Drama Seeking

A maladapted way of dealing with boredom with catastrophic consequences for relationships and civilizations

We humans often say we want peace, prosperity, and harmony, but during protracted periods of everything going well, we have a tendency to grow bored and seek drama.

In one of his dreary essays on pessimism and the vanity of life, Schopenhauer remarked something like the following:

Imagine a world of harmony, plenty, and abundant health—a world in which delicious, already cooked dishes are always at hand, and in which all men and women easily find and keep their ideal partners. In such a world, we would soon grow so bored that we would hang ourselves.

The reason for this is that humans evolved in harsh conditions of scarcity and insecurity, in which both sexes had to labor all day in order to survive. We are not built for living in conditions of abundance and leisure, and we quickly grow restless and bored in such conditions. This is why rich people are often bored and unhappy.

It seems to me that this observation explains the terrible habit of drama seeking. Underlying drama seeking is the boredom that arises from an excess of comfort. We’re all guilty of this tendency, hence our addiction to stories of high drama and conflict that produce outrage. Unless one is careful, one may become addicted to drama and outrage.

A plausible way to overcome drama seeking lies in the old stoic habit of being far harder on oneself than on others. Whenever you find yourself indulging in negative emotions and feelings of outrage about the conduct of others, go do a difficult task that you don’t want to do, or make some sort of sacrifice. To put it in more dramatic terms, don’t make war on others, make war on yourself—your own weaknesses and vices.

The easiest practical way to do this—especially for the young—is through difficult physical training, which mimics the conditions in which we evolved of running around and slaying wild beasts and training for combat in the event it came to blows with a competing tribe.

In the American political context, the least drama seeking president in history was probably Calvin Coolidge, who grew up in austere conditions in rural Vermont. His mother died when he was 12 and his sister died when he was 18. From his upbringing and temperament, Coolidge developed habits of focusing on the development of his character instead of outward expressions of wealth and attainments. While president, he famously shunned needless drama and conflict and maintained a strict habit of saying as little as possible.

My favorite Coolidge story is of a party in New York when a New York Times reporter approached him and said, “I’ve got a bet that you won’t say two words tonight!”

“You lose,” he replied.

Nowadays we could learn a lot from the example “Closed-Mouthed Cal.”