BOREDOM MASTER SIGNAL

6/20/2021

One unfortunate quality of modern life is that we’ve discovered how to short-circuit boredom. The internet pipes a never-ending stream of content into our consciousness, suppressing boredom for far longer than ordinary activities ever could. 

This is bad because boredom is an important signal that stirs you out of doing useless stuff. Sitting around doing nothing should eventually bore you, forcing you to go on and do something constructive. But with the internet, our capacity for wasting time on useless things has increased by a lot. 

Procrastinators are at a special disadvantage in this new world. I don’t mean procrastinator as a pejorative here, they're simply people who have a hard time doing things they find boring. Procrastinators can actually accomplish amazing things because they only tend to work hard on problems they find interesting, while the highly conscientious often force themselves to work on mindless tasks that have been assigned to them. 

The problem is, a procrastinator without easy access to boredom can fall into a terrible trap—one of wasted time and zero progress at all. Without boredom telling them what doesn't matter, procrastinators become run-of-the-mill couch potatoes. This ends up handicapping some very high-potential people, and that’s a terrible thing for humanity. 

Even worse, the highly conscientious enjoy an unfair advantage in such an environment. The world is already run by conscientious people with management-consultant personalities, and I’m afraid this may be entrenched by the end of boredom. Those with unusual levels of self-regulation will be the only ones able to resist the downward pull of bottomless scrolling. 

There’s nothing wrong with having conscientious people in charge per se, but there’s no reason to believe there’s a perfect correlation between conscientiousness and the other virtues we’d like to see in our leaders. We could end up with a badly skewed pool of talent from which to select our elite, and this may have effects we can’t predict.

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