Why is Everything Boring Now

Source: Why is Everything Boring Now, Hank Green, 14:21, uploaded 2026-07-01, playlist index 25.

Hank Green opens with a position that has made some viewers angry: things should not be optimal. Suffering remains bad, so he supports removing it from the world. His complaint concerns the way software companies have spent the last decade or so optimising products until many of them offer the same experience. Green wants products that work well and still have a distinct shape.

Paris and the pleasure of a crooked route

Green uses Paris to explain the difference. He has spent his life in cities built on grids, and a grid would make Paris easier to navigate. Paris contains odd intersections, buildings with strange shapes and courtyards inside which people have built more buildings. Those forms slow a person down, yet they also give the city a human scale that Green finds missing from the almost perfectly optimised cities he has lived in.

He knows the historical objection about Haussmann’s remaking of Paris and brings it up himself. The city retained its irregular character after that intervention, which lets him keep the example at the level he wants. A city built through accumulated taste and local decisions gathers forms that no planner would choose as the most efficient arrangement. That inefficiency becomes part of the thing people value.

The same pattern appears in music. Green says that music often loses its edges as artists find a wider audience. Early work can sound strange because it has not yet been shaped for the broadest possible listener. He wants more of that strangeness, and points to neil.fun as a site whose appeal comes from the fact that its logic is hard to explain from the outside. He also mentions Victor Jones as a recent musical discovery. The people who love an unusual artist can care about that artist with an intensity that a general audience does not require.

Green gives the hipster a partial defence. Treating popularity as proof of bad taste is tiresome, although seeking things before they become popular can help artists, scenes and listeners. A person who pays attention to the things they love deeply may find work that a popularity ranking has not yet flattened into a general recommendation.

From Operation Ivy to Sum 41

The Gilman Street punk scene gives the argument a longer history. Green describes Operation Ivy as too strange for the average listener, then places Green Day’s Dookie at a point where the music keeps some of its edge while reaching a mass audience. Within a few years, a cleaner and more widely legible version of punk had taken over. Someone encountering the later form without seeing the intermediate steps might struggle to hear how it grew from Operation Ivy.

Green speaks from both sides of that change. Vlogbrothers has a larger barrier to entry than his main channel, which helps explain why he considers it good. Its obscurity asks more from the viewer and creates a stronger sense of belonging for people who make the effort. He describes early VidCon in similar terms. The first events took place in a dingy basement, and nobody could decide whether VidCon was a concert, a networking event, a fan convention, an industry conference or a reunion for people who had never met. The confusion made it hard to earn money, yet the people who came had already taken a risk on the idea. The event became valuable partly because the audience had arrived before the format settled.

Success applies pressure to those edges. Green calls the process a kind of sandblasting by reality, since a larger audience brings expectations that encourage creators to smooth away whatever might confuse or repel people. He leaves room for artists whose original shape already suited a large audience. The claim concerns a common pressure, not a rule that every successful artist loses their character.

Weirdness still needs to work

Green draws a firm line between weird and bad. A new thing can be strange because its maker has found a form that has not settled yet. It can also be bad because the maker has no idea how to make the thing function. He recalls events where the only interesting feature was a ball pit in an empty room, or where a crowd spent hours in a car park because there were too few bathrooms and no protection from the sun. Those failures do not become good through their unfamiliarity.

The best cases combine competence with a shape that remains unresolved. They work well enough for people to take part, yet they still contain surprises that a mature product would have removed. Green says this often happens during a first year, although age alone does not create it. A thing can keep its oddness for years when its makers and its audience continue to value it.

He illustrates the point through 4x3, a game he is making. Players sometimes become angry when the game gives them negative points for an action that no written rule forbids. Green prefers the surprise to the ordinary reward because the points carry no real cost. A strange result can be enjoyable when the game has made the stakes small enough for the player to absorb it. The same experience would feel careless if a real event left someone sunburned or unable to find a bathroom.

The first year of Something Worth Knowing

This distinction explains why Green brings up an event that the Complexly team is planning while the form remains uncertain. He says they know it will be good without knowing what it will become, and he asks people who can attend to take the risk before the event has a settled reputation. A first-year event might fail badly. When it works, the audience itself becomes part of its unusual character because everyone in the room has accepted an unfinished idea.

The event is a fundraiser for Complexly, the non-profit behind SciShow, Crash Course and other online educational work. Green describes talks from people including Mark Rober, Simone Giertz, astrophysicist Katie Mack and Abigail Thorn, alongside music and a game he is not allowed to know about. He wants the talks to give smart people room to speak about hope, and he expects some parts of the event to work while others fail in public. The experiment remains tied to a real purpose because the ticket money supports Complexly’s educational work.

The promotion also sets a limit on the invitation. Green says the base ticket costs $500 at a Los Angeles venue, which places the event beyond the reach of most viewers. Donors, including Green, have sponsored some free tickets for people already in Southern California because the organisers cannot pay for flights or hotels. The source description links to the event information as Something Worth Knowing. Green’s wider case for early and unusual things sits inside a direct sales pitch for one particular event, and the pitch depends on conditions that exclude most of the audience.

The value of being early

Green’s final claim is modest. The hipster instinct to find a thing before success has real use when it leads people towards work that still has its edges. The artist gets room to develop a form, the audience gets a more specific experience and the wider scene gets an alternative to whatever has already become easy to sell. None of that makes every obscure thing worthwhile. It gives people a reason to look beyond popularity and to risk making something whose audience has yet to appear.

The video then demonstrates the problem through a 4x3 puzzle. Green reacts to a set of place names with disbelief, tries categories involving drinks, liquids and films, and keeps finding plausible groups that fail. He eventually solves one group with little confidence and ends with a result that feels lucky rather than earned. The puzzle is functional and playable, yet its difficulty creates the kind of surprise he has been defending. Its weirdness comes from the rules and the associations, while the game remains bounded enough that a failed guess costs points rather than an afternoon in a car park.

Limits

The claims about software, music, urban form and the history of punk belong to Green’s argument in this video. He gives examples rather than studies or detailed histories, so the note preserves them as his account. The source does not define a measure for optimisation, explain how popularity changes a work, or show that the named scenes followed the precise path he describes.

The event details are also contemporaneous claims made while Complexly was promoting Something Worth Knowing. The video gives the ticket price, location, programme and free-ticket conditions, while the description supplies the event link. Those details describe the offer at the time of upload and do not establish what the event later became.

Further reading / references

• Something Worth Knowing, the Complexly event described and promoted in the video.
• 4x3, the puzzle game mentioned in the description and played at the end of the video.