The Phenomenology of Boredom: Why Modern Life & Most Content Feels Dead (Lost Agency)

Think about your afternoon today. You lay on your couch, mindlessly flicking your thumb up a vertical screen, letting 15-second algorithmic clips wash over your eyes. You aren’t looking for anything; you are merely waiting for the next dopamine spike. Yet, the moment the screen turns off, an unbearable, hollow weight crushes your chest. This is the modern pathology: the soul-crushing boredom of mindless consumption (the digital doom-scrolling). It is not a lack of stimulation—in fact, the world is louder than ever—but a total severance of your subjective connection to it. We have surrendered our agency to the feed, becoming ghosts.

At that moment, a thought struck me. Maybe boredom isn’t just about time dragging on. Maybe it’s the feeling of not living inside the world right now. This series starts from that point. We will understand boredom as a disconnection between humans and the world. This discussion is for those whose daily lives feel flat, and for creators who want to build content that never bores.

2. The Three Dimensions of Boredom: World – Narrative – Body

Boredom is a complex state formed by three overlapping layers: Disconnection from the World, Stagnation of Narrative, and Numbness of the Body. We will discuss the first layer: Accessibility to the World.

(0) The Limits of Existing Philosophy: Ontological Boredom

If you research philosophers who dealt with boredom (Ennui), they mostly approach it from an ontological level.

Martin Heidegger: “Boredom is not just time dragging, but a state where the meaning and possibility of existence are invisible.”
Søren Kierkegaard: “Boredom is a form of ontological crisis. It arises when one chooses nothing despite being able to choose, or remains sensorially unsatisfied.”

I can empathize with the analysis that boredom is an ontological crisis where humans fail to find meaning. However, it feels too abstract. They say “The world is boring,” but the essence of the problem is “I perceive the world as boring.”

The issue isn’t the world itself, but my perception of it. Yet, they fail to provide a clear structure on how that perception occurs. I want to shift the perspective here. Boredom is not a problem of existence, but a phenomenon caused by a Failure of Perception. In other words, we are thrown into the world, but we feel bored when we fail to “Log In” (Connect) to it.

(1) Accessibility to the World

Boredom is the feeling of “Not Living the World.”

Phenomenologists always say humans are beings “thrown” into the world. This means we are thrown into conditions we didn’t choose—Korea, 2025, Male, Knee Pain. Like threads in a sweater, humans are woven into a dense context, yet we live by assigning meaning to it.

But what if you can’t assign meaning? Your body is thrown into the world, but that world becomes meaningless and boring to you. You come to feel that you cannot control the world. You feel that many things visible before your eyes merely pass by and have no relation to you. Now you understand why phenomenologists saw boredom as an existential crisis, and why commercial productions and creators strive to eliminate it.

Why Does That World Feel Boring?

To give you the conclusion first: We are thrown into the world, but if we cannot Connect, we feel bored.

“Connection” means a state where my senses and language react to the world’s Code, and interaction occurs. Here, Code refers to the consistent context and system of meaning that maintains the routine of that life-world. It is formed by law, culture, myth, bodily technique, customs, and history. Merleau-Ponty referred to this as the sediment of perception. They are the results of seimentation created by people who lived before me. A world you cannot connect to because the codes don’t match feels like a Muted Theme Park, even if your body is physically there. That is when humans experience boredom.

Humans are beings who live alongside others. Therefore, just because there are codes you haven’t deciphered doesn’t mean that world doesn’t exist. As phenomenologists suggest, it is risky to assume the existence of a transcendental consciousness or being. However, it is certain that there are shared, agreed-upon codes. Once you fall away from those codes, life becomes tedious.

Night Train to Lisbon – An Inaccessible World

Recently, while reading Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, I felt bored. Gregorius is a professor teaching classical philology in Switzerland. In his repetitive daily life, he saves a Portuguese woman from suicide. When she touches his head, he feels the power of life and awakens. He devours a Portuguese book she left behind and becomes curious about the author, Amadeu de Prado. He drops everything and leaves for Lisbon. There, he tracks the life of the doctor Amadeu, reconstructing scattered fragments of memory. In the process, he learns Portuguese and vows to live his own life.

Why Was It Boring? Respected job, stable life, intellectual anguish. For a middle-class reader living in this world, the story of impulsive escape after mental awakening might be easily accessible. But, for me—rolling in kitchen dust, raging at loan balance notifications, living an unstable life where I can’t predict tomorrow’s customers—Gregorius’s world is Inaccessible. Gregory, the intellectual middle class, and I were in different lifeworlds. Nevertheless, I forced myself to read it because I paid $15, seduced by the ad that it was the best-selling novel in Germany. It was excruciatingly boring. On the other hand, cooking novel like Kitchen Confidential or Waiter Rant, worlds I can easily access, were incredibly fun.

What this experience implies is that You can throw yourself into a world, but that doesn’t guarantee immediate accessibility. To subjectively perceive phenomena through meaning and make them conditions of existence, you must be able to Connect.

Example: A Foreigner Who Can’t Speak Korean

Imagine you are suddenly forced to work in Korea without knowing a word of Korean. Your body is thrown into the life-world called Korea. But unless Koreans speak English to you, you cannot connect to the life-world they have built over centuries. You might interpret the Korean world and assign meaning based on an American worldview and language. This Solipsistic Worldview might be fun at first. Even if isolated, it’s a process of creating meaning yourself.

But, As time passes, if Koreans don’t react to your worldview or react differently than expected, you will experience growing confusion. When failures to connect to the Korean life-world accumulate like this, there are only two choices:

Push your solipsistic worldview and become a Revolutionary who overturns the Korean world.
Learn the language, understand the history and culture (Code) and Melt into the local life.

Mismatched Codes Mean No Connection

Every world has Codes—law, history, culture, preconditions—that make it a consistent context. Even if a human is physically thrown into a world, accessibility is not guaranteed. Even if you project your existing worldview to assign meaning to a disconnected world, if that world doesn’t respond (it might be fun at first), you eventually feel bored. I tried to connect to Gregorius’s world because I invested $15. But,

The scene where he feels the resurrection of life from a woman touching his head → It overlapped with Christian baptism rituals, and I scoffed.
Doctor Amadeu’s existential anguish (suffering criticism for treating a dictator) → It felt weak and overly delicate.

As a chef working in the field, I have not mastered the code to access the world of the intellectual middle class. Unlike my worldview, which scoffs and feels pathetic, the novel’s world unfolds according to its own logic. Because I couldn’t connect to it, it was Boring.

(2) A World Without the Rhythm of Action Verbs

I recently watched Mr. Robot. It’s an award-winning show, but personally? It was boring until the bitter end. The boredom of Mr. Robot did not come from its subject or its pace, but from its lack of verbal rhythm—a world where verbs stopped moving, and only nouns remained.

The Plot of Mr. Robot

Mr. Robot follows Elliot Alderson, a genius cybersecurity engineer suffering from severe social anxiety and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Fighting childhood trauma, he creates an alter ego in the form of his dead father (Mr. Robot). This internal schism becomes the engine driving an external hacking war. Elliot joins the anonymous hacker group fsociety to execute the “Five/Nine” hack— erasing all debt records of E Corp, the conglomerate controlling the global financial system. But behind this revolutionary attempt, he realizes there is an omnipotent secret organization, the Dark Army, led by Whiterose. Elliot’s struggle deepens into a war against a massive structural evil built on capital and technology.

Why Was It Boring? Connection Was Possible

My boredom with Mr. Robot did not happen because I couldn’t connect to its world. I have watched plenty of similar stories, like V for Vendetta or The Matrix, and I fully understand the real-world impact of scandals like WikiLeaks. I am also no stranger to narratives about psychological fractures, having watched A Beautiful Mind and Shutter Island. My frustration here was entirely different from the slow pacing of a film like Night Train to Lisbon. It belonged to a completely different dimension of storytelling.

Narrative is Expressed through Action Verbs

A narrative is what meaningfully connects random changes over time, and we express that connection through action verbs.

Consider a basic middle school science example: “Electrons orbit around the atom.” The atom and the electron exist as separate entities, but they only become a narrative through the verb orbit. In reality, scientists cannot casually look at an electron to see if it is orbiting or binding; that does not matter for the explanation. The point is that inserting an active verb makes the relationship understandable as a consistent flow.

While stative verbs like have, own, or love can enrich meaning at a specific point, they do nothing to progress the plot. In fact, relying too heavily on stative verbs freezes time and creates intense boredom.

We understand the flow of the external world by centering it on actions we can personally control. If a child struggles to grasp how electrons orbit an atom, you can simply tell them to run circles around the teacher, and they will understand the concept instantly. Similarly, a spoon and a bowl of rice exist independently as nouns, but the moment you say “Eat rice with a spoon,” they connect into a clear story. Verbs are not just structural grammar; they function as the muscles of human perception.

Repetition is Boring: The Importance of Rhythm

Composing a narrative with the exact same action over and over quickly becomes tedious. Instead of showing someone holding an apple for ten seconds, a storyteller should change the rhythm: grab the apple, throw it at the ceiling, and spin it on a finger. This variety kills boredom because it reveals the physical properties of the object—the apple is light enough to throw and round enough to spin.

New perceptions are opened by diverse actions, allowing us to experience a story in multiple dimensions. Even a classic tale of love and separation will not resonate with an audience unless you insert physical verbs like pounding or aching to create a rhythm of shifting perception.

This is exactly what Stephen King meant in his book On Writing when he advised authors never to plaster their sentences with passive voice or weak adverbs like lusciously or prettily. An action verb expressed in the active voice is what forces a genuine shift in how a reader perceives a scene.

(3) The Failures of Mr. Robot

Dispersed Rhythm, Disconnected Body

The primary reason Mr. Robot feels so boring is that the rhythm of its action verbs is completely dispersed. The show introduces nearly thirty significant supporting characters. As a result, the protagonist’s direct action disappears, the viewpoint scatters, and it becomes incredibly difficult for the viewer to follow a consistent thread.

Compared to the main plot of Elliot fighting Whiterose, the episodes dedicated to the supporting cast feel entirely too fragmented. Every scene—whether it involves hacking, shooting, or talking—must center thoroughly on the protagonist so the audience can reproduce the context in their own minds. We construct a story by tracking the main character’s physical movements.

Consider the Bourne film series as a contrast. The Bourne Identity tracks Jason Bourne’s physical movements slowly and in meticulous detail. The supporting characters are handled quickly and blurred into the background. There is no verbose, psychoanalytic dialogue about self-identity and no heavy narration. Instead, Bourne’s identity crisis is described entirely through raw physical actions: screaming, tearing his hair out, and frantically searching through documents.

We understand Bourne’s narrative because we can project his panic onto our own bodies, experiencing a sensory immersion synchronized with his physical rhythm.

In Mr. Robot, however, Elliot spends massive amounts of time trapped in a split personality state, engaging in endless, internal narration where he doubts his own reality. There is no active verb. Meanwhile, the verbs that actually move the plot forward are scattered among thirty different people. The viewer feels that the main story has frozen, destroying any chance of physical immersion.

Predictable Action Kills Rhythm

The show’s second major flaw is its reliance on predictable clichés. It features the classic split-personality genius, childhood trauma, a mysterious shadow government, a rebellious hacker sister, and a workaholic investigator. These are characters we have all seen many times before. By the middle of the second season, you can easily identify every cliché and predict exactly where the plot is heading. A narrative woven entirely out of predicted actions lacks verbal rhythm, preventing any shift in perception.

Compare this to unpredictable films like Memento, The Usual Suspects, or the original Saw. In those stories, you cannot predict where the narrative is going simply by watching the characters’ lines and current actions. The middle of the film might feel slightly confusing or slow, but that is a deliberate device designed to maximize the impact of the final rhythmic twist.

When a chain of actions flips unpredictably, the viewer gets goosebumps and realizes the story is truly alive. It forces you to rewind the movie or search online to find the hidden clues you missed.

[Summary] Narrative is Composed of Actions

Narrative is composed of actions. Verbs are the language of the body, and we cannot construct a meaningful story out of nouns alone. We understand how things change over time because our own physical actions—seeing, hearing, speaking, and touching—intervene to make sense of fragmented objects.

This mirrors the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who placed the physical body, rather than abstract consciousness, at the absolute center of how humans understand the world. Changes that cannot be expressed through physical action feel random and meaningless.

Even a highly complex cooking recipe becomes instantly understandable when it is split and connected by clear action verbs like slice, fry, boil, and bake. When connecting these movements, rhythm is everything. It allows us to experience the same object through various perceptions, enriching its meaning. A world stripped of the rhythm of active verbs will always feel incredibly boring.

(4) A World Without Physical Control

Why is the treadmill a factory of boredom? This question cannot be answered simply by “Accessibility to the World” or the “Rhythm of Action Verbs.” The boredom of the treadmill stems from something more fundamental: The Loss of Physical Sovereignty.

On the treadmill, it looks like we are walking. But in reality, the world is moving us. The moment the machine takes over your muscles, you cease to be the subject moving the world. You become an object being moved by it. You become cargo.

Iron Is Not Boring

Resistance training is different. I lift. I hold. I drop. I control the body. Because I can increase the weight and reconfigure the rhythm of the action, the narrative of the workout is rewritten every set. Here, we feel the Existential Control that “I am moving my body.” That sensation is the primal rhythm that drives away boredom.

How to Seize the Rhythm

To make the treadmill less boring, don’t just increase the speed. Shorten the interval of control.

The Good: Walk 4 minutes, Run 1 minute. I restructure the rhythm. I become the subject.
The Bad: Speed 6 for 20 minutes, Speed 9 for 10 minutes. The control gap is too long. No rhythm. Physical authority is surrendered to the machine.

But what do most people do? They are too lazy to even press the buttons. They set it to 6 and run for 30 minutes. Having handed over their bodies to the machine, they instantly feel bored and turn on Netflix.

Here is the paradox: The more fun Netflix is, the more boring the exercise becomes. As the focus of perception shifts to the screen, the sensation of the body being forcibly moved by the treadmill is maximized. We experience a separation of mind and body. To truly enjoy cardio, you must go outside. Walk or run in the wild and reclaim sovereignty over your body.

How to Run Without Boredom

To avoid boredom, you must control the body.

A Connectable World: I recommend a familiar river, forest, or road in your neighborhood. A new place is an unknown world; trying to connect to it drains energy, making it hard to focus on the run.
Narrative with Verb Rhythm: A long, straight bridge is boring. Run where you see architecture. When the scenery changes, what you See, Hear, and Touch changes. The verbs change.
Physical Control: Unlike the treadmill, if you control the stride and pace yourself, you won’t be bored. However, if the action is too difficult, physical control fails, and it becomes boring. Raise the difficulty gradually.

3. A Baby’s Play and the Absence of Boredom

Before thinking about the characteristics of boring content, Conversely, what does a world without boredom look like? I see the answer in a baby’s play. If boredom is the sense of “not living the world,” play is the sense of “living the world directly.” Babies do not understand the world through language. They understand through touching, moving, and feeling reactions.

Let’s analyze this process through the three elements of boredom.

(1) Play is Connecting to a World of Sensory Stimulation

Watching my nephew, She always checks if her mom is nearby before playing. If mom’s gone, she stops the fun and cries for her. Physical safety is the prerequisite for logging into the play world.

Unlike adults who connect to worlds constructed of abstract meanings: Babies, unable to speak, have no experience with life-worlds divided by nationality, age, or gender. Therefore, simply connecting to a world of “Sensory Stimulation” feels pleasurable.

Examples:

The flapping of a toy duck.
The crushing sound of a Coke can.
Tearing tissue paper.

Babies instantly grasp the “Me vs. Object” structure. Once physical safety is secured, connecting to a world of new sensations (Sound, Touch, Movement) is understood as Play.

(2) Play Narrative is Composed of Action Verb Rhythms

Watch a baby play, and you will see a relentless cycle of physical movements: pounding, shaking, pressing, and pushing. A child gets bored instantly when playing dead or lying still. Instead, they delight when a toy duck moves precisely because of their own action, yet they lose interest completely if a heavy box refuses to budge when pushed. They constantly vary their actions rather than repeating just one.

In short, a baby understands the world through the rhythm of touching, moving, and feeling immediate physical reactions. If this rhythm breaks, they tune out. Conversely, when they experience their own actions changing the world, they laugh and clap.

This is where the core difference between adults and children lies. Adults can construct complex narratives from books or movies by projecting their past experiences of physical control onto the text. For a baby, before language forms, the body is their entire world, and their direct physical action is the entire narrative.

(3) Play is the Primal Form of Physical Control

At nine months old, a child does not understand the symbolic meanings inside a cartoon. Even when watching Tom and Jerry, they do not grasp the anthropomorphized narrative of the weak outsmarting the strong. It simply isn’t fun for them. They just see shifting colors and hear loud noises, staying interested for a second before pushing the phone away.

However, hand them a simple app that makes a sharp noise whenever the screen is pressed, and they will press it forever. Watching a cartoon is a passive experience, which makes it boring. Making a sound happen is an exercise in physical control, which makes it fun. The child does not need to feel a complex emotion or decode a symbolic meaning; the physical control and the immediate sensory reaction alone are enough to constitute play.

(4) Boredom and Play are Opposites

Ultimately, boredom and play sit on opposite ends of the human spectrum. For a baby, play is the literal process of feeling alive. Because they were just born, everything they encounter is a fresh world, requiring only a parent’s presence to safely explore.

This entire playground is built out of active verb rhythms. Because babies lack language, they cannot infer meaning from abstract information or from watching other people’s actions. Simply moving their own bodies is what opens up a brand-new horizon of perception, making infancy the least boring time of human life.

4. Why Content Becomes Boring

Boring content shares three common traits.

The reader cannot connect to the world.
There is information, but no rhythm.
There is no room for physical manipulation.

Let’s break them down.

(1) Solipsistic Worldview – The Reader Cannot Log In

Literary Example: “Stream of Consciousness” This refers to content that relentlessly dumps the author’s internal, subjective sensations. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are the prime examples. Originally, it emerged as an innovative attempt to escape logic and reason, exposing the protagonist’s consciousness in depth.

Problem is that this content is filled with, The author’s unique symbols, Sensory expressions detached from historical or physical context. Acausal narratives. As a result, most readers are locked out of the author’s world. They feel bored.

Case 1: James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Success)

He used the stream of consciousness with flavor. The novel doesn’t follow chronological order or a consistent viewpoint. Stephen’s internal sensations, emotional shifts, anguished questions, and poetic language are exposed raw.

However, The worldview of conflict between religious strictness and artistic self-realization is clear. The rhythm of moving locations (Ireland → Europe) and describing actions carries significant weight. Since this narrative echoes in Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund or Demian, readers could connect to Joyce’s world and be moved without boredom.

Case 2: James Joyce – Ulysses (Failure, at least for me)

Leaving aside its established literary merit, Ulysses stands as a fundamentally inaccessible world for the average reader. Attempting to read it often results in falling asleep multiple times before giving up entirely, leaving no lasting memory of what the book was actually about.

This happens because the text offers no clear entry point for personal immersion, making the author’s world feel solipsistic. Internal monologues and dense sensory descriptions run completely wild, while the viewpoints and narrative styles are mixed in a dizzying manner. The reader is thoroughly alienated and blocked from making a meaningful connection, rendering the book the example of narrative boredom, even if that alienation was the author’s original intention.

Blog Example

We see this same failure in blog posts that merely list superficial exclamations like “The lake is pretty” or “The sky is clear,” or those that simply paste generic definitions directly from Wikipedia.

The core problem here is that there is no context of meaning for the reader to connect to. Raw sensation might exist on the page, but there is no actual processing of that data—the writer never explains what exactly was beautiful or why it matters. While this kind of writing might function perfectly fine as a personal diary or self-portrait for the author, it remains an inaccessible world for anyone else. The reader scrolls up and down a few times, catches the draft of boredom, and immediately leaves the page.

(2) Absence of Action Verb Rhythm

I often watch book review channels on YouTube. There are two styles.

Style 1: Accurate but Boring Channel

Reads concepts like : “Liquidity Trap,” “Multiplier Effect,” “Exchange Rate Overshooting,” and “Base Effect” like a textbook. Nothing is wrong, but all verbs are Stative Verbs (is, exists, does). The narrative stops. The viewer loses rhythm.

Style 2: Channel Creating Rhythm with Action Verbs

While I completely disagree with this British economist’s analysis, I have brought it up here for the sake of example. Here is a memorable dialogue explaining an economic book:

Host: “Why can’t we catch inflation? I’m scared to buy anything at the mart.”
Author: “You’d think aging in advanced countries means old people don’t spend, right? So demand drops, prices fall, and we should go to Low Blood Pressure. But instead, the economy gets urgent, and we go to High Blood Pressure where prices keep soaring.”
Host: “Why?”
Author: “According to this book, the old and young are inflationary, and workers are deflationary.”
Host: “What does that mean?”
Author: “When you work in a factory, you have to make more stuff than your salary worth to keep the factory running, right? So if workers increase, they contribute to price drops. But old people don’t produce…”

In this dialogue:

Low interest/prices → Low Blood Pressure.
High interest/prices → High Blood Pressure.
Concepts difficult for the public are dragged down to the level of physical life.
Rich action verbs are inserted: Soar, Go, Catch, Run, Drop.

This speaker translates economic concepts into verbs, helping the viewer not just understand information but Feel it. Content that unravels abstract information into physically palpable action verbs, constructs a narrative, and uses descriptions (stative verbs) only as seasoning never gets boring.

(3) Physical Manipulation Impossible – No Room for Reader Intervention

If there is no possibility for the reader/viewer to physically manipulate, it is boring.

Case 1: Library vs. Bookstore

Have you ever felt that reading a borrowed library book somehow lacks flavor? I have even:

Borrowed a book, read it, found it impressive.
Bought it again at a bookstore to underline it. It felt like I was embodying the book.

If you are a creator, this kind of application would also be possible. Editing that widens line spacing to leave margins for: Underlining. Taking notes. This proves that allowing the reader to physically intervene helps them embody the book’s meaning more richly.

Case 2: Cinema vs. YouTube Live

Simply showing, like a movie theater or broadcast TV where the viewer only laughs or cries, is now boring. Even for the same 30-minute YouTube broadcast: Watching a recording is dull. Watching a live stream while donating and chatting makes 30 minutes fly. Typing a message and inputting a donation amount are Physical Manipulations, which heighten immersion.

Case 3: Comment Participation Strategy

Some YouTube channels use a tactical strategy to drive user engagement and comments. The creator uploads a new Short and strictly likes and replies only to the comments posted within the first twenty-four hours. From the second day onward, they completely stop interacting with the comment section.

This mechanical window forces subscribers to turn on channel notifications so they can watch new Shorts faster, competing to secure that immediate reply or like from the creator. Once this habit forms, the creator promotes their paid membership tier for deeper, unrestricted communication, successfully converting the audience into paying members.

Content that opens up a literal space for the audience to move their hands, participate, and physically manipulate the environment will never be boring.

5. Philosophical Debate: Is Boredom Meaningless?

To strengthen the core thesis, we must address some expected philosophical counterarguments regarding the nature of boredom, focusing on the intersection of the world, narrative, and the physical body.

(1) Why Scholars and Mathematicians Find Abstract Concepts Fun

It is easy to watch professors excitedly debate over dinner and wonder how anyone can find joy in formal, conceptual equations. To an outsider, an academic debate looks like an inaccessible world stripped of active verbs and physical manipulation—it looks incredibly tedious. However, this enjoyment is built on three layers of training and perception.

Answer 1: 20 Years of Academic Training

If an elementary school student suddenly logs into the world of advanced calculus, they will experience pure boredom. But if you lower the hurdles and open an accessible path, they find interest.

The step-by-step coursework from a bachelor’s degree to a master’s and a PhD functions as a slow immersion into a specific domain. At first, a student only sees static noun structures like definitions, theories, and theorems. But the moment they embody the internal verb rhythm—the flow of debate, the genealogy of citations, and the history of a concept’s birth and subversion—knowledge transforms from static information into a dynamic narrative.

Scholars enjoy research papers not because of an abstract essence of theory, but because they are connected to the historical context and world of that theory. Seeing a school of thought like Bounded Rationality (Herbert Simon, James March, Johan Olsen, Sarasvathy) passed down through generations of mentors and mentees is a great example. Even a dense academic paper becomes interesting when understood as a narrative, tracking who the advisor was, which school they represent, and who the corresponding author is. Adding these individual human episodes allows access to a vibrant life-world hidden within hard concepts.

Answer 2: Formal Logic Concepts Have Verb Rhythms

At first glance, formal logic concepts like Bounded Rationality, Effectuation, or the Garbage Can Model seem entirely devoid of physical movement. Yet, truly understanding a concept is not about memorizing preconditions and causal logic; it is about recalling the actual, lived cases the concept represents. Academic concepts come alive as meaning when perceived as narrative events.

For instance, Bounded Rationality reminds practitioners of Herbert Simon’s joke: “Is it rational to marry someone ‘good enough’ nearby because you can’t perfectly choose a partner?” The Garbage Can Model immediately evokes the memory of a chaotic brainstorming session where an entire room suddenly latched onto a rookie’s accidental comment. Effectuation mirrors the exact psychology of a small business owner improvising recipes based on real-time customer reactions and weekly sales.

Even inside highly compressed concepts, a vital energy flows. Refuting, modifying, and expanding theories is a world of active warfare for scholars. Because they have spent years training their minds to perceive the world through this lens, what looks like a meaningless cluster of nouns to outsiders feels truly alive to them.

Answer 3: Even Mathematics Is Woven With Metaphors of Movementms

Even mathematics, the ultimate domain of logic, is composed of action verb rhythms. In classic texts like Walter Rudin’s Principles of Mathematical Analysis, theorems connect sequentially to form a single narrative. To truly understand a concept like a compact set, you must physically draw an interval on a blackboard and plot distinct points to grasp the subsequent proofs.

Even the mathematical state of compactness is expressed through active transitions: closing, covering, extending, and converging. Concepts like boundaries, neighborhoods, continuity, and discontinuity are all defined through these verbal rhythms. Mathematics is not a static, frozen language; it is a system built on metaphors of physical movement.

(2) Why Do Boring Artworks Keep Coming Out?

Today, boring literature and slow movies still regularly win prestigious awards, while highly engaging content is often dismissed as merely commercial. If this imbalance has ever frustrated you, the explanation lies in how cultural elites view boredom.

Historically, artistic circles have treated boredom as a catalyst for self-consciousness and existential awakening. The underlying logic suggests that when a person is stripped of an interesting narrative and disconnected from the immediate world, they are forced to confront foundational questions: Where am I? Who am I? What am I doing? In this view, living in temporary meaninglessness is what forces a human to seek true meaning.

Readers who enjoy slow, descriptive books see time and space collapse, finding a specific comfort when beautiful sentences linger over fragmented details. They feel a sense of sophisticated admiration because the text mirrors the modern fatigue, ennui, and emptiness of their own daily lives.

Category	Enjoyable Books (Narrative/Entertaining)	Boring Books (Stream-of-consciousness, Descriptive)
Affective Structure	Tension → Release → Pleasure	Numbness → Reflection → Awakening
Source of Pleasure	Story progression	Sense of existence
Mode of Immersion	Along the flow of time	Within time’s suspension
Expression	Rhythm of action verbs	Piling of state verbs
View of Boredom	Failure to immerse in the world	Catalyst for existential awakening

The Illusion of Solipsistic Consciousness

Because the human mind does not always unfold as a neat narrative driven by active verbs, attempting to reveal the sense of existence through a stream of consciousness is a valid artistic choice. It can interpret the inner world richly. However, packaging this boredom as something inherently profound or superior is an illusion born out of physical comfort. It is a symptom of a body that is simply too safe.

The challenge to find transcendental meaning through ennui looks noble when compared to the sweaty, physical survival of connecting to a frontline life-world. But in reality, an overreliance on stream-of-consciousness writing is often just an attempt by an alienated individual to construct a solipsistic world using their own isolated language.

In the actual life-world we are thrown into, there are established codes left by those who came before us. When you actively connect to the world, master those practical codes, and move your body to survive, there is simply no time for boredom. A life spent sitting idly at a desk, indulging in detachment, and believing that contemplating your own modern fatigue leads to higher awareness is ultimately hollow.

People working on the front lines never have such concerns. To suffer from existential boredom is a self-confession that one is not living intensely.

The Ghost of Intellectualism

Consider a narrative like Night Train to Lisbon. The protagonist hovers around the local world of Lisbon like a permanent outsider, contemplating his own consciousness through the compiled memories and thoughts of another character. This structure presupposes the existence of a separate, detached self that sits back to observe the consciousness unfolding in the physical world.

Here, we see the ghost of classic intellectualism—the flawed assumption that an a priori, transcendental self exists independently to make experience possible. Maurice Merleau-Ponty denied the existence of this detached consciousness. When we treat abstract linguistic constructs like a transcendental self as real entities, we separate humans from the rough, earthy reality of the world, leaving the mind impoverished.

Intellectualism worships this universal, detached perspective, combining it with logical, rational, and reductionist causal thoughts. In doing so, it crushes the individual value and raw pain hidden within the irrational moments of human life, blinding us to the true phenomenon of existence where humans and the world are inextricably entangled.

If a character like the one in Night Train to Lisbon existed in the real world, he would belong to neither his original home nor his new environment. He would fall directly into a swamp of ennui, searching for an observant self separated from his body. In actual life, the experiencing self and the experienced world are already woven into one. There is no room for a separate soul to sit back and observe from a distance.

Reclaiming the Meaning of Being Alive

True life is found in concrete engagement:

A baby learning the properties of the world by touching and molding raw clay.
A chef slicing ingredients with focus to prepare a meal.
Scholars fiercely debating a concept they treat as an war zone.

For any being thrown into these physical loops, boredom cannot exist. Boredom is merely a byproduct of consciousness created in a state of deliberate disconnection from the world. Therefore, the existence in ennui praised by cultural intellectuals is simply the portrait of a stranger who cannot survive in the real world. That they lived such lives is an existential tragedy, but it does not elevate them to a profound status. Feeling chronic boredom simply means you are functioning as an unconnected observer—an outsider who is not actively hustling for survival.

This mode of thinking is destined to loop endlessly: being unable to live in the world leads to overthinking, and overthinking makes it even harder to live. The only way out of this trap is to stop endlessly analyzing the self, step into the real world, experience a narrative driven by active verbs, and engage in physical action. Meaning is found in tactile communion with the ordinary people who are grinding hard right now. The exact moment we touch, smell, and collide with the physical world again, we reclaim the true meaning of being alive.

Existences Compared

Category	Linguistic Existence	Embodied Existence
Essence	Self-consciousness	Communion with the world
Mode	Observation · Analysis	Participation · Immersion
Sense of Time	Ennui & repetition	Rhythm & cycle
Way of Being	Hallucinatory, non-active	Tactile, alive

6. A Reflective Guide for Content Creators

The only way to avoid boredom is to reopen the connection to World, Rhythm, and Body. Every creator must ultimately return to one question: “How alive am I?”

Here are three guidelines for that penance.

(1) Accessibility to the World – Stop Talking to Yourself

Content that mutters to itself inside its own world, like abstract modern art, is boring. The audience asks: “What does this have to do with my life?” Content is not a diary for self-organization; it is a Bridge into Another’s World. Meaning is completed not in the speaker’s mouth, but in the listener’s world.

Don’t explain concepts with language or numbers. Show a situation they can feel. Create an entrance where the reader can walk into your world. I admit it. When writing, I sometimes drowned in organizing my theories, pushing abstract terms and concepts to the front. Especially in the Toyota Pub series, I tried to measure the sentence Dishes requiring many hand movements are hard to cook in parallel with a concept like “Parallel Production Index.“ Thinking about it now, it is utterly embarrassing.

(2) Verb Rhythm – Move the Thought

Listing abstract concepts without connecting narratives via action verbs is a sedative. Novels or videos using the “Stream of Consciousness” technique—contemplating the thinking self, the feeling self—usually fall into this trap. It is so descriptive, fragmented, and peripheral that it simply fails to connect into a cohesive narrative. Not being boring means thought is constructed into a narrative by Verbs. Don’t say “I felt this.” Say “I did this.”

Create short, strong rhythms. You might doze off reading Nietzsche’s thick, difficult books. But: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Short, intense aphorisms driven by verbs hit home. I always place Hip-Hop Aphorisms at the end of my articles. I try to use them as a rhythm to drag the reader into action.

(3) Physical Intervention – Make the Fingers Move

Content with no hole for the reader to participate is boring. It is no different from a sightseeing bus tour around Seoul. Passive and distant. Boredom arises from the inability to manipulate. Humans immerse when they participate; they feel meaning when their hands move.

You need possibilities for manipulation: Rewind, Comment, Chat, Share Memes. At the very least, induce a light action like “Try this.” Through this, the reader enters the creator’s world. Since I run a blog, the areas for creating physical meaning are limited. That’s why I try to be proactive in responding to emails and comments.

7. Conclusion

The three nerves that wake boredom are World, Rhythm, and Body. When these three are alive simultaneously, the content is Alive.

World: I am inside the world.
Narrative: Events flow with verb rhythm.
Body: I can physically intervene.

To not be boring is the act of reviving the sensation of living in the world.

The antidote to boredom is not more stimulation; it is more existence.

8. Next up

The Phenomenology of Boredom:A Practical Analysis of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” for Content Creators

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1. Why Can’t Humans Endure Boredom?