Why Everyone Is Bored - and Nothing Is Remembered

What people are doing differently

People aren’t disengaging from media. They’re disengaging from manufactured relevance. The behaviour shift isn’t that audiences have stopped watching, scrolling, or consuming, it’s that they’ve stopped registering. Vast amounts of content pass through our field of vision without ever landing cognitively. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s contextless.

“What began as a dream of liberation turned into a way of avoiding reality.” Adam Curtis on technology, Hypernormalization 2016

What we’re seeing now is a quiet filtering instinct. People are skipping anything that feels pre-planned, over-produced, or culturally synthetic. Content that looks like it was made to perform is processed differently than content that feels like it simply exists. The former is tolerated. The latter is remembered.

Our memory doesn’t archive pixels. It archives meaning. And meaning only forms when something connects to lived experience, timing, or cultural reality.

Why that behaviour is changing

We’re deep into an era of media overconsumption, but the real issue isn’t volume, it’s, in my opinion, homogeneity. Algorithms have optimised distribution, but they’ve also flattened expression. As feeds become more predictive, they also become more forgettable.

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” - Jean Baudrillard

At the same time, AI has accelerated content creation to a point where intention is no longer a differentiator. When everything can be generated, polished, and deployed instantly, people become highly sensitive to what feels earned versus what feels assembled.

This is why real-world moments, events, cultural collisions, unscripted appearances, cut through so effectively. Not because they’re louder, but because they carry inherent context. They don’t ask for attention. They arrive with it.

What advertisers misunderstand about this shift

The mistake isn’t that brands are using creators, culture, or AI. It’s that they’re treating all three as outputs instead of environments. Cultural relevance can’t be manufactured in isolation and then placed into a feed. It has to emerge from something that already matters to people.

Many campaigns still optimise for visibility when the real constraint is memorability. They chase aesthetics, formats, and trends while ignoring the cognitive reality: people only retain what aligns with how they already interpret the world.

Intentionality isn’t the problem. Disconnection is. Content fails when it feels like a performance rather than a byproduct of participation.

What actually matters now

The next advantage in advertising won’t come from producing more content or even better content. It will come from understanding where meaning is actually formed.

That means shifting focus from assets to situations. From messages to moments. From reach to resonance. Brands that embed themselves into real cultural circuits, sport, music, community, physical experience, don’t need to explain relevance. It’s already there.

In a landscape saturated with engineered output, reality becomes the most efficient signal. Not because it’s raw, but because it’s recognizable.

The work now is not to make content people see, but to make meaning people keep. And that requires respecting how humans actually notice, remember, and decide, not how platforms report performance.