The Most Important Skill in the 21st Century

This world is a trap of perfectly-customized entertainment: We need boredom

I’ve been thinking about entertainment. And about boredom. And about how my body, which is always seeking new things to watch and play with, sometimes self-saturates to the point that it wants nothing. Just be there, bored.

And I realize that we’ve forgotten what that is. Boredom is dead. And we have killed it. It belongs to a past we are happy to have left behind; a past we thought we’d never yearn for. But we do. The modern world is scarily satisfactory to our immediate desires. It has been for some time; I’m saying nothing new here. It rarely, if ever, encourages us to develop — or simply feed — “the part of ourselves that likes quiet,” as David Foster Wallace said.

It’s interesting not because we haven’t learned a thing (do we ever?) but because we are doubling down on our mistakes. We’re building a future that, being better than any past time in keeping us alive and meeting our wants, is getting us into a definitive trap that’s like Dracula’s kiss: sweet but mortal. Artificial intelligence, the central theme of this newsletter, might be the final piece (especially the generative type) of that dystopian puzzle. To illustrate what it looks like I don’t even need to resort to science fiction…