Boredom World 3: Overcoming the Hastings Limit By Bootstrapping a World-View

[E]mbrace the fact that there will be good shows you’ll either miss or be very late to. I called it “The Hastings Limit” last November — named after Netflix’s CEO who said that his only real competition was sleep. The Hastings Limit is the moment when you admit to yourself that there’s stuff that you would absolutely love that you’re absolutely just going to not see.

• Dieter Bohn

The Hastings Limit is declaring attentional bankruptcy. It is highly relevant to the notion of overload boredom. In fact, it’s pretty much a direct statement of how too much access to content produces boredom. Drowning in an ocean of content, the only way to reach the surface is to take control of your own attention.

In my model, triaging must be done via some orientation, to act as a filter on all this incoming content. But this is difficult to bootstrap when your attention feels pulled in a hundred directions at once. What’s a consumer to do?

I think we have to understand orientation as – at least in part – a kind of self-knowledge. A way to actively manage our own attention, by knowing intuitively what will be most appealing or relevant. In new environments, or when exposed to many new things all at once – like on Twitter¹ – we are often lacking any such properly calibrated filter.

A simple and intuitive approach is reflected in the common advice: read nothing directly on social media – instead use it to collect links. By separating collection and consuming, you can revisit your decisions later when the context has changed, and see if the particular piece of media still feels salient. This idea makes perfect sense when you remember that the marketing of content in general is done with the particular intent of manipulating your salience landscape to make you click. Of course, inbox management comes with its own issues, but ultimately this may be a more manageable situation.

Another is to relinquish control for a while. Read widely, dipping in here and there, and pay attention to what actually seems to pay off and what doesn’t. Start many books, finish few. With time, and reflection, this process can help you understand your own interests in a bottom-up fashion.

Of course, any of this is dependent upon your giving up on the fear of missing out. And the solution is not to unplug – this is its own pathology which Venkatesh Rao called the fear of being ordinary. You must come to know yourself. To act with intention and clarity toward the development of your own idiosyncratic experience of the world – your very own world-view.