Why Nothing Feels Exciting Anymore

(ambient music) (people murmuring)

- [Narrator] How to buy the best maps in 2025.

You're doing it wrong.

You're still using this to navigate life.

Embarrassing. (people chattering)

(light music)

- I'm so bored right now

and I truly hate the way it feels.

You're probably bored too.

You clicked on this video trend to feel less bored

and all you've got is a guy scrolling on his phone

alone in a room.

Here, let me see if I can help with that.

(coins chiming)

Is this better?

(coins chiming)

Good. It's not just you and me.

It's everyone.

(pensive music)

Boredom is on the rise,

even at a time when we're in the golden age of content.

Boredom isn't simple,

it's not trivial, it's not benign.

It's actually a painful emotion

that quietly haunts our sense of meaning and purpose.

It's more like pain or disgust.

We've been going deep on this.

There's a lot of great new science.

My producer, Alex, read like five books on the topic.

In all of this literature,

I am starting to see a clear story that explains

why all of us are more bored than ever,

but I'm also seeing something that I didn't expect.

Something that's quietly hidden

within the feeling of boredom.

How this really unpleasant feeling, boredom,

might actually be key

to living a more purposeful, creative life.

(inquisitive music)

Your life is like a road trip.

Stick with me while I build this analogy

because it's actually really useful

for understanding the real meaning of boredom.

It's a road trip in the dark.

In this analogy, the most important parts are,

first off, your headlights.

This is your attention.

Your ability to pay attention and what you pay attention to.

And the second most important part is this fuel tank.

We're gonna look at this a lot.

This represents your sense of meaning and purpose.

It helps motivate you,

pushes you along the journey of your life.

Attention and meaning are vital

for how humans navigate their lives,

how they make decisions on where to go

with the constraints of their everyday experience.

These determine the route that you take on this road trip.

So you're going along your life,

you're taking turns,

you're making decisions on how to spend your time.

You spend time with friends, you pay attention to this.

And look, your tank is filling up with meaning and purpose.

For a lot of us, friendship is fuel.

You go for a walk, maybe in nature.

You listen to music that is meaningful to you.

Maybe you watch a good movie,

you shine your attention on that,

and that is actually pretty fulfilling.

But life is heavy and hard,

and sometimes your fuel runs out.

Your attention fractures or fades,

and then this happens.

(audio warbling)

Lights out.

(switch clicks) This is boredom.

The state where your sense of purpose

and meaning is on empty.

And consequently, you don't really have the ability

to muster the energy to pay attention to something

that would change the situation.

Real quick before we go on.

Have you noticed

that one way you might cure your boredom is email.

Knocking out a few emails makes you feel productive.

Doesn't take that much work sometimes,

but if you look closely,

you might note that a lot of the emails you're knocking out

are actually junk.

Like they shouldn't have been there.

You don't want them there.

You never signed up for them.

The same thing extends to robocalls

and all of those text messages you get,

and even junk mail being sent to your house.

It's sort of a constant low-level buzz

and one that I kind of hate.

I'm telling you all this

'cause it has to do with our sponsor today, Incogni.

Incogni has woken me up

to just how extensive a industry the data broker market is.

These are companies

who make a lot of money off of collecting your information,

your address, your shopping habits, your birthday,

your court records,

and selling it to anyone willing to pay,

marketers, credit agencies, insurance companies,

you name it.

I actually heard about Incogni a few years ago.

I signed up.

I gave them permission to act on my behalf

and then they went out to these data brokers

and say to them in some legal language,

"Hey, take Johnny off your lists."

And it has worked hundreds of times, actually,

automatically, without me having to do anything.

I actually just get to sit back

and look at this fancy-looking dashboard,

see the status of all of the requests that have been made

and the ones that have been successful,

which, at this point, there's like hundreds of them.

Let me do a little update right now.

Incogni,

what is my current number of...

Dude, 744 total requests to these data brokers?

And of those, 612 have been completed.

That's very satisfying.

132 are in progress.

Man, this is great.

Just this month, there have been more than 10.

You just see all of this. It's very satisfying.

They just launched this unlimited plan,

which now allows you to request removal from any site,

including those creepy people search sites

that post your info online for anyone to see.

So if you wanna try this out,

go to incogni.com/johnnyharris.

Clicking that link helps support this channel.

If you use the code, johnnyharris, at checkout,

you get 60% off the annual plan.

I do the annual plan because, like I said,

like every month there are more lists that I get added to

and Incogni scans them and takes me off of them.

So thank you, Incogni, for sponsoring today's video,

for allowing us to do this work.

With that, let's dive back into why we are so bored.

The most surprising thing that I've learned so far

while researching this is

that boredom is not this trivial, mundane feeling.

It's actually a pretty strong emotional experience,

and it kind of sucks.

- I define boredom as meaning withdrawal

as a sense of discomfort,

telling you that your need

for personal meaning is not being met.

- Your brain's way of telling you,

you need to change what you're doing

because what you're doing is unsatisfying.

You find it hard to focus.

- And that feeling of like,

"I can't do anything about this.

I don't have any agency here."

Or, "What's the meaning of all of this?"

You're just kind of stuck there.

- [Lars] I'd say that the experience

of boredom is an experience of unfreedom,

an experience of being trapped in the present

without meaning.

- [Nathaniel] Time seems to slow.

- [Lars] It's like you're in a situation where,

"I don't care about this.

This really doesn't stimulate me in any way."

- [Alicia] Tolstoy described boredom

as like a desire of desires.

- I also remember a friend of mine,

he worked with the postal services when we're students,

and his job was to take mailbags and turn them inside out

to see if there was any letters remaining in there.

And one day he told me,

"Yesterday at work, I just started weeping."

I mean this was "The Myth of Sisyphus,"

the eternal recurrence of the same.

There is no end to it.

There will always be another mailbag coming in

that would have to be turned inside out.

No progression, just the same over and over again.

And he started weeping at work.

Though being a good Protestant,

he continued to turn mailbags inside out

while he was weeping.

(person sobbing)

- For me, this happens usually on a Saturday at like 3:00 PM

This is when my kids are occupied playing with friends

or playing Nintendo, or whatever.

I have time.

I usually don't have time,

but Saturday at 3:00 PM,

I have precious free time that I don't get during the week.

And I have all this stuff that I want to do,

but then this emotion just hits me.