Why nothing feels interesting anymore (and a two-week test)

October 10, 2026

It is 11:40 at night. You are in bed, the phone a hand's width from your face. A clip starts, and four seconds in your thumb has already moved on. The series you loved last spring sits paused at episode three. Nothing is wrong with any of it. It just does not land. So what changed: the world, or the thing you measure it with?

What the survey recorded

Monitoring the Future hands eighth, tenth and twelfth graders the same plain line every year: "I am often bored." Weybright, Schulenberg and Caldwell (2020) pulled the answers from 2008 to 2017, 106,784 students in all. Boredom rose across and within grades, with girls generally showing larger increases than boys. It fell from 2008 to 2010, then rose significantly from 2010 to 2017: about 1.6% a year for boys and 1.7% for girls, according to the university's release on the study.

The study did not test a cause. The researchers note, as context, that digital media use doubled for twelfth graders between 2006 and 2012.

A contrast effect, measured in 1978

Why would more make things duller? An old study points at one answer. Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman (1978) compared 22 major lottery winners with 22 controls. The winners were not happier than the controls and took significantly less pleasure from a series of mundane events, such as watching television, buying clothes or talking with a friend. The authors' term was contrast: next to the peak of winning, ordinary pleasures look smaller.

It is one small study, so hold it loosely.

What happened when people could skip

Tam and Inzlicht (2024), at the University of Toronto, published seven experiments with 1,223 people in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. In one, students first predicted that being able to switch between videos would make them less bored. Then each person tried it both ways: one ten-minute video, start to finish, and seven five-minute videos they could jump between whenever they liked. When they could skip, they were more bored. In that test, they also rated the time as less satisfying and less meaningful. In a later YouTube experiment only the boredom result held; satisfaction and meaningfulness showed no difference.

The authors' own reading is that switching disturbs attention and cuts immersion. Ours goes a step further, and it is a reading, not a measurement: every skip is a small contrast, the next clip has to beat the last one, and the bar keeps rising.

Who set the bar

For about 300,000 years, since Homo sapiens appeared in Africa (Smithsonian Human Origins), a human day set its own bar. New things arrived slowly: a track in the mud, a change in the weather, a stranger at the edge of camp, an old story told again by the fire. The measuring stick was made of ordinary days, so ordinary things still registered. Now the stick can be set by the best clips millions of people made this week, served one after another. If that is right, nothing feels interesting for a plain reason, and the reason is not a defect in you. That part is not something any study tested.

The two-week test

Castelo and colleagues (2025, PNAS Nexus) recruited 467 adults in the United States and Canada and asked them to block mobile internet on their phones for two weeks. Calls and texts still worked, and so did computers. Average daily screen time fell from 314 minutes to 161. Of the 313 people who completed all three surveys, 90.7% improved on at least one of three measures: well-being, mental health or sustained attention. The attention gain was about the size of ten years of age-related decline.

The caveats are real. Only 119 people, 25.5% of those who committed, kept the block on for at least 10 of the 14 days. Participants were paid. And the outcome list did not include boredom: the paper never uses the word.

What the evidence supports

1. Boredom rose in a large teen survey after 2010. It did not test why.
2. Being able to skip made people more bored in the lab. Each person tried both ways, one ten-minute video against seven they could jump between.
3. Turning off phone internet for two weeks improved well-being, mental health or attention for most who finished. Most dropped out of full compliance, and nobody measured boredom.
4. Beyond the evidence: leave one thing to run to the end without the skip, and see what happens to your own bar. That is a reasonable guess from the above, and it was not tested.

Sources

1. Weybright, Schulenberg and Caldwell (2020), Monitoring the Future boredom trends, Journal of Adolescent Health. Europe PMC · WSU release
2. Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman (1978), Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative?, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Europe PMC
3. Tam and Inzlicht (2024), Fast-forward to boredom: How switching behavior on digital media makes people more bored, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Crossref · BPS Research Digest · PsyPost
4. Smithsonian Human Origins, Homo sapiens. page
5. Castelo et al. (2025), blocking mobile internet for two weeks, PNAS Nexus. paper

This article reports what these studies measured. It is not medical advice. If low interest or low mood is weighing on you, talk to a doctor or a counsellor.

Film version, with the sources on screen: Why Nothing Feels Interesting Anymore (4:29).