Member-only story

The Only True Goal is Boredom

JA Westenberg
Westenberg
Published in
4 min readJan 8, 2025

Two scenes:

  1. A medieval peasant, having worked fourteen hours in the field, sits on a wooden stool watching the sunset. His mind is blank. He feels nothing in particular.
  2. A modern knowledge worker, having attended eight Zoom meetings, scrolls frantically through TikTok while half-watching Netflix and messaging three different group chats. Her brain fizzes with dopamine and cortisol. She feels everything, all at once.

Which of these people is more bored? The peasant, obviously. Which is more fulfilled? I suspect, controversially, also the peasant.

The hedonic treadmill tells us that humans rapidly adapt to both positive and negative changes in their circumstances. Win the lottery? You’ll be back to your baseline happiness in months. Lose a limb? Same deal. We’re remarkably adaptable creatures, which is both our blessing and our curse.

But there’s something the hedonic treadmill theory doesn’t fully capture: while we adapt to circumstances, we also adapt to stimulation itself. The more we receive, the more we need. It’s not just that the pleasure of a new iPhone fades — it’s that the entire concept of “new phone excitement” becomes harder to access. We need bigger hits, more frequently, just to maintain the same level of engagement.

--

--

Westenberg
Westenberg

Published in Westenberg

Join a community of skeptics, thinkers, and questioners.

JA Westenberg
JA Westenberg

Responses (25)