I recently came across a video titled “Everyone is losing interest in EVERYTHING.” It had attracted tens of thousands of views and more than a thousand comments in only a few days, but what caught my attention wasn't really the video itself. It was the comments underneath it.
People were describing boredom, exhaustion, disconnection and a strange loss of enthusiasm for things they once enjoyed. Some blamed work, the cost of living or social media. Others blamed governments, corporations or technology, while many looked nostalgically back at the 1980s and 1990s. The explanations varied considerably, but underneath them was a surprisingly consistent feeling: life doesn't seem to feel as rewarding as it used to.
Perhaps we're not bored
There is something contradictory about describing modern life as boring because we live in an extraordinarily stimulating environment. Before we've even started work, many of us may have checked messages, email, news, social media and notifications. Then come meetings, messages, emails, tasks, alerts, breaking news, advertisements, videos and an almost endless supply of content competing for our attention.
We rarely have nothing demanding our attention, yet people are still describing boredom and disengagement. Perhaps, then, what we're experiencing isn't simply a lack of stimulation. It could be too much stimulation combined with too little meaning.
Our attention is constantly being divided
Modern digital environments don't simply provide us with information. They continually compete for our attention. A notification appears while we're concentrating, an email arrives while we're completing another task, someone sends a message during a meeting, or we instinctively reach for our phone while watching television.
Each interruption may appear insignificant, but we still have to recognise it, decide whether it matters, process whatever information it contains and then return to what we were doing before. Research on task-switching shows that moving between tasks has costs. When it happens repeatedly throughout the day, the effort can accumulate. Increasingly, it doesn't necessarily stop when the working day finishes because the same devices and services follow us home.
More choice hasn't necessarily meant more control
Technology has given us extraordinary capabilities and access to choices previous generations could barely have imagined. But those choices also create hundreds of small decisions. Which subscription do we need? Which application should we use? Which notification matters? Which message requires an answer? Which option should we select? Which information should we trust?
Choice can create autonomy, but an endless stream of choices can also create cognitive burden. At the same time, some of the largest things affecting people's lives, such as housing, employment, economic uncertainty, technological change, politics and world events, can feel increasingly outside their personal control. We can therefore find ourselves constantly making decisions about relatively insignificant things while feeling we have surprisingly little influence over the things that matter most.
What happens when we step away?
One of the comments underneath the video particularly interested me. The person described becoming burned out with technology, people and social media, so they had started returning to childhood activities such as fishing, riding a bicycle and making good coffee. They said these things felt more meaningful.
Think about what activities like these have in common. They tend to be slower, have natural boundaries and involve relatively little unnecessary information processing. There are fewer interruptions, progress is visible and, importantly, the individual has much greater control over the experience. Perhaps this helps explain why activities such as walking, gardening, cooking, fishing, reading, exercise and making things can feel restorative. They aren't necessarily more exciting than our digital lives. They may simply demand our attention in a healthier and more manageable way.
What cognitive burnout means for accessibility
We often discuss cognitive accessibility in relation to people with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, anxiety, brain injuries, age-related cognitive changes and other neurological differences. These groups may experience cognitive overload more frequently or intensely, but cognitive capacity isn't unlimited for anyone.
Complexity accumulates. Interruptions accumulate. Decisions accumulate. Uncertainty accumulates. Eventually an environment can demand more cognitive capacity than a person has available at that particular moment. When this happens, we shouldn't automatically assume the individual lacks motivation, resilience or interest. Sometimes the environment is simply asking too much of them.
This is an important distinction because accessibility isn't always about adding something. Sometimes the most accessible intervention is removing unnecessary complexity, reducing decisions, creating predictable experiences, allowing people enough time to process information and making it obvious what matters. W3C cognitive accessibility guidance likewise recommends limiting distractions and interruptions so people can maintain focus.
Maybe people haven't lost interest in life
Perhaps some people haven't lost interest in life at all. They may simply be exhausted by the version of life we've constructed around them: constant connectivity, constant information, constant interruption, constant decisions and constant stimulation, with surprisingly few opportunities to simply exist without something demanding their attention.
If that's the case, the answer probably isn't another productivity application, another notification or another piece of content designed to capture our attention. Better environments might instead give people opportunities to concentrate, complete one thing before demanding another, understand what is expected of them and retain a meaningful sense of control.
Because perhaps people aren't losing interest in everything.
Perhaps we're discovering the cognitive limits of trying to process everything, all of the time.