July 2025, 9 Minutes

The Love and Letdown of Beauty

Why We Cherish Art - Until We Don’t

I’m going to talk about a universal truth.

That experience we have all had.

That truth we have all known.

That when we you find a new song, we listen, listen, listen…

Until we don’t

Cause we can’t

It’s too much now. We don’t like it so much anymore. Maybe it even annoys us.

We have reached a point of nauseum.

It’s annoying. I’ve gotten to the point where if I now come across a piece of music that really hits, I actively avoid listening to it too much, lest I never want listen again.

In this way, music becomes a precious thing that if not handled correctly, will break.

This phenomenon bugs me, and honestly made me afraid that I was wearing down my appreciation for art like one would wear down cartilage in a joint - so I went looking for answers.

Is This Athens or Tartarus?

That is to say, is this a result of order or disorder? Can science explain this, or are we at the mercy of tragedy?

Let’s dive in…

At the core of our response to beauty is the brain’s reward system, particularly the neurotransmitter dopamine. When we hear a touching melody, look at a sunset (or, my preference, a sunrise), or watch a film that moves us, dopamine is released in regions of the brain (chiefly the ventral striatum and orbitofrontal cortex), making us feel pleasure and causing emotional engagement. This neurological response reinforces our attraction.

Basically, beauty makes us feel good, so we seek it out.

It is believed that much of what we find beautiful aligns with our brain’s love for patterns, symmetry, and balance (Aristotle and Plato would equally approve, though perhaps for slightly different reasons). Visual art often features compositional harmony, music blends rhythm with tonal predictability, a nice-to-look-at face usually contains a healthy balance of symmetry, “averageness” (not a bad thing despite the name - representing the average of most faces) and sexual dimorphism (classically masculine and feminine features). These elements appeal to our pattern recognition system, a trait developed for evolutionary survival. The detection of order in chaos helped early humans avoid danger and navigate the prehistoric world.

Context plays a key role, too. Our perception of art depends on our emotional state, life experience, and personal meaning. A song might evoke heartbreak during a period of grief or a breakup, but feel irrelevant later. As we age/grow/change/evolve (take your pick), so too does the lens through which we view beauty. What once resonated may no longer fit our emotional narrative.

Moreover, emotional and cognitive fatigue can set in. Consuming too much emotionally intense art - or overanalysing it - can numb our responses. Just like overstimulation in any domain, saturation can lead us to disengage as a form of psychological self-regulation. Our minds need to find a kind of homeostasis at all times, meaning over or under stimulation is psychologically guarded against.

Paradoxically, the fading of beauty’s impact is what keeps art alive. The cycle of infatuation, boredom, and rediscovery compels artists to innovate and audiences to seek fresh interpretations. Remixes, reinterpretations, or simply the passage of time can make old works feel new again.

Yep – I said boredom.

The Evolutionary Necessity of Boredom

Now, now, before you get too excited, let me just preface this by saying if you get bored easily, work on that – this is not your excuse manifesto. Those who bore easily bore others easily – you are super spreaders of the disease you fear.

That throat clearing aside, let’s just get on with it.

Boredom is often dismissed as a nuisance — an unwanted lull in stimulation or productivity. Yet from an evolutionary perspective, boredom may be one of the most vital and adaptive emotions we possess. Far from being a psychological glitch, boredom is a cognitive signal, finely tuned by natural selection to push us toward exploration, learning, and meaningful engagement.

The phenomenon of habituation means that when we are repeatedly exposed to the same stimulus—whether it’s a song, a painting, or a face—our brain gradually reduces its response. That hit of dopamine weakens. The once-stunning becomes ordinary. Neurologically, this is called neural adaptation: neurons fire less with each repetition, dulling the emotional and sensory impact.

This dovetails with our innate drive for novelty. The same dopamine system that rewards us for beauty also motivates exploration. Evolutionarily, new stimuli could signal opportunities—food, mates, knowledge. Thus, while beauty initially excites us, we’re hardwired to move on once familiarity dulls the experience.

Thus, boredom rings the silent alarm. When our current activity no longer offers novelty, reward, or purpose, we begin to feel restless and dissatisfied. This discomfort is not a failure of attention or willpower; it is an evolved mechanism telling us that what we're doing is no longer serving our long-term survival or social development. Just as hunger drives us to seek food, boredom drives us to seek stimulation, novelty, or change.

A good amount of evidence suggests (remember: they use the word suggests for a reason) that early humans needed motivation to seek out new food sources, environments, or social connections when the current ones became stale or inadequate.

In these nascent human societies, this was critical. A hunter-gatherer who stuck to a depleted food source out of habit or comfort might have starved. Boredom would nudge them to move on, to explore new terrain, or to invent new tools. This motivational state helped prevent complacency and encouraged innovation. Boredom likely supported the development of planning, curiosity, and even storytelling — all of which are key to human evolution.

Moreover, boredom plays a role in social dynamics. In a group setting, repetitive or meaningless behaviour can lead to collective stagnation. Individuals prone to boredom may be more likely to challenge norms, initiate change, or seek new alliances. Some scholars argue that boredom has historically catalysed social and cultural revolutions — from the birth of artistic movements to the rise of political dissent.

In the modern world, the landscape of boredom has shifted. With smartphones, endless streaming, and constant notifications, the momentary discomfort of boredom is often immediately suppressed. Yet this suppression may have unintended consequences. Research suggests that people who allow themselves to be bored — who sit with the discomfort rather than avoid it — are more likely to generate creative ideas and solutions. Paradoxically, the attempt to eliminate boredom altogether may be undermining our capacity to innovate.

Moving as seamlessly as possible from the evolutionary to the cognitive, we find ourselves very much in the now.

Neuroscientific research supports the view that boredom is not just a maladaptation. The state of boredom activates the brain’s default mode network (DMN) — the same network involved in mind-wandering, imagination, and autobiographical memory. When we are bored, our brain shifts into a mode conducive to internal simulation, future planning, and creative problem-solving. In this way, boredom creates a space for imaginative thought and self-reflection — cognitive features central to the evolution of art, culture, and civilisation.

We also observe that boredom increases attentional flexibility and receptivity to new goals, often driving creativity—many problem-solving breakthroughs, such as Archimedes in the bath (“Eureka!!”) or Newton under the apple tree, are linked to moments of idle thought.

Ironically, art itself may be a product, or at least a byproduct, of boredom. Moments of idle time, when the mind hungers for stimulation, may have given rise to early forms of expression, storytelling, and creativity. Fittingly, art also serves as a powerful antidote to boredom, offering engagement, meaning, and aesthetic nourishment where monotony once lingered. In this way, boredom and art exist in a kind of generative loop: boredom creates the conditions for artistic impulse, and art, in turn, restores vitality to the disengaged mind.

Consider this: without boredom, we might still be sitting in the same cave, staring at the same fire.

But, to harken back to my own warning about indulging in boredom, how then do we square this exceptionally rotund circle?

Just Flow, Baby

The flow state is a psychological condition in which a person becomes fully immersed in a task, experiencing a sense of effortless concentration, deep enjoyment, and distorted perception of time. First identified by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (a professor of mine once told me to say “me-hail cheeks-set-me-high”) in the 1970s, flow is often described as the peak of human experience - a zone where action and awareness merge, and the self seems to dissolve. It occurs across a wide range of activities: you may have heard athletes say they’re “in the zone,” or musicians say they “lose themselves” in performance or in the music, and artists often say the work "just flows through" them. While it may sound a bit wo-wo, or even pretentious, flow is a well-studied cognitive state with identifiable conditions and profound implications for creativity, learning, and well-being.

It's not so easy to get there, though. To enter flow, three key elements must align: a clear goal, immediate feedback, and a balance between challenge and skill. If a task is too easy, we become bored; if it’s too hard, we become anxious. Flow arises in that delicate space between the two, where our abilities are stretched to their limits, but not overwhelmed. This balancing act is essential, and is also what makes the task so damn pernickety - it explains why flow is not just pleasurable, but also developmental. When in flow, we are operating at our highest capacity, often learning and growing without realising it.

Neurologically, flow is characterised by a unique pattern of brain activity. Studies using EEG and fMRI (MRI’s of the active brain) have found decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex (the area responsible for self-monitoring and judgment; the part that in a sense makes us, us, or at least makes us aware of us) and increased coherence in areas responsible for focus and action. This reduction in self-consciousness allows us to act without second-guessing, freeing up mental resources for the task at hand (speaking as a writer, this is beyond fucking key). The brain also releases a cocktail of neurochemicals during flow, including dopamine (a callback to our appreciation of beauty; in this context it may aid in the creation of new beauty), norepinephrine, and endorphins, which enhance motivation, memory consolidation, and emotional pleasure.

Flow is also closely linked to the idea of intrinsic motivation, namely the pursuit of activities for their own sake, rather than for external rewards. In fact, people often report that the reward of a flow experience is not the outcome of the task, but the experience itself. This makes flow a powerful engine for sustained creativity and meaningful work. For instance, a 2020 study of dancers by Jacqu et al. found that participants entered flow 84% of the time while engaging in their craft, and that this led to positive emotions. Additionally, in the field of medicine, a 2025 study (don’t you just love them when they are so fresh) by England’s Royal College of Surgeons found that surgeons often experience a deep sense of intrinsic fulfilment when immersed in complex operations. In this “surgeon’s zone,” the participants said that self-doubt disappeared, and time perception shifted, leading to peak performance. A longitudinal study (always so empirically useful, yet so resource intensive and awkward to achieve – in my opinion the Gold Standard of quantitative research methods, challenged only by meta-analysis) cited in the paper reported that surgeons in flow were up to 500% more productive than at their baseline, highlighting flow as a powerful driver of sustained excellence and personal satisfaction.

Importantly, and this is the part in my estimation to bear most heavily in mind, flow doesn’t happen by accident. While it can arise spontaneously, it’s more often the result of deliberate conditions: eliminating distractions, setting clear intentions, and working within a structured environment. One can see why, as modern life takes on an increasingly fragmented and attention-scattering reality, cultivating flow has become more challenging.

Perhaps, too, this makes it more essential than ever to learn these techniques. See them as a creative self-defence mechanism.

Csikszentmihalyi had an interesting take on his own theory, one I greatly appreciate. He believed flow is one of the central pathways to a fulfilling life. When people are in flow, they aren’t escaping reality, rather they are fully engaging with it. In a world dominated by distractions and shallow stimulations, flow offers depth, coherence, and connection. It’s where we do our best work, feel our most alive, and become, even for a short while, more than ourselves.

I’m not in flow now, as I write these words, though I wish to. My biggest impediment is the style of non-fiction writing I am currently engaged in – the constant fact-checking, looking up of quotes and dates, checking sources and references, focus on precision over style, is not, for me, conducive to finding flow. But that’s Ok! I’m happy to save it for other endeavours. As with a distant lover, just knowing it’s out there, and knowing how it can be found, is enough for me.

Itaque…

So where does that leave us - loving beauty, but eventually growing tired of it; craving stimulation, but only to be dulled by its excess?

We stand, perhaps, in the middle of a strange triangle: beauty draws us in, boredom pushes us away, and flow pulls us through. Despite appearances of contradiction, this cycle is not a failure of our perception but a fundamental design of the mind. Art may wilt under constant exposure, but it blooms again when rediscovered. Boredom, once feared, becomes the fertile soil for invention. And flow – ah, to just ffflllooowww - offers a glimpse of what it means to be fully engaged, fully alive. The trick, then, is not to hoard beauty, nor to flee boredom, but to use both as signals, road signs in the creative life. To love wisely. To listen lightly. And when the song hits? Maybe don’t hit repeat. Maybe just… stay with it, once, fully - and let it go.

At least for a bit.

Photo by: Pixabay