 Have you ever been so bored that you just cannot work? You can't seem to get anything done because it's just so boring that it becomes painful and it becomes impossible to choose to continue doing the boring work without some kind of stimulation? Then anybody who's had any kind of addiction can understand that just that feeling of boredom and emptiness and it's just unbearable to not be stimulated and it could be a drug addiction or it could be playing video games or it could be just something as simple as looking at your phone and getting those little ping notifications that give you that little zap of excitement. Ooh, someone's thinking about me. Ooh, there's something novel that is popping up. Stimulation. We have this need for it. So to run away from boredom and to avoid this kind of empty feeling, we look for more stimulation. We look for anything that can give us that hit of excitement. As we do this more, then we need it even more. It becomes even harder to get that stimulation. The feeling without it feels even more empty. So that's when addictions escalate and we have to do them more and do more intense things in order to get that hit of feeling and stay away from that unbearable boredom that is outside it. But of course, we are not able to just feel endless stimulation. It just seems like the way we work as animals, as beings is that we are always seeking a level. So if we are constantly stimulated, then that becomes the new level. That becomes the new standard and we don't even feel it anymore. And then anything that is less stimulating than that level feels even more boring. So the things that were boring that we were trying to run away from by getting excitement, now they become even more boring, even less tolerable. And we have to run further away from anything boring and further into excitement and stimulation, just to keep ourselves even. And this seems to be at the heart of any addiction, whether drugs to technology to whatever. So by filling ourselves with stimulation, we are raising the threshold or raising the baseline of what we consider to be an ordinary level of stimulation. And yet if we're going to do meaningful work, do difficult work, take steps to improve our lives, live better lives, change things, make valuable things and do good. It seems like there's no way to do that without going into sometimes being bored, sometimes being very bored, being able to do things that are difficult, uncomfortable, unstimulating, unsatisfying in the moment. And they only become satisfying later, a long time later sometimes after we're able to make useful work out of them. But when you're accustomed to the excitement of a flashing video game or a scrolling social media feed, it's so difficult to put that aside and really focus on even just doing an hour of work where you get no rewards. There's no blinking lights telling you you've achieved anything. There's no pinging notification from your friends with some kind of message. There's no stimulation. It's simply you and your work and the boredom is unbearable. I imagine we've all been in this situation and anybody who hasn't has just been extremely lucky of being able to work on something that naturally they find very stimulating, but this seems like a very rare thing to have that all the time. In almost any case, even if you're working on something that you're passionate about, you still have to do hard, boring work for parts of it as part of doing what you love. So we have this baseline stimulation level and then we have the level of boring work, the stimulation level. If it's below our baseline, then it's going to feel painfully boring. So I see two ways to adjust the situation. We can either lower our threshold of stimulation or we can raise the stimulation level of the boring work that we have to do and choose to do. So our stimulation level, our baseline level is conditioned in us by everything that we do. So if we're accustomed to feeding ourselves with our addiction, with our stimulation, then we're going to have a high level of baseline stimulation. So it seems like the only way to bring that down is the painful, uncomfortable, long, boring process of removing the stimulation, stepping away, either reducing or taking breaks from or quitting entirely, the things that give us excitement and stimulation without adding any useful benefit to our lives. Things that keep us excited and happy in the moment. If you can use the word happy for some kind of a stimulation, we're entertained, we're occupied in the moment, we're unbored for a moment, but things that take away from our ability to actually make better lives. All these habits that accustom us to the high baseline stimulation, that's the slow process of training ourselves off them. If we do less of them, then we can become used to having a lower level of stimulation as our baseline. Although it really sucks to lose all that great stimulation that we're filling our lives with, the trade-off is that we can actually become more capable of doing anything else. Anything else in the world other than the addiction becomes easier as we have this lower base stimulation level. I mean, you just imagine the extreme of it like being high on drugs while playing an exciting video game and a social media feed buzzing at you and maybe throw on some TV shows, some videos, full sensory overload, hyper stimulation coming at you all day. Imagine then it's time for you to do some boring work, it would be so difficult to pull yourself away from that. But taking away those stimuli one after another, cutting down, if you imagine the opposite extreme, sitting in an empty room and there's nothing there. Maybe you could have nice sun shining through the window and just an empty room. Now, in this completely unstimulating environment, the thought of doing some kind of boring work, it's a little bit more tolerable. So the extreme activity in this direction is meditation. Meditation, you have this state of no stimulation. I find one of the most valuable things about meditation is simply to remove all stimulation for a few minutes, have nothing new coming in and just let that be a break from any new stimulation in my mind. So as you lower this baseline, now wherever your boring work is, it's a little bit closer to that baseline. Maybe it can even rise above that baseline so that it doesn't feel quite as boring. I guess the sad way to say it is like, you know, your life overall becomes so boring that boring work is no longer so boring, which when you put it like that, does sound kind of sad. And yet it does result in being able to do boring work, which then leads to a whole suite of good things possible in life. In complimenting that, the other way to change the situation is to raise the stimulation level of the work itself. Boring work feels meaningless, feels like wasting time, and you just can't wait for it to be over. If we can connect the work with something that matters to us, make it feel like doing this so-called boring work is actually part of this great project that we really care about, really want to do, then it's no longer quite as boring and painful to do because now it is connected to this game of life, to this thing that we actually want to do. And then even if the activity itself is still boring, it is connected to something that we actually care about. The classic example of a boring activity would be filing taxes, doing your accounting. Okay, it's hard to make this an exciting activity. Imagine comparing this to partying, playing a video game, you know, you can't compare the excitement level. Tax party, no. But it seems like it's possible to see doing our taxes, doing this kind of basic maintenance. It's part of organizing ourselves, organizing our business, our personal lives, all that as part of the project of living a good life. We want to keep these finances in order, keep our business and personal life in order so that we can accomplish what we want to accomplish in life. Still doesn't make doing taxes an exciting thing, but somehow it's less completely mind-numbingly boring if we can connect it to the larger, meaningful goal that's part of. So by lowering our baseline of excitement and trying to drop in a little bit of excitement into boring tasks, we can pull those boring tasks above the baseline to the point where we can actually stand doing them, where they're not so painfully boring. And once we can start to do these boring tasks, then the machine starts rolling, the ball starts rolling, we start to be able to do useful things out of that boring work. And then almost sneaking in out of nowhere just seems like life starts to get better as we start to build in better things.