Choose Boredom

light‑hearted banter
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This era is developing into a form that is unfavorable for the birth of masters.

The reason is simple: there are too many distractions.

Unfortunately, I have already realized it. My thirst for any information has become a subconscious habit; I will choose to read or watch junk information whenever I can do so unnoticed.

This is a kind of “consumption downgrade”. When massive junk information spreads on the Internet at zero cost and almost zero time, any uncareful click we make will cause the recommendation system to show us even more eye‑catching content. Regardless of how many false pieces of information there are, how many of what we see are actually valuable to us?

Modern streaming services are erasing ‘boredom’, so we no longer have to face our empty, incomplete inner selves. We fear boredom because we fear ourselves. The truth is cold; we do not want to admit that we are just overly mediocre college students, covering our incompetence with confusion, turning life into avoidance and self‑deception.

Laziness and greed are instincts that humanity has evolved, and streaming exploits both perfectly. Information that comes without effort caters to laziness, and infinite scroll continuously stimulates the brain, making it repeatedly shout “I want more!”

Evolution has no direction; richer, more diverse streaming has never represented progress. It is a software‑driven survival of the fittest in the human jungle, where the strong survive and the weak perish.

All of this is not developing in a direction more beneficial to humanity.

I often think that the first half of the 20th century was a period suitable for cultivating masters. A small amount of real information was allowed to flow globally, and the earliest large‑scale entertainment tool (TV) had not yet been born.

Anyone who already possesses a certain amount of knowledge, after swinging repeatedly between boredom and entertainment, will eventually find a sufficiently interesting field and cultivate it.

If we took a genius from the past and brought him to the present, teaching him how to use X, YouTube, and Facebook, would he become addicted to the overload of information and be unable to extricate himself?

Maybe yes, maybe no.

Perhaps a true genius always has an unclouded value orientation, able to distinguish junk from what is still valuable. Perhaps people are all similar and will be

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Excerpt:

Human achievements in the cultural sphere, including philosophical thought, owe themselves to our capacity for deep, focused attention. Only in environments that allow deep attention can culture arise. This deep attention is increasingly marginalized, giving way to another kind of attention—hyperattention (Hyperaufmerksamkeit). This scattered attention manifests as a constant shifting of focus among multiple tasks, information sources, and work routines. Because this attention cannot tolerate a hint of boredom, it also refuses a deep boredom, which, paradoxically, is crucial for creative activity. Walter Benjamin called this deep boredom “the dream‑bird that hatches the egg of experience”[1]. If sleep is the highest form of bodily relaxation, then deep boredom is the ultimate state of mental relaxation. Pure busyness does not generate anything new; it merely repeats or accelerates what already exists. Benjamin lamented that the nest of the dream‑bird, built from rest and time, is disappearing in modern society. The activities of “weaving and net‑making” are gone. Boredom is a “warm, grayish cloth with a dazzling, multicolored lining,” “and when we dream, we are wrapped in it.” We find ourselves “on its Arabic‑style pattern lining,