What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Bored

A culture that never tests itself stops competing in craft and starts competing in outrage. The Renaissance Festival taught me that.

A Kingdom Of Cosplay

Over the years, I invited numerous friends and connections in the entertainment and business world to visit the Renaissance Festival in Minneapolis. I thought it would be fun. Of course, I loved the place, but after so many years of working there I’d lost a sense of perspective. My friends saw the place with fresh eyes. One of my visitors was a gracious gentleman, himself an English dandy, who said with wry humor, “One can only imagine how much worse it must be to actually work here.” Ouch!

I was a bit put off by the comment because so many people there were, in fact, talented performers, but not actors. There is a difference between an actor and a performer. An actor is playing someone else within a written structure; a performer is doing something, and narrative is optional. There’s overlap, obviously. Renaissance festivals are animated by performers — people walking in costumes, riffing, improvising, doing bits — but true thespians are few and far between.

So what. Why bring this up? What does this have to do with being wrongfully accused? The culture that makes such a thing possible.

I want to understand how a culture cultivates and drives group behavior, particularly the kind that animated the #MeToo movement within this dusty cosplay kingdom. Because I’m so acquainted with the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, I thought it provides a good example of how groupthink inside a small, tightly connected community spreads, and how moral entrepreneurs orchestrate outrage and dissent.

The first insight for me is the calcification of the culture. The MRF performing company has a formal audition process for new acts. But once you’re in, you’re in. Acts and performers rarely if ever seriously revisit the question. The roster hardened, and tenure became a credential in and of itself. The local performers don’t worry — meaningfully worry — about competing for a slot in next season’s show. This is a problem in its creative and cultural DNA. Economic stability without contest, challenge, or threat produces a weakened monoculture: creatively jejune and banal. Without competitive pressures, the culture chases other inputs that will animate its passions, and #MeToo provided fresh opportunity.

Now, I want to be clear. I'm not suggesting the issues surrounding the #MeToo movement were purely performative, or entirely wrongheaded. However, the way it caught fire and consumed the place in [2017/2018] suggests it was more contagion than conscience, the inevitable result of a closed system that had run out of other grievances to tend.

Many years ago the owner of the MRF suggested that we recast the entire show and require everyone to go through a modest audition process. It caused a meltdown of indignation within the ranks. We didn’t end up doing it because the blowback was so intense. It would have been a healthy exercise, even if the lineup of acts didn’t fundamentally change. Because a person who never has to earn a spot stops asking the questions that keep them competitive and alive: Am I still good? Am I still growing? Am I still worth it? Is that person better than me?

As one performer said to me, “It’s easier to find a new audience than it is to write new material.” Without challenge there is no growth, and without growth, the energy will migrate elsewhere.

In Jonathan Weiner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Beak of the Finch, he carefully records how competition and the ebb and flow of a natural environment affect families of Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands, in real time. Darwin himself suggested that some of these animals, having evolved for long stretches with few land predators, lost much of their instinct for self-preservation around human beings. Early visitors described birds so tame they could be taken by hand, until the first shots were fired and they learned fear.

Darwin’s Finches

The birds weren’t weak in any dramatic way. They were simply unprepared for challenges they hadn’t already faced. The environment hadn’t demanded certain instincts, so those instincts never developed, or at least weren’t sharpened. My point isn’t the cliche that hardship makes virtue. It’s that adaptation requires friction. A system that never tests itself loses the habit of testing.

Competition keeps a thing alive, or slowly kills it. Without drive and hunger, without the threat of uncertainty, energy doesn’t disappear; it simply migrates to where the excitement is. Instead of competing in skill, people compete for status. Rather than risking failure onstage, they risk nothing in public moral theater. Boredom becomes something like a solvent: dissolving nuance, turning petty disagreements into a kind of cosplay crusade, replacing modesty and gradation with brutish certainty. That energy has to land somewhere, and in a culture already running on fumes, it lands here.

We tend to think of boredom as passivity, the slack jaw on an empty afternoon. But that's the old boredom. What we're living inside now is something more volatile: an activated boredom, restless and hungry, endlessly refreshing, looking for something that makes us feel. It doesn't produce inertia. It produces appetite.

Psychologists who study boredom have documented this mechanism: when meaning collapses, people reach for social identity and the conflict it generates.

Outrage is perfect for this. It’s cheap, it’s fast, and it mimics the sensation of meaning without requiring any of the work that meaning actually demands. Beyond the tedious distractions of technology, we've become culturally cloistered and restless — fed by convenience, insulated from consequence, starved for meaning, and increasingly dependent on the emotional charge of conflict to feel anything at all.

In The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt describe a modern inversion of resilience: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.” The point isn’t that suffering is good; it’s that suffering and scarcity might be necessary to awaken the senses. A culture that trains people to interpret discomfort as harm will eventually lose the ability to calibrate it. Everything starts to feel like an emergency, because emergency can make us feel awake, needed, and alive.

Without consequence, we turn to navel-gazing, cultural battles, and low-stakes protesting. We pick fights as a form of recreation, moralize as a substitute for craftsmanship, and start treating the emotional temperature of a moment as evidence of its importance.

I don't think a movement like #MeToo could have taken the same form, or carried the same social chemistry, in the months and years immediately after 9/11. Not because sexual violence wasn’t real then. Not because predation didn’t exist. But because a culture in the shadow of genuine stakes has less patience for performative moral theater. And, it seems to me, everyone knows the performative when they see it, and once you know what to look for, you see it everywhere.

When the world is on fire, we navigate to what is essential, what we actually need, like food, shelter, safety and companionship. Disaster, like being accused of rape, takes care of destroying the inessential for you. French writer Maurice Blanchot wrote that a disaster doesn't just destroy, it ruptures our normal relationship with reality itself. The disaster 'ruins everything while leaving everything in its state.’ It strips away our habitual patterns of perception without necessarily changing the physical world. You don’t choose what’s essential. The disaster chooses for you, burning away everything that can’t withstand the heat.

The #MeToo movement offers a case study, not because its core claim was wrong, but because its social mechanics revealed something ugly about us. Men are guilty of savage sexual violence; this is undeniable. The movement exposed real predators and gave real voice to real victims. That matters, and I’ve never suggested otherwise.

But the movement didn’t stay there. It couldn’t. A crowd that hungry and bored rarely stops once the predators are named. The movement becomes the point. The fuel has to come from somewhere. What followed was a deliberate flattening of human behavior: clumsy dates, sexist jokes, blue comedy and criminal assault were folded into the same moral category, processed through the same myopic machine, punished with proud certainty. Because distinguishing between them was a betrayal. Nuance looked like complicity.

The headline became the verdict. The accusation was the evidence. And the crowd, righteous, bored and finally awake, treated anyone who asked for evidence or proportion as contaminated by the very thing they were questioning.

This isn’t a defense of predators, but to insist on moral seriousness. Justice depends entirely on distinctions, on the ability to say: this is not that. When we lose that capacity to draw those lines, we haven’t become more moral. We’ve become more dangerous. We’ve replaced judgment with appetite cloaked in the fashionable vocabulary of justice.

The performing community, with its mostly guaranteed contracts and little competition, doesn’t evolve because there’s no selection pressure. Every working actor will tell you an audition process can be uncomfortable and even brutal. If you don’t hone your skills and thicken your skin, you’ll fail. Sure, the process can be cruel, but it’s also clarifying: it forces you to improve, to listen, to adapt, or to step aside.

At the festival, once you’re in, there was no pressure to leave or improve. The performing stage becomes something close to a living room, the audience is furniture. It’s the rough equivalent of a magician saying “Ta Da” at the end of a lame magic trick. There’s no heart in it. Most of the performers show up and work, and most love it. But that’s not a good measure of vitality and creative success.

Watching a couple of performers stumble through a street routine, my British friend, with a glass of mead asked, “How on Earth do they justify the continuing effort?” At the time I thought he was being cruel. Now I know he was being diagnostic.

The answer to his question, about the performers then and about what I believe drove my accusers later, is the same: No standards. No accountability. No consequence.

Van Tilburg, W.A.P. & Igou, E.R. (2017). “The Moral Dimensions of Boredom: A Call for Research.” Review of General Psychology.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312186497_The_Moral_Dimensions_of_Boredom_A_Call_for_Research

Grubbs, J.B. et al. (2019). “Moral Grandstanding in Public Discourse: Status-Seeking Motives as a Potential Explanatory Mechanism in Predicting Conflict.” PLOS ONE. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6795490/

Rothschild, Z.K. & Keefer, L.A. (2017). “A Cleansing Fire: Moral Outrage Alleviates Guilt and Buffers Threats to One’s Moral Identity.” Motivation and Emotion. Referenced in: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09593543241305147

Brady, W.J. et al. (2021). “How Social Learning Amplifies Moral Outrage Expression in Online Social Networks.” Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe5641

OECD Competition Committee (2023). “Competition and Innovation: A Theoretical Perspective.”https://one.oecd.org/document/DAF/COMP(2023)2/en/pdf