The Most Important Skill in the 21st Century: Boredom
This world is a trap of perfectly-customized entertainment and there’s no other way out
I’ve been thinking about entertainment. And about boredom. And about how my body, always seeking new things to watch and play with, sometimes saturates and wants nothing. Just being there, bored.
I realize that I’ve forgotten what that is. Boredom is dead. We killed it.
It belongs to a past we happily left behind; a past we thought we’d never yearn for. But we do. The modern world is scarily apt to satisfy our immediate desires yet it rarely, if ever, encourages us to feed “the part of ourselves that likes quiet,” as David Foster Wallace said.
We don’t learn so we’re now doubling down on that mistake. We are building a future that’s better than any past in meeting our basic needs yet, like Dracula’s kiss, will become a sweet but mortal trap. AI is the final piece of that dystopian puzzle.
To illustrate what a post-boredom world looks like I don’t need to resort to science fiction or ungrounded predictions — every example below is already real. The rest is coming.
- You can endlessly chat with anyone you want, dead or alive, real or imaginary.
