Boredom World
This blogchain is an ongoing investigation of boredom, overload, meaning collapse, and related themes.
My foray into this topic began with two posts from 2019, where I began to think about information overload and “ephemerality” more generally, as a source of anxiety or overwhelm. Since then, I’ve began to see this in terms of boredom, understood as the inability to make a decision (due to too much noise, or too much redundancy), which is the topic of the first post.
July 23, 2020 – Boredom World 1: Boredom, Overload, and Meaning Collapse
In a couple of my most recent posts, I’ve been gesturing at the notion of ephemerality as a source of overload and anxiety, and trying to determine some strategy for alleviating it. Here I’m going to give this problem a new name: boredom.
August 16, 2020 – Boredom World 2: The Role of Orientation in Overcoming Overload Boredom
Last time we developed a generalized notion of boredom as the inability to make a decision. In this post I focus in on boredom induced my exposure to an ephemeral environment, and propose a model of what solutions to such a problem might look like.
October 27, 2020 – Boredom World 3: Overcoming the Hastings Limit By Bootstrapping a World-View
The Hastings limit is what you hit when there is simply far too much content for you to ever get to it all. Here we talk about overcoming this problem by bootstrapping a world-view from the bottom up.
November 14, 2022 – Boredom World 4: You can't "do anything", so do what you can
In this post, I apply the concept of an orientation to career choices, using a case study from Meg Jay’s book, The Defining Decade.