Ran across this passage in David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel The Pale King (which, as a posthumously published work, raises some interesting questions about what it means for a book to be finished). Maybe touches on some of the things we've been discussing with regards to technology:

To me, at least in retrospect,[26] the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us[27] spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.