, as in
the case, so frequent in machine production, of literally
monotonous or one-operation jobs. Long hours of labor at acts
calling out only one very simple response may have very serious
effects. In the first place, in the work itself, since repetitions
of one or one simple set of responses may impair speed
and accuracy. On the part of the worker, it promotes varying
degrees of stupefaction or irritation. Excesses of drink,
gambling, and dissipation among factory populations are
often traceable to this continual frustration of normal
instincts during working hours, followed by a violent search for
stimulation and relaxation after work is over. Under conditions
of machine production, the responses which the worker
must make are becoming increasingly simple and automatic.
Hence the problem of bringing variety into work and something
of the same vitality and spontaneity into industry that
goes into play and art is becoming serious and urgent.[1]

[Footnote 1: See Helen Marot: _Creative Impulse in Industry_.]

MENTAL ACTIVITY. Just as physical activity is a characteristic
of all living beings, so, from almost earliest infancy of
human beings, is mental activity. This does not mean that
individuals from their babyhood are continually solving problems.
Deliberation and reflection are simply the mature and
disciplined control of what goes on during all of our waking
hours--random play of the fancy, imagination. We are not
always controlling our thought, but so long as we are awake
something is, as we say, passing through our heads. Everything
that happens about us provokes some suggestion or idea.
"Day-dreaming, building of castles in the air, that loose flux
of casual and disconnected material that floats through our
minds in relaxed moments, are, in this random sense, _thinking_.
More of our waking life than we should care to admit, even to
ourselves, is likely to be whiled away in this inconsequential
trifling