Boredom

Stimulus: the new oil

Boredom the productivity hack in the age of abundance

Finally the actual post

Do you remember the last time you were well and truly bored. When you had nothing to do. No one to see. No mindless things to occupy your attention. We live in an age of abundance. Stimulus is the most abundant resource. Stimulus is the new oil. Everywhere we look there is something to entertain us. Technology enables amazing things and is unequivocally a net good. We can connect with people halfway across the globe through satellites in space and fiber on the sea floor. We can cure incurable diseases. We have never had fewer farmers, but we have more food. Enough food to feed the entire planet. Technological advancements have propelled the human species forward at an exponential rate. This growth has been one of the greatest gifts given to current humans by the collective effort of every human before us.

The gift stretches back to the compounding knowledge of all species that have existed from the first single celled organism to the extinct and living dinosaurs that inhabit the planet. The trade has not been without sacrifice. Every technological advancement raises humans to a higher level of abstraction. We gain leverage at the cost of connection. The shovel no longer required us to use our hands. Domestication of horses saved us from walking and increased the speed of communication. The latest advancements in technology enable is to meet everyone and see everything. However, this is at the expense of losing touch with ourselves. This trend will only continue as the great gifts of our knowledge continue to compound faster. The rate of technological growth generally increases. Some might say there is nothing we can do, but I believe the answer to our problems may be the act of nothing itself.

Nothing has become a lost art. Nothing has become stigmatized and associated with laziness, but the active pursuit of nothingness requires deep focus. Choosing to do nothing seems like a painful waste of time, but the constant pursuit of something draws us away from who we are. We must master the art of intentional boredom. We’re never bored enough to even hear ourselves think. We can’t realize who we are if we never truly spend time with ourselves. We fill our heads with so much nonsense that we lose all sense. We need to allow ourselves to be a little more bored. The only solution to learning more and having more and knowing more is demanding less. Clearing out the mind. Taking the time to not think. To not do. To just be. There are so many better alternatives to doing nothing. A constant stream of new content and an infinite back catalog of old content exist at our finger tips. We can doom scroll for eternity and never lose novelty. The connotation of doing nothing has never been worse because the global world cultivates FOMO. Being alone makes you seem like a psychopath. Despite being surrounded by more and more, we have never been more lonely at a societal level. Keeping up with a 24 hour new cycle and all the random shit that happens is useless and destructive. But it feels SO IMPORTANT.

It feels like we become less lonely when we take the actions that make us more lonely. Very little of that information really matters. The half-life of our information expires before we even consume it. When you get bored, you realize what matters. Everything else starts to fade away. The things you cannot live without come to the front of your mind. We believe that the most important notification is the next one. This robs us of the present by forcing us to live in the future. All that we get from that mindset is anxiety. Happiness is the result of increased presence. We become more present when we don’t care about that next notification on your phone or those five videos about absolutely nothing that seem so vital. How can we be happy when the mind is being jerked every which direction. These distractions are pulling the mind away from the only thing that matters. The only thing that has ever or will every matter. The true self. We cannot properly show up in relationships or any aspect of life until we truly show up for ourselves with ourselves.

We find ourselves through focus. Focus is the art of reduction. Clarity only comes from a clear picture. When the fog on the windshield of life dissipates, we can actually see where the car is going. Distraction forces us to fly completely blind. We, more or less, get by in this state. We are lucky though because the answer is incredibly simple. When we allow everything in the periphery to fade away, we can focus and truly see the center. When all the distractions are gone, we can see is ourselves. We can see ourselves for who we are. We can hear the voice in our heads. We can feel our body being pulled in every direction and summon the strength to fight back. To center ourselves.

Being alone is scary. People are terrified to be alone. Terrified to be bored for fear of what they might see, hear, or think. Why are we scared? Why do we run from ourselves. We are the only person we truly have. We think we can run from ourselves, but were on a hamster wheel. Running is futile. It may tire us out and give us the feeling of movement, but not progress. We get nowhere. We stuck with ourselves. We are all alone in the palaces of our minds. Trying to avoid that sense of loneliness instead of embracing it may make us a bit happier in the moment. A bit less alone. However, the long-term path of loneliness is paved by the inability to be alone. This thought is so nonsensical. It would be farcical if it wasn’t visceral true. The sooner we accept that we are well and truly alone the quicker we will feel less lonely and surround our hearts and minds with the love we need. All we will ever have are the perceptions constructed in our head. Running from that uncomfortable truth only makes it more real. The only way to live a better life is to get bored.

We all know how to. It is super simple. Boredom is the art of inaction. Less is more. Boredom bravely looks away from action in all of its forms. That instinct to check your phone. The desire to go somewhere. All of these just fade and allow us to step into a sense of grounded being instead of mindless doing. We’ve completely lost the sense of being as a society. Every second we lose in attention span is met with some new complicated term for distraction. Society has grown to believe the answer is to diagnose people with some sort of disorder when in reality we’ve just created an environment that disorders our brains. Either billions of years of evolution is the mistake or the last couple thousand of artificial environment creation are the issue. The choice seems pretty obvious.

Zooming in further. The smartest people in the entire world have spent the last 20 years trying to grab your attention more and more. Now, these people have the help of super intelligent AI. How could we possibly win? Our brains are being hacked by geniuses. When we use their tools, we play their game. Brining our brains into the hyper stimulative environment of our age and expecting to focus is akin to walking out on an NFL football field and expecting to win a Super Bowl. We need to discover who we are, so we can play our game. The best way to beat Gary Kasparov is to play a game other than chess. The best way to avoid distraction is to embrace environments that are optimized for presence not ones optimized for distraction. None of this is that complicated, but unfortunately its incredibly difficult. Our environment is like crack for our brains. Setting off dopamine in just the right ways to force us to come back. We are addicted. Worse, we don’t realize were on drugs. Changing our life and environment though will never be easy and always leave us wanting. This is a choice we must all make.

That is all it is. A choice. No one is a bad person for choosing the distracted life. Also, none of these super geniuses hacking our attention are evil or even mildly bad. They are playing their game. They are just giving us what we think we want and being rewarded handsomely for it. Seems like a trade anyone would be stupid not to take. Ultimately, nothing worth doing is easy. The only way to truly live every day is to live it intentionally. The distracted life has troubled people as far back as ancient times, so it’s foolish to think something so engrained in our nature will be easy to overcome, but it is possible. Not only that, its within our reach. Get quiet. Create some space and just experience.

Experience what though you philosophizing generalizing crackpot you may ask? What should we even look for? We cannot simply just change our life completely. Moreover, would we even want to if we could? There is a line between distractions to the human experience and enablement of that human experience that we toe in our use of various technologies. Technology enhances our abilities to do these core things, but we must recognize that our evolution has created a new niche that requires a different skillset. Adaptations geared to previous environments no longer work, but the core remains the same.

The human experience has always been rooted in deepening the connections with others. In increasing the knowledge base of humanity to further dominate our environment. Domination comes not from rejecting new technological paradigms that threaten our core existence, but a from a fulsome embrace of this new human created environment. This is a law of humanity. Embracing new technology is a feature of all successes. This law is present in the oldest innovations like agriculture. Agriculture allowed for specialization which enhanced societal fitness versus hunter gatherer populations. Every human innovation stems from the ability to not need our most fundamental resource, food. This fact is so clear, but confusing because innovations build on each other. We have gotten so tall we don’t recognize the giant mountain we stand on. First plants and animals are domesticated. Then complex irrigation forms. Even less time is needed to till the fields, so humans, the ever-industrious species, figure out what to do in their free time.

Humans have never sat still as a species well. This is the dichotomy we face. This bias to action is the reason we find ourselves in this boredom conundrum in the first place. We decide to build bigger settlements. We create an exponential phenomena through the compounding of knowledge. Humans have many ideas, some good and arguably most bad. However, increasing human interactions super charges progress and quality of life. Humans meet other humans at a faster rate. More interactions create more ideas. Time transmits the good ones and the bad ones die out. The rate of interactions increases catalyzing the learning rate which leads to more progress. This is a train we have been on since the beginning of human existence.

It has never slowed down. Well, except for a brief 1000-year period when one organization controled the means of information. Nothing against the Church here either, but the rise to power of the Church coincided with the destruction of so much ancient and largely directionally correct knowledge. The church themselves could not even reject all the ancient knowledge integrating the philosophers of antiquity, like Aristotle and the stoics among others, into their holy books. This is why the moral philosophy of religion is pretty good. The ideas are far from perfect, but the issues with religion lie in the lack of rational means of improvement more than the actual starting place of knowledge. Love your neighbor. Don’t cheat or steal are great tenants to live by generally. Even banning shellfish can make sense looked through the lens of a prescientific understanding of allergies. The deep complexity of these views was reduced to blind acceptance. This blind acceptance instead of a critical approach and active pursuit of truth over blind faith was the root of the problems created by the church.

The Church benefits from decent rules that created a more or less functional society morally and socially. This evokes another great law of humanity. If ever possible, cheat and steal every idea you can from the smart people. The big ideas of the church were built on the some of the best thinking that had existed at the moment, but the door to new ideas was closed behind the existing ones stopping progress. Discovering new ideas yourself often isn’t worth your time. Independent thinking is required to discern which people are actually smart. Which ideas have deep truths and which are complete nonsense. Then those great ideas are built on further. We are only tall because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Smart people cheat and steal from the best. The only person you cheat is yourself by not cheating in this way. Cheating doesn’t mean blinding copying, but actively investigating and adopting. True authentic intellectual theft requires more skill than inventing your own cult grounded in random beliefs. We can keep blaming religion or some other institution for our problems, but religion is inevitable and organizational bloat is inevitable. The need to believe is so rooted in human nature that a wholesale reject of religion will likely lead to more religion not the implicit goal of the rejection. The goal is a more enlightened society not one devoid of all belief. We reject bad views to end dogmatic belief. Religion is simply the result of the need to believe and form communities. Viewed from this perspective, religion is not good or bad. Religion is the formalization of innate human nature. A natural byproduct of who we are. If we run the human experiment 1000 times, we may get different stories but the core structure of religion is present in iterations. Instead of pretending we exist above our nature; lets investigate what religion is and why we need it.

Religion in its classic form gives us structure to live our lives to the best possible extent. The structure religion creates is a combination of moral philosophy, how to live, and metaphysics, how we explain what we see. We all need a moral philosophy to guide our every interaction and some metaphysics to inform what isn’t readily obvious to us. Examples of the respective points are the 10 commandments and for metaphysics god herself. Now the pompous over educated critic would conjecture our current morality is hedonism and our metaphysics has been solved by science. You just have to trust the science. If you can’t trust the science, who can you trust these days, amiright? Ignore the fact that all science is conjectural and all knowledge fallible. JUST TRUST IT. Good science has always relied on trust not experiments and proof. Anyways, what a digression we have fallen into here. Time to bring it back to reality a little bit. These sentiments are the issue with implicit beliefs. When things become accepted, without being written, they cannot be analyzed criticized and improved. We have, in some ways, traded a book we said was right despite its obvious flaws for an unclear worldview we passively accept and through a lack of clarity cannot see the clear flaws.

The religion of rationalism and science provides a suboptimal moral philosophy and incomplete metaphysic. We cannot always defer to the science because we know even our most fundamental theories of physics relativity and quantum physics contradict each other. The guy who discovered a lot of that stuff is considered pretty smart and the guy whose theories he disproved was also quite smart.

The religion of rationalism has divorced our minds from the cold hard truth. We know very little about the world and almost nothing with certainty. The biblical god has been replaced with a scientific one. Instead of attributing uncertainty about the universe to an all knowing god, we now believe science will lead the way. The bright side is we continue to compound in the face of these headwinds. We know a lot more than we knew last year and a lot more than last decade and a heck of a lot more than last century and a millennia ago when the people in charge forced us to think the world was flat and that we should all be illiterate. To put it mildly, we have made progress. Some would say a lot of progress. I would say a lot of progress. The most disheartening and inspiring thing about all the progress we have made is we also still know almost nothing. Is it possible to bend space time and travel to the edge of the universe? Are we living in a simulation? Could we be ruled by lizard alien overlords?

The problem with the societal religion that has come to power after Nitzsche declared god was dead is that the moral fabric is unclear at best and the metaphysic is restrictive. Crazy ideas are the only ones that matter, but in the current dogma crazy ideas are seen as well a bit too crazy. Morally, we have become so internally focused and rules driven that departing from either of those positions is no long game theory optimal behavior. We already see the world through only one perspective, but it has gotten so much worse.

Each technological advancement seems to take us into an even more isolated world. Headphones basically shut you off from the world. The death of linear TV means there are no stupid conversation starters about an admittedly terrible show no one wants to watch but did because it was better than nothing. This has been replaced by personalized recommendations that find what we each like and feed it to us more and more. We live in different worlds from even our closest friends through the music we listen to and content we consume. Sports remain the last bastion of low-level connection between mass groups of people. With each passing day, our society is telling us we are different and special, which we are, but in doing so is pulling us further from every other person when all we need is deep human connection. We come to believe we are the most important person in the world. Worse can only envision reality from our perspective the more and more everything customized to us. We rarely have to compromise or make tough trade offs for the betterment of a wider group. Our moral philosophy becomes even more selfish and isolated.

But how could we care for something or someone we cannot even begin to understand. Caring is the product of deep trust and love that comes from authentic connection and our hyper optimized individualized world constrains our feelings for even those were closest to. Why do something unless there is something in it for you. Selfless acts are dying. Neighbor relationships used to be necessary. Loving your neighbor is vital when you don’t have enough food because your harvest went bad and they had an abundant harvest they cannot possibly consume themselves. Then the next year when roles were reversed, we gladly gave what we could. We don’t have this conundrum anymore. The people we rely on our livelihoods for are often bosses we hate in jobs we dream of leaving. The morality becomes even more me centered. Why would I give up my hard earned cash or time to you when it was so painful for me to get and so scarce. The sacrifice becomes strictly quantifiable with the selfless act being potentially compensated at some arbitrary time in the future and the selfish act providing immediate gratification. The trade off makes less and less sense.

The reward for doing the right thing is disappearing as well. Social media amplifies the big kindnesses but bastardizes the little kindnesses in doing so. These acts also poorly inform the social fabric we stand on. We start to take satisfaction from other people telling us we did the right thing instead of the thing in itself. A better moral philosophy is grounded in an other centric world view which allows us to pop the bubble we have constructed for ourselves around ourselves. The world is better when we realize were not the only ones in it. The only way to live this way is to take enjoyment from the deed in itself. Happiness cannot come from external plaudits, but from a deep personal sense of alignment with each action. A good moral philosophy masters the little kindnesses without shirking the big ones. A good person isn’t constantly offering his shirt to everyone walking by on the street, but is willing to give the shirt on his back when truly necessary. He should be as comfortable opening the door for someone as thanking someone for opening the door for him. These little kindnesses define true moral philosophy. Giving someone a car may sound nice, but constantly producing a smile from your interactions is vastly more important. Giving people things isn’t always good. It can rob them of their agency. That’s an entirely different digression. However, NO ONE can be a bad person from doing a good thing or trying to do the right thing, but good things should be rooted in the big and small. Truly good people have a balance of both. Receiving kindness well can be the greatest kindness. Humans are a cooperative species. We enjoy doing things for each other. Helping each other. Relinquishing agency can be as empowering as exercising it. True power comes from surrender. When one has so much control over themselves and the situation, they no longer feel that have to control it. That is true power.

A moral person is as comfortable playing high and low status because they know who they are. Genuine morality is rooted in a deep sense of self. The issue today is our lack of boredom has divorced us from the voices in our head that guides us on our path. We fill our heads with the paths of others; we think these paths serve as directions when all they are is blinders and barriers. The only sustainable life is an authentic one. Thus, a good moral philosophy must be rooted in self. A non-authentic philosophy will lead to misery and ruin. People live their entire lives never discovering who they are. Some take solace in money and fame. Others in the mountains of a monastery. These are both inauthentic paths in many regards. True transcendence is not achieved by the supermen and women of this world. Nor those who self-select out of the world.

Transcendence can only come from within society. True transcendence is a mindset. A way of life. A guiding light in the dark that illuminates your path. Life marches on. The movement of time cannot be slowed and the arrow cannot be reversed. Transcendence is not a place or a time. Transcendence is now. When it is now, it is forever.

A life well lived is one of calm transcendence. Calm transcendence requires the equal embrace of peace and chaos. A deep internal sense of calm is not a linear feeling or process. Some days the world stops and other days the world is faster than you’ve ever imagined it could go. Not every step is forward. Not every environment is initially conducive. However, transcendence comes from dominating your environment.

Discouragement and failure are key tenants of this process because authenticity is rarely accepted and promoted. Society doesn’t reject individualism. Society just promotes the average good. No one is completely average in every way. Everyone is unique. Everyone is being pulled in some direction or another away from their true selves without noticing. This isn’t bad. This is one of those things that just is. This is inevitable in every way. Everything converges to the average over time and becomes stable. An ice cube in a hot cup of tea acclimates to the temperature of the tea. Then the tea acclimates to the room temperature. Then the room acclimates to the wider world. All energy converges towards the average. We have a choice. Energy cannot be created or destroyed only transferred. We could choose to use the energy we have to remain comfortable and happy. Keep ourselves in balance with the temperature of the world. Or we can risk this balance for purposeful authentic action. Were all given this choice. The irony is the only way to be calm is to shake things up. Chaos and calm are not adversaries but allies. Creation happens at the edge of order and chaos. Every bit of purposeful chaos and investigation leads to deeper calm.

Metaphysically, society has never seemed more right and more lost. The hubris that accompanies intelligence can motivate, but it also restricts. The more we give in to this idea that science always lights the way the less we allow ourselves to traverse that path of the unknown. Sometimes fantasy is the only path to reality. We need a little mysticism in our lives. A little magic. We think everything can somehow be explained one way or another. However, the world can be irreducibly complex in certain areas. We need to accept that we don’t always have an answer. We need to accept that in our lifetime we may never have an answer. Sometimes there is no answer just divergent paths. We will never know the answer to a lot of things. We are likely blessed and cursed with finite lives, but we struggle to accept this.

We reject death at every turn these days. In a society where we’ve been given so much the thought of having to give something away. Something we cannot get back or undo. The thing that we hold most precious. That is terrifying. We’ve invested so much in this religion of science, partly in the hope that we can transcend the death that we know waits for us at some point. The religion of science is rooted in many of the same eternal life views as the concept of heaven, except in rejecting the afterlife, we make every possible arrangement to extend the life in the heaven we’ve built here on Earth.

Death makes no sense. Death is irrational. No one wants to die. We want to live great lives. The scientific metaphysic struggles most with the irrational. The formulas of science strip out all chance to give us a definitive answer, but humans are innately irrational. So much of our explanations for the world start with this physical law that we can reduce things to expected outcomes. Economics is rooted in rational actors, but anyone who’s spent time in economic circles realizes the only money made is off irrationality. The issue with our scientific metaphysic isn’t that is bad. There are so many great features to it. The testability and hypotheses rooted in scientific thinking have brought society to the moon and back, but that same thinking prevented us from going back to the moon for generations after we first went. We got lost in some scientific dogmas about the risk and return we tolerate. This was to our detriment. The more we know the less we tolerate risk. Progesss is rooted in intelligent risk taking. The lower risk taking environment drives us backwards in time.

When JFK chose to go to the moon, it was crazy. That was a completely unscientific and irrational statement. How could we set such a crazy goal? How could we take such a risk? The current beliefs are rooted in the struggle of personal risk and bold conjectures about the world that make you seem stupid the moment you say it because they seem so insane. But that’s how we got to the moon. That’s how the Wright brothers got in the air. Through experimentation, ingenuity, and a whole lot of craziness we flew. Then we reached outer space. Then we reached the moon. This is the metaphysic that we should cultivate. One rooted in rigorous scientific knowledge and conjecture blended with the crazy ideas and a level of irrationality that can only exist in between hope and fear such that it takes the form of both completely. We need to rediscover the mindset we had then. The tolerance for risk taking. The embrace of hard science and acceptance that the universe has plan for us. The plan is cowritten with our hand and the beautiful randomness that exist in chance. To execute on the highest calling of our plan we need to take risk.

True risk is facing fear and running toward it knowing that you may be ruined. Neil Armstrong got in the Apollo 11 rocket believing he had a 10% chance of death and only a 50% chance of landing on the moon. Now it is crazy to think we would launch our smartest people into space with a real chance of killing them to attempt something that was a coin flip at best for no other reason than a crazy belief in human ingenuity and a couple moon rocks. We need to look these demons in the eye once again. We need to embrace and listen to the universe. Our metaphysic should be rooted in the moonshot mentality. We chose to go to the moon because it was hard. Astronauts knew the risks. The scientists lived for the sleepless nights when you’re not sure if you’re even awake, but you have never felt more alive. Intelligence is based in doing everything possible to avoid error. Courage is rooted in accepting the limitations of knowledge and riding into the fire of uncertainty. Relinquishing control to the universe and accepting the cosmic rolls of the dice. The only way to truly investigate the universe is to open yourself up to it. To listen to it in the most irrational crazy way that opens our minds to making sense of the absurdity. True science is rooted in active observation and acceptance that the universe will talk to us and reveal its secrets when we ask the right questions and keep our hearts and minds open. Embracing science and reality must be rooted in the acceptance of what is not and what may never be. Yet through rigorous process and a level of belief in ourselves that may not even be justifiable we move forward.

Life always invites more questions than answers. How can we make sense of all this nonsense? How can the answer to more be less? How can the path to finding ourselves be forgetting ourselves? How can escaping societies many pitfalls be the result of embracing and not running from society? How can we possibly conquer an age that seeks to conquer us? What is the point of it all anyway? The ground truth of the world is nothing stops the inevitable march of time. Time only moves faster. The speed of society compounds and accelerates. Technology always seems at first to divorce humans from their nature, but ultimately ends up reinforcing human nature. Social media put a barrier between humans only to bring out the most ground level examples of basic animalistic human nature seen in comments sections everywhere. Humans have been able to reveal more and more about their nature online through the guise of autonomy. Technology reveals human nature by creating asymmetric power dynamics on a global scale. AI is the next step on this path of technological innovation.

AI and the reorganization of human society.

The world is always changing. Some of the oldest living philosophy from Heraclitus deals with the nature of flux and change. Change generally accelerates because of compound growth. Change is a threat and opportunity. Furthermore, believing change presents something other than an opportunity robs us of our agency, so is a useless mindset even if its partially right. Betting on your agency is the only positive EV bet out there. AI presents the biggest threat and opportunity to human existence since the last major change, the internet. The internet has created a global world that has both increased connections and decreased connection. AI will continue to create barriers to connection and relationship building between our fellow humans. Deep relationships are forged through tough times. Connection requires perspective. When we all have a super intelligent AI built for us, interacting with others will seem useless. Other people cannot possibly tell us more than we already know. Other people cannot possibly know us better. Why risk spending time with others when you can have a great time and be truly seen by this better version of any friend we can imagine. This is an argument that makes complete logical sense the entire way and the end state is everyone alone in a dark room wondering why loneliness and depression keep going up.

The internet has given us the test run. We know what happens when we decrease physical and meaningful human connection. Now these problems can be put on steroids. Every problem the internet creates AI will 10x. However, there are two sides to every coin. Every opportunity the internet enables AI will also 10x. Technology is neutral. Properly leveraging the gifts of AI could make us an eternal interplanetary species. The pitfalls of AI could make that eternal life lonelier than one day in the old paradigm of rocks and fire. What a pointless ending to a lot of great work that would be. We must tread carefully, but how? We have to crave the seemingly suboptimal connection present in the real world. Real world connection is engineered for long-term meaning and happiness, but in the short term it will be less fun. We need to accept happiness comes through boredom.

The payoff to being bored is nonlinear. Issac Newton invented calculus because he was bored. Einstein reinvented physics because he was bored. Newton was home during a pandemic; Einstein bored at the patent office would do his job in a couple hours then to kill time redefining gravity. AI will give us everything, but we cannot take it all or we will die of indigestion. The more raw material we are given the more we must become sculptors of our lives not builders of it. FOMO will hit all time highs. We will all feel like we missed the boat not realizing that an hour of quiet deep work a day will put us further ahead than any AI ever could. The arc of history shows the commoditization of nonsense menial labor. AI should be used in everything we do and then completely excluded from the deep thought we need. Calculators used to be physical people; now it’s an app on our phone. Super computer inventors were stunned they could solve enigma with something the size of a room. Imagine what they would think of a Tamagotchi. The only form of unique human differentiation will remain unique creativity. The only way to be genuinely creative is to spend a meaningful amount of time not thinking. The diffusive learning mode has never been more scarce or more important. The only way forward in the word of abundance is backwards.

Any logical person has to realize these arguments are borderline insane, but innovation happens in the tails. The only way to do something is both all at once and not at all. Total commitment and enthrallment in one act necessarily prohibits every other path. This is not a new law of humanity. The optionality provided in our abundant society is extremely novel. For the entirety of human existence, we have craved stimulus because we never had it. Food is the most obvious example of excess leading to bad consequences. The food industry has hacked our brains through sugar to make us crave more and more leading to us being less healthy. The mind cannot deal with an abundance of food in a reasonable rational way. When food is scarce, every little bit is valuable. Evolution never gave any thought to the issue of food being so abundant that we can eat ourselves to death. This same dynamic has now played out with stimulus. Brains become filled with so much useless stuff that there is no space to think. Our information diet needs to be more carefully curated than even our nutritional one because our mind is the centerpiece of our lives. We also have yet to invent Ozempic for focus. A strong mind can summon the inner strength to push through any tough situation, but a distracted or weak mind cannot find happiness on even a perfect day. Our information diet creates a mind virus that weakens our resolve without us knowing. Training your mind has become table stakes for success in this abundant world. We are competing against the best of the best in the art of controlling our mental cognition. We win by using technology to serve us. Technology serves us when it becomes a part of our lives not the window to every connection. Technology is a jet pack not a crutch. The only way to compartmentalize technology is to view it from a new perspective. The only way to create this new perspective is through getting in touch with yourself.

We used to plan our days around our activities. Now, we need to structure boredom. Good things take time. Everything takes time. Humans are cursed to live a very short, but seemingly near infinite lifetime of moments. The constancy in the pace of life distracts us from the inevitable march of time. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. That amounts to over 3 billion seconds in a lifetime. Life needs a serious reframing around time allocation. We should view each second as a prized possession that we are forced to trade for a momentary experience. Time is not a thing that passes. Time is a piece of you that you cut out and give away. Eventually, we are all reduced to empty nothingness with our time having run out. We must trade the little part of us dying every moment for a moment of active being; we cannot be content with giving our time away for scraps. That does not mean every moment is intense organismic joy, but it does mean we cannot be content with observing time pass. We cannot be content with observing the precious life we are given trickle through the hourglass of our allotted time. The world needs to be seen, felt, and tasted to truly be experienced. Strive to experience the world. The joy, pain and serene moments of peace. Live not in the actions and monotony of every day but in the beautiful half spaces. Where nothing exists. The space between order and chaos where everything is made. The blatant and unexplainable randomness the universe provides that we cannot yet explain.

Randomness has been pushed to the periphery of our hyper optimized society. Randomness used to be the governor of human existence. A good harvest created kings and a bad one destroyed empires. The randomness we deal with now is either existentially dreadful or completely inconsequential to our well being. The middle exists undisturbed. The last refuge of true randomness is in sports. We cling to sports because it shows us that things do not happen how we imagined or even hoped. Through sports, we see 1 in 100 events happen all the time. We experience true elation and unbelievable happiness as well as unreconcilable loss and pain. Then in the moment of loss, we realize we cannot change the past, but we have hope for the future.

We may have lost in the moment, but we have an opportunity today to right a wrong. When we are on top have to risk our superior position with the possibility of loss. Such is life. Through a combination of purposeful action and a roll the cosmic dice, we traverse each moment of our lives. Maybe we benefit from the positive variation in randomness. Maybe we get smacked in the face again. Maybe that day provides no more opportunity for us and we must go to bed winners or losers. No matter the result, we must accept it. We must learn and turn our eyes and open our hearts to the next opportunity. Opportunity is a strange beast, we may turn down the best opportunity of our lives only to be given a better one the next day, or we may toil in obscurity wondering if our moment will ever come. Sometimes at the trough of our lives, were given the thing we’ve been craving. We must accept that we will never be given all we desire. Our wildest hopes and dreams can remain just that even if we do everything right. Sometime in the realization of those dreams people gain clarity that it was never about the destination just the simple pursuit.

Life is fundamentally random and we remove that randomness to feel secure when we should really embrace it feel alive. We have lost sight of tomorrow and that has robbed us of our presence. Failure today is the first step taken in success tomorrow, but that must start with the view that life will go on. We must continue to believe there will be another opportunity to right a wrong. We need to appreciate we will lose things we love and gain things we never imagined we could love so much. The dichotomy of this argument is nonsensical in many ways. Be present by realizing you have an infinite future of moments to alter the outcome of this current moment without robbing yourself of the intense feelings trapped and given to us by each moment. Life, however, is partially absurd.

We must not let absurdity consume us, but rather remain clear and calm in the chaos. The only way to truly see these events is with a clear mind. The brain is like an inbox. Things pile up without even realizing. Next thing you know everything feels foggy chaotic and clogged for no particular reason. This inbox is felt more than seen. When we are doing, things get added to it. No matter how backed up it is. Things can always be added. Worse, when things are being added, things cannot be removed. Millions of little stresses can be thoughtlessly added, but must be thoughtfully removed. When you’re bored things don’t stack on your brain. Eventually instead of thoughts flowing down they have the ability to flow up to thoughtful attention. Doing keeps thoughts forcefully pushed down, but not doing is the easiest way to get them to flow back up. When your brain is given the space, the floodgates open. These thoughts are dying to come out and killing you inside. The heavy thoughts exiting your brain leave you lighter and create space for more, hopefully better, thoughts to be added. Sometimes these are thoughts from an hour ago, but these could be things from a decade ago that have left an invisible imprint on your mind. Addressing these gives a clearer sense of self.

Our brains are transformation functions that attribute agency and feelings to each experience we have. The brain turns stimulus into feeling. Through a deeper understanding of our past experiences, we understand our essential nature. When we understand what we feel, we can start to parse out why we feel that way. Then we can rob the negative thoughts of their agency and truth, promoting a positive self image to shape the life we want. The mind puts implicit restrictions on our action. These restrictions are evolutionarily optimal. The brain tells you not to touch the hot stove without thinking or realizing. We recoil when we see something that can hurt us without even noticing. This is an ingenious restriction, but we also understand the stove cools off. Our fear is properly calibrated, but our fear settings for different tasks are not always accurate. So much fear is imagined in our world while so much stupidity is neglected. What are the hot stoves that have cooled off in our lives without noticing. What past fears or limits do we erroneously impose on ourselves. What toxic behaviors have we adopted to our detriment?

Boredom reveals these limits through our repetitive thinking patterns and allow us to open our minds to the change we need. Cycling through past thoughts not only relieves us of their pain that they cause inside of us, but also allows us to understand ourselves better to proactively attack these feelings in the moment instead of passively absorbing them. Boredom provides a safe space to refine our character through deeper analysis of past experiences. Then we test the newer version of us against the newer challenges of the day slowly conquering our problems and embracing our natural interests and strengths.

Boredom provides the mental canvas to see our feelings, which can be addressed in a more authentic way through calm and thoughtful reflection in a safe space. Looking into the ether and doing nothing creates the space. Boredom is the best form of therapy. Stress is created by stuff and relaxation by the removal of non-essential stuff. Being bored allows you to relax. The picture of relaxation is a person on a beach doing nothing, but we can find our beach anywhere. Almost all of our problems are either with other people from the past or the anxiety for the future. Being bored allows you to be in the present with yourself. Surrendering to the moment instead of being lost in thought. It allows you to slow down time. Time is no longer being wasted. Time is being observed. Life is being lived.

Boredom is the gift that all humans have been given but throw away. We discard clarity by thinking that boredom was the enemy when it’s really the answer. Everyone wants to know what they want do. Who they want be, but then turn around and fill their heads with the advice of false profits. The only true clarity comes from listening to yourself. Only then can we hear what we have to say. We have been taught to value more in this great age of human abundance, but the only way to get more is to demand less. To not fill your head up with what other people are thinking. What other people are telling you to be. Being bored removes the veneer of society that keeps a stranglehold on the identity that’s caged inside you. So, the next time you’re feeling overwhelmed or worried or confused or happy get bored and try to realize what you’re really thinking. Look at who you really are. Chart the path to see where you really want go. Only when you turn off every other sound, light, and stimuli from every corner of the universe, can you see the light in yourself. The direction that your heart points and pulls you.