This All Bores Itself Out

22 Dec, 2025

Boredom is in the air.

It might not seem like it, but everyone appears to be getting bored. By the narrative of consumer capitalism, this shouldn’t make sense. We have every type of entertainment we’d ever need and, not just that, but these entertainments are ever-growing. The very logic of the current system is such that if something entertains us, then more of it will be made. It doesn’t matter if the TV show had a clear-cut ending, the recipe is perfected, or the UI is useful—if something amuses us, we’ll get more of it.

It is precisely this saturation point that is boring us. We’re not bored because there’s nothing to do, we’re bored because there’s too much to do. In The Twilight Zone episode A Nice Place to Visit, a man called Rocky dies and awakes in what he believes is heaven, complete with a casino where he wins every bet, beautiful girls who come to his beck and call, and a world where every single whim is instantly satisfied. This reality of zero challenge, it turns out, isn’t heaven, but is in fact hell.

We’re in a hell of our own creation, the primary driver of which is the cultural form of aggrandizement. The entire purpose of everything we do in the modern West is addition. We want more knowledge, more fun, more ideas, and more entertainment. We just want to keep going, without ever questioning the very purpose of our movement. In time, the purpose of modern movement altogether has become no longer to experience, enjoy, or engage, but to move and grow for its own sake. Eventually, like a child left alone with the ice cream tub, you get sick from the lack of limits. Not so much ‘Too much of a good thing’, but just too much. I am not, however, a pessimist about this.

As we push past this saturation point (because we know of no other language than aggrandizement for our meaning), the cracks are starting to show. More and more people are not actively reducing screen-time via mechanical means, but genuinely feeling somewhat sick and bored of the usage in itself. As quality transforms into content which in turn transforms into filler, the noticed boredom becomes an act wherein we realize, with a stark immediacy, that all of this is just helping us pass time. We’re bored because the end result of capitalism has been, and ever will be, simply to keep us infantilized and entertained until we die.

Even the process of developing and applying artificial constraints to these entertainments (speed eating, is a good example) is burning out, and we’re left coldly staring at a lost passage of time. Like the meditation technique wherein one mentally states ‘Okay, next.’ after each single thought, capitalism too is just short-circuiting, and is finding itself in a panic of limited forms as to the development of the next entertainment. There’s only so many times the superhero can blow up the bad guy, so many gimmicky accessories, and so many times you can deep fry the chips, until eventually people begin not only to say they’ve seen this one before, but, more importantly, refuse to undertake the entertainment altogether because they already know the end.

Let me guess, the good guy wins? Alright, I’ll be outside with the birds.

The artificial lacks will undo themselves.

What comes after the orgy? Well, as Baudrillard says, A thing which has lost its idea is like a man who has lost his shadow, and it must either fall under the sway of madness or perish.¹, and so I feel both of these stages are to collectively, culturally arrive rather soon. Firstly, we shall go quite mad. When all these entertainments no longer entertain us, the contradiction will crack many minds wide open, pushing us toward a relatively immediate future of openly Sadean tastes and hobbies, a final burnout, if you will. And then, like the end of the manic episode, comes the crying, the clearing up, and the apologizing.

In short, one final orgasmic, mad, blowout before the (already) evidently oncoming rise of bureaucratic Fascism.

We just really ain't that good at handling freedom.