Why we are bored of boring titles like this
And what it says about our human condition
We’ve all become characters in a peculiar drama: the desperate race against boredom.
The proliferation of clickbait headlines, particularly visible on platforms like Medium, isn’t merely a marketing strategy gone wrong — it’s a mirror reflecting our collective inability to sit with ourselves in the quiet moments of life.
Consider the modern Medium article: “This Morning Routine Will Change Your Life Forever” or “5 Secrets Successful People Never Tell You.” These titles, dripping with false promises and manufactured urgency, have become our daily bread.
But why do we keep falling for them?
The answer lies not in the cleverness of content creators but in our own mounting intolerance for the unexceptional.
The ubiquity of clickbait reveals a profound paradox of our time: despite having unprecedented access to entertainment and information, we’ve never been more susceptible to boredom.
We fidget through thirty-second intervals at traffic lights, mindlessly refresh our feeds while waiting for coffee to brew, and treat any momentary pause in stimulation as an existential crisis requiring immediate resolution.
This contemporary condition — what I might call “hyper-boredom” — manifests in our increasingly fractured attention spans. The mundane moments that once offered space for reflection or simple presence have been reframed as productivity gaps to be filled. Waiting for a plane no longer involves watching people pass by or engaging in conversation with fellow travelers; instead, it becomes an endurance test of endless content consumption.
The irony is striking: in our attempt to escape boredom, we’ve created a self-perpetuating cycle of shallow engagement.
Each clickbait article promises depth but delivers superficiality, leaving us more hollow than before. Yet we continue clicking, hoping the next headline will finally deliver the satisfaction we seek.
It’s as if we’re trying to quench thirst with salt water — each sip only intensifying our desperation.
This compulsive content consumption speaks to a deeper discomfort with stillness. In previous generations, boredom might have been the fertile ground from which creativity or contemplation could grow.
Today, we’ve pathologized these empty spaces, treating them as problems to be solved rather than natural rhythms of human experience.
Perhaps most telling is how this aversion to boredom has transformed our relationship with knowledge itself. The clickbait economy doesn’t just mislead — it fundamentally reshapes our expectations of information. We increasingly demand that knowledge be packaged in easily digestible, emotionally charged fragments, preferably with a surprising twist at the end. This preference for intellectual fast food over sustained engagement mirrors our broader cultural shift toward instant gratification.
Mark Fisher in his canonical book, Capitalism Realism talks about a condition in young people (now almost everyone) called depressive hedonia, which goes something like:
Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is Usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure.
So maybe we are now totally unable to do anything but to pursue small packets of pleasure. that's why we become so bored of the ordinary types of titles.
The solution isn’t to denounce digital media entirely but to recognize our complicity in this ecosystem. Every click on a sensational headline, every share of a manipulative title, reinforces the very system that exploits our restlessness.
What if, instead of viewing boredom as an enemy to be vanquished, we recognized it as a natural state that signals our need for meaningful engagement? What if we understood that our susceptibility to clickbait reveals not just media manipulation but our own spiritual hunger for substance in an increasingly superficial world?
