The Most Important Skill in the 21st Century

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

I feel compelled to repost this essay that seems to be truer as time goes: Learn to be bored. And learn to realize that it's scary that we don't ever need to be bored anymore.

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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 or ungrounded predictions — everything below is real today to some degree. The rest is coming.

In our post-boredom world, you endlessly chat with anyone you want, dead or alive, real or imaginary; you personalize your virtual girlfriend (or boyfriend) never to question you or push your boundaries through the existence of their own; porn is customized to meet your wildest demands and satisfy your darkest fantasies; your AI assistant knows everything about you to the point that it no longer needs you to know how to do exactly what you want and need; your emotions are taken care of not by self-introspection but by your robotic therapist; the videogames you play adapt to your feedback in real-time to enhance the experience to immerse you into a world that’s no longer shared with anyone else; you create art and literature that doesn’t need your presence but fulfills your yearning imagination.

It is a world of perfectly-customized entertainment. Do we really want it?

It is as heavenly in its infinitude of possibility as it is hellish in its attention-saturating and energy-depleting allurement. As satisfactory to our hunger for stimulation in the short term as detrimental to any ambition that lives on the horizon. A world that makes easier what was easy — ephemeral fun and joy — and harder what was hard — growing and nurturing ourselves. A reality tailored for us, designed to fulfill every preference and avoid any friction or effort. A way to lose ourselves without ever again leaving our own mind. A place where we are the god, but also the slave. A prison without bars.

This cyberpunk, black-mirror-y scenery is not that far off when you zoom out to see, at a single glance, the last 30 years of tech progress (or regress?). We’ve been going at it for years and it’s only getting worse. The current wave of AI technology seems to partly enhance this erroneous decision: What we thought would be a productivity-boosting, economy-growing elixir turned out to be a deadly trap of perfect entertainment and not much else. I accept and embrace the promises and advances that have materialized thanks to digital technology, but the world I’ve just described isn’t a place to aspire to. It is a vanity project out of the minds of a generation of deluded tech CEOs who, in a mistaken calculation to make more money, turned modern adult life into a routine of cheap shots of ecstasy and endless distraction-seeking.

Perhaps in an attempt to self-redeem their treason to human values, they’ve convinced themselves that this new world brings us a step closer to an eternal life of hedonism and epicurean culmination. In a facade of incredulous surprise, they ask: Who doesn’t want that? For others — for most others — it’s a dream turned nightmare. I feel its appeal, it gets me every now and then, but I also recognize a visceral rejection boiling inside, a kind of inexplicable intuition that tells me it isn’t right; that I shouldn’t go there because I might never leave. But, why would I stop myself — how could I — when I’d have anything I could ever want?

And that’s the thing, right? Perhaps, deep down, we obsess over this paradise. Perhaps we are purposefully letting resilience, determination, willpower — and boredom — fade away from our vocabulary in exchange for entertainment, stimulation, and distraction. Perhaps, we think, that’s how we escape our inherent suffering as human beings. Because who wants to live one single more instant of pain when ineffable pleasure is a couple of clicks away? It’s a call hard to resist yet it scares me more than the crudeness of the physical, uphill, mortal life that remains the alternative.

The most important skill in the 21st century

I can’t help but feel there could be another way. Instead of tech-scaping forward, we could try to find calm within as we are. We could try to reach inner tranquility instead of avoiding the chaos of life by confusing and distracting ourselves with even more noise. Suffering may not be inevitable, but in response to that hopeful belief, we’re collectively walking the easy path.

The struggle that will derive from living — surviving — in the world we’ve been building for decades, defined by the internet, smartphones, and social media first and now with generative AI, fits uncannily well with what is possibly Blaise Pascal’s most famous aphorism; an observation four hundred years ahead of its time:

“All man’s troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room.”

We’ve never known how to be bored. How to be in deep silence without feeling asphyxiated. Maybe we had too much boredom and silence and not enough entertainment back in Pascal’s times. But that was a world we were more or less made for — we learned to handle it. We had to. Pascal's observation was true in the 17th century, but I bet he would not have imagined it would be any truer half a millennium later.

Now the problem is that we don’t have to handle boredom anymore. We are the same apes that roamed the wilderness a hundred thousand years ago; the same people who were contemporaneous to Pascal and the inspiration of his clairvoyant observation. But the world isn’t the same and we don’t have to deal with it anymore. We’ve tricked our minds by culturally changing the human condition. We’ve erased boredom. And we’re doomed for it because not only we didn’t solve the problem Pascal so perceptively recognized, but added another on top.

Today, all people’s troubles come from not having to know how to sit still in one room.

It’s not that we don’t know how to be bored or in silence. It’s that we don’t need to know. Today, a few minutes pass by without our brains receiving external stimulation and we go crazy, so we click out of our boredom. Noise and chaos don’t make us go mad — boredom does. And silence.

That’s the most important skill in the 21st century: Knowing how to overcome this piled-up problem. First, we have to acknowledge that boredom was never a problem but not having to ever feel bored is. Second, we have to prove Pascal wrong and learn how to sit still in one room. We must learn how to be bored. That’s how you get ahead. That’s how you stand out.

Easier said than done. That silence that was ubiquitous in ancient times is no longer an intrinsic property of the world. It can now only be found in the deepest corners of nature that are distant, almost alien to most of us: You’d have to look for it high up in the mountains, gazing out over a vast forest of tall trees with lush green tops, so that all you hear — apart from your pleading mind, forcibly absent of one more gratifying interference — and barely a murmur to your unaccustomed senses, are the leaves whispering in the wind.