One of the most vivid examples of the economic influence of boredom came at the end of last month, when amateur brokers, many of them followers of the Reddit Wall Street Bets forum, huddled in shares of GameStop, a bearish retailer for players. These investors pushed their stocks to astronomical levels before falling back to Earth.
Part of their motivation was the idea that they could keep the hedge funds, which bet GameStop would fall. Part of that was boredom.
“I’m bored to have 8k of free money that I can invest in that will generate at least a small profit,” wrote a Reddit user who answers biged42069 on Wall Street Bets at the height of the stock market frenzy. The answer was unanimous: GameStop.
On Thursday, the Chamber’s Financial Services Committee held a contentious hearing on the GameStop saga. The focus was on market volatility and stock trading, but some witnesses acknowledged that they may have found themselves in this situation because people had so much time available.
Listing several factors that could have attracted amateur traders to public markets, Jennifer Schulp, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, testified that “more time at home during the pandemic probably played a role”.
Of course, millions of people were more busy than ever during the pandemic. Nurses, grocery workers and other essential workers have hardly experienced the boredom of the blockade. Women who have left the workforce to care for children who cannot go to school are often exhausted and overwhelmed, their days a torrent of Zoom lessons and dinners and bedtime. A large number of families are mourning loved ones, a painful and shocking change.
Boredom, in some ways, is a luxury, experienced by those who have unfilled and unfilled time.
And some groups of people are more likely to experience boredom than others. People who live alone, for example, are more likely to be bored, said Daniel Hamermesh, an economist at Barnard College who studied loneliness during pandemic blocks.