Enough with the jigsaw puzzles already | Opinion

Boredom has never been more of a privilege than it is today, in the quarantined spring of 2020. Those who don’t have to educate children while working from home, or travel on public transport to frontline jobs have turned to classic distractions — immediately shared on social media, of course — to pass the long hours. Competing with banana bread baking and killing sourdough starters for top quarantine comeback are jigsaw puzzles. Puzzling is a device-free leisure activity touted by fans as both relaxing and challenging, a fun-for-all-ages brain teaser hyped as possibly deterring the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Everything about this is annoying.

» READ MORE: The Other Side: A jigsaw jock on how puzzles have kept her family sane amid the pandemic

The wholesome emphasis on collaboration where no one loses and everyone works together to win? Unamerican. We’ve been in each other’s faces for 50+ days continuously. Maximum teamwork energy has already been expended just not murdering whoever keeps eating all of the M&M rations in the middle of the night and denying it. Claiming puzzles are a relaxing activity is utterly confounding. Sifting through a pile of things that all look alike is frustrating as hell. Snapping the correct piece, once finally located, into place is a meager payoff certainly devised by someone who wouldn’t recognize Fun if it sat naked in their lap. If you so enjoy sorting tiny objects into similar piles based on shape or color, go organize your sock drawer or bookshelf and have something useful or aesthetically pleasing to show for your efforts at the end!

It was pointed out by my fellow puzzle-perplexed that jigsaw jocks spend countless hours searching and snapping to end up with a much crappier version of a very good image, regardless of content. Once the pieces are fully assembled, besides ostensibly reveling in the satisfaction of a pointless job well done, what is the successful puzzler’s next move? Nod approvingly each time one passes the now-useless table, occupied as it is by the solved conundrum? Only true zealots would frame such a thing, delighting in their victory over cardboard pieces by subjecting invited guests to its ill-favored depiction of the Danube river by moonlight, or Disney Princesses through the ages, or whatever.

The puzzlers’ final trump card is always its alleged IQ-boosting, short-term memory enhancing capability. Microsoft billionaire and giant brain owner Bill Gates has been quoted as never going on vacation without a Stave to solve, a brand of extra-difficult, hand-cut wooden puzzle with no two alike pieces. Noting a lack of scientific investigation into the cognitive effects of solving jigsaw puzzles in adults, a team of researchers in Ulm, Germany conducted a randomized, controlled study of adults over 50 to see if an hour of jigsaw puzzle solving for one hour per day, six days a week for five weeks had a measurable effect on global visuospatial cognition. Their article, published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience in October of 2018, determined that solving puzzles “recruits multiple visuospatial cognitive abilities and is a potential protective factor for cognitive aging. Engaging in low amounts of jigsaw puzzling over a 30-day period (approximately 3600 connected pieces) does not improve cognition in a clinically relevant way compared to engaging in other potentially beneficial activities.”

So there. You could do literally anything else that engages your floppy old quarantine brain, from learning some new dance moves from minors on TikTok to attempting to decipher James Joyce’s exhausting Ulysses, with equal gray-matter benefit … and maybe even less irritating social media bragging.

Under more boring circumstances, Felicia D’Ambrosio handles events & communications at Monk’s Café; and is a partner in Federal Donuts. Direct outrage to @feliciafied on Twitter.