We create our own drama
Think back to the calmest, most stable stretch of your life. Good job, decent health, nothing on fire. Now try to remember what you were upset about at the time.
There’ll be something. There’s always something.
I’ve got a theory about why, and it isn’t that you’re a dramatic person.
Your brain is a problem-solving machine
That’s the job. That’s the whole job. It takes in the world, finds the gap between how things are and how they could be, and works the gap. It’s very good at it. It’s the reason we’re not still living in trees.
The thing is, it doesn’t have an off switch. It has an idle speed.
For almost all of human history that was fine, because there was never a shortage of genuine problems. Food, weather, injury, predators, the neighbours. A brain that powered down during the quiet weeks was a brain that got you killed in the busy ones. So we ended up with hardware that’s always running, always scanning, always looking for the next thing to solve.
Which is a magnificent feature, right up until you build a world where a lot of us are fed, warm, safe and largely unbothered. Then the machine doesn’t stop. It just lowers its standards.
It lowers its standards without telling you
There’s a study I keep coming back to on this - Levari and colleagues, published in Science in 2018. They showed people a long series of dots ranging from clearly blue to clearly purple and asked a simple question: is this dot blue?
Then, partway through, they quietly reduced how many blue dots were in the mix. People started calling purple dots blue. Not because they were told to, not because they noticed anything had changed - they just expanded what counted as “blue” to keep the number of blues roughly constant.
Then the researchers did it with photos of faces, asking which looked threatening. Same result - as threatening faces got rarer, neutral faces started looking threatening. Then with written requests, asking which were unethical. Same result again. As the genuinely bad things became rarer, people quietly redefined bad to keep the count up.
And here’s the kicker: it still happened when participants were warned in advance that it would happen, and when they were paid to resist it. Knowing about it isn’t enough to switch it off.
That’s the mechanism, right there, and it’s not a character flaw - it’s how judgment works. Your threat detector calibrates on relative frequency, not absolute severity. So take away the real problems and it doesn’t go quiet. It promotes whatever’s next in the queue. A reply that took four hours. A tone in a meeting. A look.
The drama is practice
Here’s the part I find genuinely comforting, and it’s the bit that changed how I think about this: the drama isn’t the machine malfunctioning. It’s the machine running training reps.
A border collie with no sheep will herd your kids, your guests and the vacuum cleaner. It isn’t broken. It’s a herding dog in a house with no sheep, doing the only thing it was built to do, on whatever’s available. Give it an actual job and the “behavioural problem” evaporates in an afternoon.
We’re the same animal in better shoes. The 3am rehearsal of an argument that hasn’t happened and probably never will - that’s the simulator running. You’re practising: how would I handle betrayal? what would I say? what if it all fell apart? It’s problem-solving without a problem. Learning without a lesson. The mechanism is sound, it’s just pointed at nothing.
Which is exactly why it feels so productive while you’re doing it. Rumination has the precise texture of work. That’s the trap - you can spend a whole evening feeling like you’re getting somewhere.
Except the bill is real
Manufactured problems have real casualties, and this is where the comforting framing has to stop.
The argument you picked because you were under-stimulated is still an argument someone else has to actually live through. The tension you introduced to a team is now that team’s Tuesday. A simulation with other people in it isn’t a simulation - it’s just a thing you did to them.
And there’s a second cost that’s easier to miss: you get good at what you practise. Do enough reps of catastrophising and you don’t become a better problem solver, you become an excellent catastrophiser. The skill compounds like any other. That’s the same principle that makes deliberate practice work, running in the wrong direction.
Teams do this too
You can set your watch by it. A team with no clear goal will generate politics.
Have a look at when the worst internal conflict happens where you work. My bet is it isn’t during the crunch - it’s during the quiet quarter, when nobody’s quite sure what they’re for. Then the site falls over at 2am and suddenly everyone is focused, generous and kind to each other. Same people. Same personalities. The only variable that changed is whether there was a real problem to point at.
So before you send anyone on a communication course, check whether they have anything genuinely hard to do. A good chunk of what looks like a culture problem is just an under-employed problem-solving machine looking for work.
A good chunk - not all of it. Some teams have a real culture problem, and “you’re all just bored” is a spectacularly convenient thing for a manager to believe. If the conflict survives a genuinely hard, shared, well-defined problem, it was never boredom. Go and deal with it properly.
Give it something real to chew on
The fix isn’t to relax. Telling a problem-solving machine to stop finding problems works about as well as telling someone not to think about a bear.
The fix is to feed it, deliberately, before it goes shopping on its own:
- Learn something hard enough to make you feel stupid. Not a tutorial you’ll follow along with - something that genuinely defeats you for a while.
- Build something and finish it. Finishing is the part that matters. An unfinished project is just more open loops for the machine to chew on.
- Get your body involved. Long walk, real sweat, something with a bit of consequence to it.
- Point it at somebody else’s problem. Cheapest, most reliable way I know to make your own shrink back to their true size.
The test for whether you’ve fed it properly is simple: the small stuff stops registering. When you’re deep in something that actually matters, you don’t have the spare capacity to be annoyed about the dishwasher.
Catching yourself in the act
One question does most of the work:
Is this a real problem, or am I just bored?
Ask it out loud. It’s embarrassingly effective, because a manufactured problem tends to collapse the moment you look straight at it. A real one doesn’t - a real problem survives the question, and then you get to go and solve it, which is what you wanted in the first place.
A few tells that you’re in the simulator: it’s late at night. You’re rehearsing a conversation that hasn’t happened. The problem is about someone’s tone rather than anything they actually did. And the big one - you feel a flicker of disappointment when it resolves.
That last one is the giveaway. If some part of you is sorry to lose the problem, you were never trying to solve it. You were enjoying it.
The bottom line
We create our own drama because we’re built to. The same machinery that got us out of the trees doesn’t switch off when things are going well - it goes looking, and it’ll take whatever it can find. Understanding that doesn’t make you immune, but it does turn “why am I like this?” into something much more useful: what have I got it working on?
Because the machine is going to run either way. The only real question is whether you give it something worth solving, or leave it to choose for itself.