If technology was supposed to kill boredom, it is doing a bad job. People today have near-constant access to entertainment, messaging, and on-demand information, yet self-reported boredom has gone up, not down, over the last decade (Tam, 2024). A recent perspective in Nature Human Behaviour argues that digital media does not just relieve boredom. It also raises our “desired level of engagement” so that ordinary, unstructured life feels more empty by comparison (Tam, 2024).

There was a time when staring at a blank Word document was just part of life. You opened the file, hated every sentence you wrote, rewrote it anyway, and somewhere between the third bad draft and the final one you learned something about the work and about yourself. Today, that same moment feels optional. If you are a student, you can paste the question into a chatbot and get a “good enough” draft in a few seconds. If you are early in your career, you can outsource the

Most people are being pushed to “try” AI products long before anyone explains why they should trust them. The result is predictable. Tools that are meant for convenience end up in workflows where they are making, or heavily shaping, decisions about grades, hiring, money, health, or access to services. The problem that the bar for using AI currently is “it looks smart and the demo is fun.” That is fine when you are turning a selfie into an ghibli character. It is much less fin