Street protests appear furious. Social media timelines overflow with rage. Television talk shows speak in grave tones about national collapse, democracy under threat, and enemies within.
Yet step into an office cafeteria, a university common room, or a roadside tea stall and the mood feels different. People scroll through outrage the same way they scroll through cricket clips, viral jokes or celebrity scandals – with detached curiosity. We have confused the display of conviction with conviction itself. What looks like deep polarisation is often something far more ordinary. It is boredom seeking stimulation.
In Pakistan, boredom does not come from comfort or excess. It comes from stagnation. From the sense that effort no longer connects to outcome, that institutions do not reward patience, and that tomorrow will look uncomfortably like today. Work feels repetitive and insecure. Education promises mobility but delivers frustration. Public life feels frozen between crisis and deja vu. When meaning disappears, emotion takes its place. Anger becomes attractive not because it solves anything, but because it makes life feel momentarily intense.
Digital platforms have learned to exploit this perfectly. Content does not spread because it is careful or accurate. It spreads because it provokes. A balanced argument is ignored. A dramatic accusation travels fast. Algorithms reward whatever keeps people engaged, and engagement in a bored society means outrage. The system is not designed to radicalise ideology. It is designed to relieve monotony. In that process, exaggeration outperforms explnation every time.
This helps explain a common paradox. Extreme positions dominate online spaces, yet most people, when spoken to privately, express mixed and often moderate views. Nuance demands effort. It requires attention, patience and the ability to sit with uncertainty. Boredom resists all three. Extremes offer clarity without complexity and emotion without responsibility. They are easier to adopt and easier to abandon. Most outrage is not belief hardened into ideology. It is a performance sustained for as long as it remains entertaining.
The loudest voices are rarely the most committed. They are often the most restless. Political passions flare and fade with remarkable speed. Yesterday’s existential threat becomes today’s forgotten trend. Causes rotate quickly, not because problems are resolved, but because attention moves on. What appears to be deep engagement is frequently just participation in a content cycle where politics functions as another genre of consumption.
Political actors and media institutions have adapted accordingly. Calm explanations do not travel far, accusations do. Measured language does not trend, confrontation does. A politician who speaks carefully is ignored. One who speaks angrily dominates the screen. Media outlets, under commercial pressure, have shifted from informing audiences to stimulating them. Outrage is cheaper to produce and more reliable in generating attention. The system rewards those who can momentarily distract people from boredom, not those who can address underlying problems.
This produces a peculiar kind of political participation. Bored citizens are easy to mobilise for symbolic action. They will flood comment sections, attend rallies and amplify slogans. But they are difficult to organise for sustained civic work. Coalition building is slow. Policy discussion is tedious. Institutional reform lacks drama. The same people who argue passionately online often struggle to explain how governance actually functions. They are not deeply engaged citizens. They are spectators seeking stimulation.
The consequences reach beyond politics into institutions themselves. Democratic systems depend on patience, compromise and incremental change. They assume citizens can tolerate slow processes and delayed rewards. Boredom undermines all of this. It demands immediacy, clear villains and simple narratives. When political life becomes entertainment, institutions designed for deliberation feel ineffective or irrelevant. Trust erodes not only because institutions fail, but because they cannot perform at the speed boredom demands.
Outrage cycles now turn with extraordinary speed. Scandals erupt, dominate attention, and vanish within days. This does not signal resolution. It signals fatigue. Accountability requires sustained attention beyond the initial surge of emotion. Boredom makes such attention rare. Problems remain unresolved, but the audience has already moved on.
This pattern is not uniquely Pakistani. It appears across societies with different histories, cultures and levels of development. What unites them is not ideology, but a shared condition of modern life. Constant connectivity combined with social isolation. Endless information paired with diminishing meaning. Material struggle mixed with existential exhaustion. What we label as polarisation may be a coping mechanism for this condition. Conflict becomes a way to feel alive. People do not necessarily hate each other more than before. They are trying to escape indifference. The opposite of care is not disagreement, it is apathy – and apathy is unbearable.
Democracy, however, was not designed for bored citizens. It assumed engagement rooted in understanding, not stimulation. It did not anticipate a public that treats politics like a feed to scroll through while waiting for something better. When boredom becomes the dominant civic emotion, institutions built for thinking appear outdated.
We are not witnessing an explosion of conviction. We are witnessing a collapse of attention. The noise is not deep. It is the sound of a society trying to escape monotony through conflict. The real crisis is not disagreement but our inability to care long enough to disagree seriously.
The writer is a journalist specialising in socio-political analysis and historical perspectives.
