Boredom Has Become the Enemy

It is 2026. Vertical content is the content of choice for advertisers, and the content of choice for consumers. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Twitch dominate the average person’s freetime.

For the first time in history, boredom has become the enemy. Where once slow, repetitive days pushed the individual to seek innovation and adventure --- drivers of change --- today, boredom drives the individual to drown out their own thoughts in endless novelty, cementing the status quo.

As they say, attention is the most valuable currency in the digital age, and I argue that there has never been a time when we spend less of it on ourselves than on otherss.

Is there nothing that the individual can do? But resign themselves to the algorithm, always susceptible to doomscrolling? To live in a binary world where there is work, and there is entertainment?

I believe there exists a strategy out there, independent of an individual’s willpower, that can greatly reduce an individual’s dependence on short-form content.

I think it begins with a question: why not spend attention, the most valuable currency, on yourself?

My first formulation of this strategy is as follows:

Limit the time you spend online in one day to 1 contiguous 1 hour block.

Two days adopting this strategy, and I’ve found immense relief: I no longer find myself making the binary decision to do hard things that really interest me, or easy, lowest-common-denominator shorts that are also interesting, but much less meaningful.

I naturally started to gravitate toward planning out what I wanted to do in the time that I’d be online.

I felt a slight uneasiness and FOMO in losing constant access to LLMs… But I’ve found that the conversations I’m having with them to be less about “what should I do, mirror mirror on the wall?” to more of a search engine (though locally hosting is possible).

You can still slack off. The rule doesn’t prevent you from downloading games, media, and books. But the key observation here is that you are the one in control of the content you curate for yourself. Even if you download half the internet, it’s a half that you’ve chosen with your own free will. And that is infinitely better than having no control.

That feeling of wanting to explore is back. That feeling of pleasure, knowing that I won’t be rushed, that I can take things slower is back. That ability to sit and take in life is back.

Please give it a try, and let me know how it goes. I’ll give a 1-month update on how this strategy is working for me.