Introduction to M0

Consider the statement:

Most people act stupid because they are physically addicted to boredom.

When people hear this, the most common initial reaction is, “don’t be silly, people hate being bored”. Sometimes people also object to the first part and disagree that most people act stupid. That second reaction is far less common. For some reason, we find little to disagree with in the phrase “most people act stupid”.

The idea that people are addicted to boredom sounds absurd, but it is worth holding steady for a moment. Boredom is usually described as the unpleasant sensation that arrives when the mind is unoccupied. Repetitive and predictable activity is supposed to be boring, while novelty and unpredictability are supposed to be exciting.

Yet much everyday behavior does not fit that neat story. We even have a phrase for it. We are creatures of habit. Many people get up at the same time, repeat the same morning sequence, travel the same route, do the same kinds of tasks, and unwind with the same familiar entertainment.

There is something deeply comforting about routines and rituals. Most people do not like their daily pattern being disturbed. If something genuinely unexpected comes up at work, it rarely “makes the day”. It more often ruins it. You do not often hear someone say, “I had to deal with a novel situation at work today, which was nice.”

This sits awkwardly beside the claim that people dislike boredom. One thing many people truly dislike is sitting around doing nothing at all. That produces the uncomfortable feeling they label as boredom. But give the same person a repetitive task that absorbs attention without demanding thought, and they can be oddly content. Not necessarily happy, but not distressed either. Think of mindless games, passive scrolling, background television, or repetitive workplace tasks.

So what is it about doing nothing that feels so unpleasant?

One answer is that doing nothing forces a kind of contact with the mind that modern life trains people to avoid. Our brains are not designed for total inactivity. In everyday life, routines keep the mind ticking over. And for many people, work does not demand deep thought very often. Even highly trained professionals are frequently presented with situations they recognize, where the response is a learned procedure. Occasionally there is improvisation or a combination of techniques, but the demand for genuine invention or fundamental new insight is rare.

Doing nothing becomes uncomfortable because contemplation is unfamiliar. The mind is not “busy” in the approved way, so it begins to wander into questions, uncertainty, and open-ended thought. Many people experience that as agitation rather than freedom.

We are trained into routine early. School requires sitting still, following instructions, completing exercises, doing homework, and learning by repetition. This is where people learn the habit of habits. The trouble is that a predictable, repetitive lifestyle is not what the human brain was originally optimized for. Humans are adaptable, but adaptability does not automatically mean the new condition is healthy.

A major shift in human society occurred when we moved from hunter-gathering to farming. The two ways of life reward different mental patterns. A hunter must stay aware of the environment, quickly noticing threats and opportunities. Attention needs to switch fast. The hunter must be ready to drop one activity and begin another, immediately. Novelty, monitoring, and creative response are direct survival advantages.

Farming rewards something else. The farmer must apply steady effort with delayed feedback. Crops do not respond today. They respond months later. That requires tolerance for waiting, and the ability to continue without immediate reward.

One hypothesis is that humans learned to cope with this by leaning harder on dopamine. Dopamine can make waiting tolerable. It can stabilize attention and reduce the distress of delayed payoff. In modern life, many situations resemble waiting. Meetings, queues, commutes, forms, approvals, process gates, long projects, and slow institutional cycles. It is not crazy to say that much of daily life is structured as “wait until later”.

But if higher dopamine becomes the default, it may come with a cost. High dopamine can impair creative thinking and reduce sensitivity to novelty. Worse, it can become self-reinforcing. Addictive drugs, almost by definition, act on dopamine systems. If routine becomes the delivery mechanism for a dopamine “calm”, then disruption of routine can trigger the same resentment you see when an addiction is interrupted.

This would explain something familiar. People often react strongly to routine disturbance. The more ritual-dependent a person becomes, the more irritated they can be when the script is broken. In extreme cases, people become angry when presented with a genuinely novel idea. They ridicule the person presenting it, but do not engage with what is being said. The point is not refuted. It is rejected.

When this pattern spreads through groups, it becomes structural. Workplaces can drift into spirals of paperwork and procedure. Everyone recognizes the phenomenon. Bureaucracies are a classic example. Common sense is pushed aside. Procedures are added but rarely removed. Organizations become resistant to change, even when the change would clearly reduce cost and friction.

Under this model, that resistance is not mysterious. Removing procedure would feel like taking away the very thing that stabilizes the people inside the system. Introducing novelty would feel like introducing threat. The resentment aimed at reformers begins to look less like reasoned disagreement and more like the response of an addict being denied the familiar ritual that keeps discomfort at bay.

This is part of the Reciprocality Project