Comment by jaggederest
3 hours ago
Motivational saliency requires both the ability to learn and increasing difficulty - witness video games.
The model I think makes sense here is the Csikszentmihalyi Flow model, by another name the challenge-skill model of effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Characterist...
Roughly speaking, you might have taken a task that was in the control, flow, or relaxation zone, closer to the center there, and lowered the difficulty so much that now it's flat out in the middle of the boredom zone.
My answer to this is to either seek out much harder problems (moving it back up into challenge, for example), or to change to a task where I have lower skill and so am in the learning mode rather than the execution mode, which I find much more pleasant and compelling than boring.
You change the goalpost, basically, or give yourself a handicap, to bootstrap yourself back up into motivating regions of the graph. Just a model, but I think it's one that is really useful.
I didn’t know that theory but makes sense.
When I was little, I was surprised to find that using a Game Genie made a lot of Nintendo games instantly become boring.
Precisely so. This is also why you find people, mid career, suddenly having that crisis and trying some different things to break up the monotony. If we had a more stable system of employment, things like sabbaticals become really essential to reset the joie de vivre you lose when you start to be an expert executing the same plan over and over.