Like many others, I have always thought of boredom as a negative thing. It seemed to run parallel with depression in my youth; it made me feel like a loser, like there was nothing worth doing. After depression, I did everything I could to combat it. I expanded my interests widely, and the more I took on, the more it went away. It seemed to have an inverse relationship to my happiness.
Yet studies have shown that boredom can lead to increased creativity and benevolence. This came as a surprise, because I have never seen it in a positive light. It's true that when I was bored in the past, I had more flights of fancy, and I seemed to be nicer than I am now. Too nice for my own good, in fact. I may explore cultivating it more in my life, since I have more tools to combat depression than I used to, including two children that have brought much joy to my formerly bleak existence.
The one killer that boredom does to me is snowball negative thoughts. My stream-of-consciousness inevitably leads to cascades of worry, doubt, memories of the past, of lives that could have been. That is why I have been so keen to avoid it. The difference in actively pursuing boredom is that one can potentially control their thoughts more, by fine-tuning them on creative processes. When boredom creeps in its own accord, it is far more deadly.
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