The West Is Bored to Death

I enjoyed this article and it is giving me ideas on how to improve the quality of my own leisure time.

There is dukkha

I dealt with a little bit of what the article describes, the burden of too much leisure. I ended up getting a masters part time and another certification that ate up much of my 20s. But after that I still felt anxiety growing older. It was all just so meaningless. And every year I was less likely to ever have my career really take off so what the hell was the point? I'll be working until my 60s or moving to some random cheap country I have no connection to to live out the rest of my days.

This all changed once I had children. I'm surprised the article doesn't mention children at all. But I was in a kind of prolonged adolescence. You see this among many people without children. Just obsession about "addictive, sensationalist, forgettable entertainment and media", Disney World for adults, collectibles, anime, video games, all distractions.

Obviously children are not for everyone and I can only speak from personal experience. But having kids just cured that anxiety almost immediately. Not that I was not bored, but I kind of flipped things where time was on my side. Prior to kids, I felt anxiety growing older because I was just that much less likely to have some big breakthrough. And every year we get a little slower and less interested in things. Now every year my kids grow a bit and I know they got their best years ahead of them. And I get to experience all of that, win back some hard earned free time for personal interests, and overall have more interesting dinner conversations. But probably most importantly, you get to see what kind of people they're going to grow up to be.

This is just me of course. Some people might have the opposite experience, where they feel children are a prison. And plenty of people blow their lives up and abandon their families. But for me I couldn't imagine where I'd be without them.

>American greatness has produced a society whose members know not what to do with the freedom and abundance that earlier generations secured.

There have been several posts on HN about this. I have commented every time I have seen one because I think the above quote is true. I also think it is one, of several, reasons things are going the way they are.

Many of my friends, coworkers, and relatives have fallen into the trap of being bored to death. They fill up their time with worthless empty "calories" of media consumption, ethanol, and doom scrolling. Almost all of them are unhappy. I think it is widespread to be like this.

But the problem is solvable.

There is no person, no person too busy, too tired, too poor, too disabled, too shy, too anything, who cannot find the time to do something that provides value to their life. They just have to, and this is the part that makes people mad, put down their phone and turn off the TV.

In every zip code in the entire United States of America, there is some group of people, somewhere, that is looking for someone to join them-- unless it is an isolated patch of remote wilderness where food and fuel need to be airlifted in or a remote island separated from the mainland by thousands of miles of sea there IS something.

You just have to get out, find them, and join them.

The last time something like this popped up I do what I usually do and listed non-work, non-social media things to do within an hour of my deceased grandparents' farm in central Southern Indiana. That's my benchmark-- if there are things to do here there are things to do everywhere because it is about as far from "the big city" you can get absent stretches of western desert or alaskan tundra.

Some quick searches found rod and gun clubs, knitting circles, small rural libraries with 3d printers going idle and anime clubs, three (yes, three) astronomy clubs, amateur radio clubs, gardening clubs, volunteer fire companies (who always, everywhere, need members), civic societies, book clubs, and even a small community performing arts center with a banging schedule of shows whose website was practically begging for people to come join them to be stage crew, performers, and set builders. Rural, barely-covered-by-a-cell-signal, southern Indiana, and those are just the things I found with online calendars full of events.

Being active in one's community outside of work, and deriving meaning not from work but your personal accomplishments and activities is a skill-- but it is a learnable skill.

Blame the government. They have strangled the hell out of productive Americans. Try to get a building permit to build something, anything.

Insane amounts of taxes, being wasted.

Failure to raise the minimum wage.

What an insane article. It's almost like he hasn't read Eric Hoffer.

Mass movements arise when populations, that had had large increases in living standards, find their living standards are no longer rising. Hoffer cites something like 30% of the country is now 'middle class' and then depressions etc. set in.

Take the quote, "A society so thoroughly steeped in the work ethic and committed to the pursuit of individual achievement cannot but fail to prepare its members for any other kinds of lives."

The reality is the opposite. When work doesn't pay (i.e. when hard work can't lead to buying a condo/house and starting a family) the original premise of "work hard to get ahead" breaks. And here we are.

Any civilization where two 30 year old elementry school teachers can't buy a 1,200 sq-ft 3bdr/2bath condo for less than 30% of their income - is morally bankrupt. Aka 99% of the bay area, or DC, NYC. So people tern to idleness without the ability for work to result in personal progress.

The solutions are simple: make it easy to build housing. If you're bored, deadlift. Spend time outside. And, most of all, change our national household economics to allow ownership and family formation.

The hard truth seems to be there is no meaning and we as a species are discovering that fact.

Worrying.

We already know: no exercise and a life targeting instant gratification does bad things to brain chemistry.

We need physical toil to stay fit and mental toil to stay sane. Together they won't guarantee a happy life, but without you'll never have the foundation for one.

We find this hard in the modern era because it's so very easy to sell dopamine hits. We are our own worst enemy and companies are only too willing to exploit us.

The article dribbles around these ideas, without actually connecting cause and effect. The lazy attack on STEM is bizarre. Learning to code isn't a problem because LLMs can code, it's a problem if we don't use it. An argument to instead study the Humanities rather undercuts itself if it means we all write like Stuart Whatley here. It's the toil, the engagement, the creativity we need, not specific knowledge.

Boredom isn’t the worst thing.

30 years ago being a couch potato who watched tv all day was stigmatized. These people were wasting their lives. But at least they weren’t hurting others.

Nowadays these bored coach potato aren’t watching COPS and Judge Judy all day. They’re posting angry stuff online and radicalizing themselves and others. Which makes the world worse for everyone else.

(For what it’s worth I personally happen to be a big fan of COPS and Judge Judy. And I also post stuff online as evidenced by this very same Hacker News comment. But sometimes what you post matters)

> Just a few short years ago, everyone was advised to “learn to code”, regardless of where their real interests might lie. Yet now, we are told, this is one area where large language models already excel. Will some share of the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested into Stem be reallocated toward rescuing the humanities – the one set of disciplines whose value does not depend entirely on unforeseeable macroeconomic contingencies? We shouldn’t hold our breath.

This is an odd statement, and probably reflects the authors own anxieties.

This is one reason I find myself so often thinking about drugs. The cartel let us down, there should be a version of heroin without the downsides, by now.

This is a sign of a society going downward.

I can see how an entire population doesn't find thing to create motivation or inspiration.

I would be pretty worried.

We tend to ignore politics because politics are quarantined, we can ignore it, but the political climate is also a reflection of that same boredom.