I often refer to my state of mind as being “bored”, as this word is colloquially understood by many, and is a relatable feeling. It's what happens when there is a disconnect between someone and their environment. Disinterest, apathy, depression? What is it really? It really is a vague feeling that is hard to encapsulate. Let's give it a go.
 

Needs

In the past hundred thousand years, our environment has evolved at such a rapid pace that our biology and brains could not possibly be able to catch up with. From hunting and hiding, the discovery of fire, the discovery of community, the discovery of agriculture, organised agriculture, trade, and eventually modern capitalism, we have been able to make life a bit easier and a lot less taxing. Arguably. Because of the rate at which the world has developed, we still have quite a lot of outdated and vestigial characteristics: physically and mentally.

How can anyone possibly be bored? Life is always giving us something to be occupied with: the most pressing are basic human needs. Food and water, warmth and shelter. There are multiple other things that humans require: friends and confidants, self-actualisation, a sense of purpose, entertainment. Of course, these other things are not primary needs, they are secondary needs, and no one who lacks food and water could possibly care about what legacy they would leave behind.

If we have so many needs, and these needs are often quite difficult to attain without significant effort; effort that would typically keep us quite occupied, how come so many people describe their state of mind as bored? It really is quite interesting, I think. Perhaps it's because we've solved the difficulty of attaining basic human needs. In the developed world, it's rare (though not impossible) to find people worrying about food, water, warmth, or shelter. If these basic needs have been met, the next logical steps would be to solve for your tertiary and secondary needs. But people would rather content themselves with distractions of some sort or the other.

This is what has come of the digital age: since the invention of social media, we are now mass-producing distractions (which some people would call entertainment). So let's look at it this way: Food (solved? But not really, there are people still dying of starvation in this day and age — believe it or not), water (solved? But also not really), shelter (solved? Except for the hundreds of thousands of homeless people, of course). Then that leaves us with tertiary needs: Relationships, entertainment, self-actualisation, purpose. Do you see where this is going? I'll tell you where this is going. It's going here. The internet. Social media. The wired. The “connected world”.

All of these tertiary needs can be simulated and give you something really quite close to the real thing. This is the primary human vulnerability and why the richest men on the planet are people who can provide the world with simulated tertiary needs in exchange for time, attention, and money.

I must state, at this juncture, that I'm not making any moral or value judgements about social media, tertiary needs, time, attention, or money. It is what it is. The goal of this article is to solve for boredom and expose it for what it is.

If simulated tertiary needs can be scaled up ad infinitum, then that would explain the never-ending race to creating, recreating, and optimising platforms that can always exchange tertiary needs — closer and closer to the real thing (although it would never be the real thing ever).
 

Dopamine

Because life was so ridiculously hard and interesting, our brains had a mechanism that allowed us to achieve the incredible feats that lay the foundation of what we now take for granted. The release of one cool chemical called dopamine. And boy is it one heck of a drug. Whenever we were able to chase down a boar for hours on end with no guarantee of a meal at the end of the day. If we managed to slay it, our brains would reward us with a rush of dopamine. And basically, dopamine is what makes life worth living. It sounds strange, put this way, but your brain releases dopamine when you achieve your basic and tertiary needs. It's life's first and foremost currency. When you get paid money, your brain releases dopamine.

The more experienced we got at life, and the more sophisticated our tools became, the immediate connection between our needs and our actions became more and more abstracted away. Now you don't hunt for food, you solve maths problems, or you put the right boxes in the right places, or you run around a football pitch for hours. Because of the privilege of community, we all help each other out, and provide each other with our different wants and needs. Someone who has easy access and tools to find and provide food, shelter, warmth, or water, would bring it to your feet, as long as you do your part.

Of course, as with everything in life, when you solve one problem, you create another one. In this case, the problem caused by abstraction through community and economic systems, is the problem of dopamine being a vestigial payload in the human brain. It doesn't have to be this way, of course, but we'll get to that later.
 

Boredom

After everything we've discussed, we can only conclude that boredom is an inability to release dopamine. This can be because your brain's threshold for releasing dopamine has been tampered with due to the ease of access to simulated tertiary needs: causing our brains to release dopamine without having to work for it, therefore making it harder and harder to release dopamine.  Therefore, making it harder and harder to get the positive feedback loop that dopamine produces. Therefore, making opportunities to achieve amazing feats and get that powerful rush of dopamine that makes life meaningful look like mere trifles or impossibly high mountains to climb.

Boredom is a cage that is very hard to get out of, because it sows the seed for its own continued existence. If you're bored, no amount of excitement that requires even the slightest amount of effort on your part would be enough. Because your understanding of life has been skewed — no longer as a game that rewards you for trying, but as a game that rewards you for not doing anything. Boredom is a failure of being a human being. It's your primary cognitive systems compromised.

 

The Solution

The world is always moving, and entropy is always coming for us. There will never be a time to sit on your laurels and have nothing to do: believe it or not. Even when there really and truly is nothing to do, if you're locked not in a proverbial cage, but an actual real life cage, boredom is still illusory. You're always doing something. You're looking, you're listening, you're thinking, you're sitting, you're lying, you're standing. If you're bored, you're simply not paying attention. If you're locked in a cage, the first thing you should do is try to get out. That should give you plenty to get on with. You can use every nook and cranny of your mental and physical power to do that and get rewarded with a flood of dopamine. Which would enable you to do even more, even better things.

There's always something to do, no matter how many problems you think have been solved, look again. They haven't. They haven't even been half solved. Haven't even been a quarter solved. What are you doing with your limited time on this planet? Still bored?

June 12, 2025, 1:13 p.m.

Written bY CYril