Notes on Boredom

Almost everything we are told about boredom is wrong.

We are told boredom is dead. That we are the least bored generation in history. We have iPhones and TikTok and Instagram Reels and Netflix and Spotify and Discord servers and Slack channels and we have more stimulation than any civilization in history. You see writers mourning the “loss of boredom,” and productivity influencers tell us we need to deliberately recover it.

But the opposite is true. People aren’t less bored, they’re more bored. Especially when they’re scrolling. We live in a boredom world.

That’s because boredom isn't a mood problem, nor is it a stimulation problem. It's an information problem. A meaning problem.

But no one talks about it this way.

The Information Problem

This is actually well-established in information theory, even if we don't talk about it this way in everyday life. Meaningful information exists in a specific range, between pure redundancy and pure randomness. A clear photograph sits in this band. Pure static does not. Boredom appears when information flow hits either extreme.

Too little change creates monotony. Waiting rooms. Treadmill miles. Standing in line at Whole Foods. DMV. Airports. Environments that never surprise you. Your brain stops receiving new signals. Monotony boredom.

Too much change creates overload. Information arrives faster than you can process it. Casino floors in Vegas pumping oxygen. Social feeds. Your phone vibrating. Your brain stops distinguishing signal from noise and novelty at high speed becomes noise which produces its own form of boredom and this is the modern condition. Noise Boredom.

This second form, noise boredom, is the modern condition. You’ve been scrolling for two hours and I can't remember a single thing you saw and you’re more bored than when you started not because nothing happened but because too much happened for anything to matter.

It’s sort of like how, if you’re hungry, and you eat a meal of refined carbs, you end up even hungrier than if you never ate at all. A fast spike in blood sugar triggers a fast drop afterward, and that drop produces hunger. This is why a breakfast of pastries or sugary cereal can leave you hungrier at 11am than if you skipped breakfast. That’s what’s happening with modern noise boredom.

@kmankang

How carbs make you hungry #hunger #cravings #carbohydrates #carbs #sugar #hanger

The solution to boredom isn't more stimulation. It's better information. Input that arrives at a pace you can process, with enough novelty to stay interesting but enough structure to extract meaning.

How do you find meaning?

That's one of the most important questions we face today, and it's deeply personal. What generates meaningful information flow for you isn't what generates it for someone else. The process of developing interests, encountering something, pursuing it despite friction, building competence over time, that's something only you can figure out.

But before we get to how you build that capacity, we need to understand both failure modes completely. We've been talking about noise boredom, the condition of modern life. But the other extreme, monotony boredom, has its own logic. And unlike noise boredom, which traps you in perpetual stimulation without meaning, monotony boredom can actually be exploited.

Boredom Can Be a Moat

Sometimes, people ask me for career advice

I ask them how tolerant they are of boredom.

It's not the question they expect. They want to talk about their skills, their interests, what kind of work feels meaningful. And those things matter. But if someone wants stability, good pay, and isn't sure what direction to go, boredom tolerance is often the most useful variable to assess.

Because here's another thing people get wrong about boredom, they think you should avoid it in your career.

The culture messaging is relentless, follow your passion, find work you love, stay engaged and stimulated. Boring work is treated as low status, something to escape. But this is wrong. Boredom tolerance is one of the most valuable and underpriced skills in the labor market.

Many lucrative fields aren't really difficult, they're just boring.

@mikerafi

The most BORING but REAL lawyer video you will ever see! #lawyer #attorney #lawtok #lawschool #court #lawsuit #lawyersoftiktok #watchtok

Patent law. Regulatory compliance. Infrastructure engineering. Backend systems.

@allenvert

If youre a swe lmk what you think about the boring side of software engineering! #softwareengineer #techjob #coding #csmajor #university

Biostatistics. Materials science. Federal contracting. Actuarial work. Enterprise software. These aren't fields where you solve fascinating new problems every day. They're fields where you do mostly the same thing, getting incrementally better at a narrow technical domain. The work isn't intellectually impossible. It's psychologically tedious. And that tedium creates a moat. This moat is where value lies. Especially in very narrow but very important technical fields.

The older business owners at the country club aren't in entertainment or tech startups. They're in HVAC distribution, industrial supply chains, regional insurance agencies. The world runs on boring things everyone needs, and most people can't stand building them.

@briantboyd

As a tax attorney and tax strategist I have a lot of clients that are...doing well. And on average...they have the most boring businesses.... See more

The boredom moat functions as a natural filter that eliminates most competition before it begins.

People don't fail out of tax law because it's too hard to understand. They flee because it's too boring to tolerate.

They try regulatory compliance for six months and realize they'd rather do something more dynamic, even if it pays less. They can't stand the thought of spending ten years honing expertise in backend infrastructure.

That doesn’t mean the people who do this type of work are boring, not at all. They just have a skill. Like any other skill. they can do certain things other people can’t do. And then they can shut it off if they want.

But you can't stay in the moat forever. Once you've mastered your domain, boredom doesn't disappear. It mutates into something more dangerous.

Boredom is a Predator

When success reduces variance, boredom hunts you.

Tolstoy saw this clearly in Anna Karenina. Anna is trapped in a social structure that offers no acceptable outlets for generating new information. She can’t work (not acceptable for women of her class). She can’t really leave (trapped by social and legal constraints). She has no way to create small fires to avoid the big one that will eventually burn down her life.

So boredom rises like pressure in a sealed vessel until it finds an escape path. The escape is destruction, the affair, the social catastrophe, ultimately her death.

The implicit promise of modern self-optimization is that if you get everything right, the perfect career, the right relationship, the ideal lifestyle, boredom disappears. You'll have achieved the life you want, and then you'll finally be content.

But this fundamentally misunderstands what boredom is. Boredom isn't a symptom of having the wrong life. It's what happens when you've successfully optimized your life to the point where it stops generating new information. You achieve your goals. You get the career you wanted, the relationship you wanted, the life you wanted. And then you're bored.

The rich avoid boredom, everyone else avoids pain.

The wealthy understand this instinctively. They've learned to engineer small fires to prevent the big one. Extreme travel. Geographic rootlessness. Novel experiences on demand. Building more businesses. Risky Titanic submarine trips.

@jre_shorts

Recreation of the Titanic Submarine Implosion #titanicsubmarine #podcast #oceangate #jre #podcastspotify #tiktok #wow #comment #like #crea... See more

If you get rich enough, you don't even maintain a primary residence, you move between homes, cities, continents in constant rotation. It looks insane from the outside, but it's rational once you understand the alternative.

This explains why happiness and boredom coexist so easily. You can have everything you want and still feel profoundly bored. Not because you're ungrateful or broken, but because boredom doesn't care about your conscious goals. It only cares about information flow and meaninbg. And success, by definition, means you've made your life more predictable.

"Against boredom even gods struggle in vain." — Nietzsche

Boredom is the evolutionary mechanism that prevents stasis. Once you've mastered your environment, once your circumstances have become predictable, boredom pushes you toward new problems. It forces movement.

Once you see boredom as a predator, you stop expecting to “beat” it. You won't. Instead, you accept that boredom is the price of consciousness itself, the signal that tells you it's time to move. The predator never stops hunting. But at least you can stop running toward the things that feed it.

If monotony boredom drives you toward new territory, and noise boredom traps you in high-speed sameness, how do you actually reach the optimal band?

Build a Better Receiver

The solution must follow from the diagnosis.

If boredom is an information problem, a misalignment between input and your capacity to process it, then the answer isn't just different content. It's a different kind of engagement. The solution is to build a better receiver.

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