Escape Boredom - Leonardo da Vinci and a Guide to the Good Life

Modern Western life is trapped in a “myth of arrival” that promises happiness through external achievement—high pay, status, a perfect partner, and admiration—yet leaves people no real answer to the certainty of death. Ernest Becker’s framing of death anxiety as a mainspring of human activity sets the stakes: societies often supply coping mechanisms, but the dominant secular script in the West offers a future-oriented escape that doesn’t actually cure the core problem. Even when success comes, it can arrive at the cost of years spent in a job one dreads, crowding out intrinsically rewarding activities; when success doesn’t come, people may experience themselves as failures, turning frustration and resentment inward. Either way, the approach does little to affirm a life in the face of an approaching grave.

The transcript traces how myths have historically helped people manage existential dread. Christianity offered a myth of arrival in which earthly suffering and death were meaningful steps toward heaven. As science and skepticism weakened belief in an afterlife, a secular replacement emerged: suffering is treated as a byproduct of lack, and the turning point is imagined as something that will happen once material and social conditions improve. But the “earthly heaven” is still illusory. It can’t prevent the end that comes for everyone, and it often misunderstands what actually sustains well-being. The promise that money and status will eliminate struggle ignores the reality that many forms of suffering are tied to how a person lives day to day—whether life feels purposeful, whether time is spent well, and whether one is becoming rather than stagnating.

Against this backdrop, Leonardo da Vinci is offered as an alternative model for coping with mortality: live more fully now through a “well-employed life.” Da Vinci’s motto—relentless rigor—signals that a good life is not one of chasing wealth or fame, nor one of filling free time with shallow pleasures. Instead, it means choosing intrinsically rewarding projects and consistently putting in the time required to master them. Da Vinci’s own life—masterpieces, attempts to build a flying machine, and deep work on human anatomy—illustrates a sustained pattern of creative engagement.

The transcript argues that even without patrons, money, or public recognition, people can mimic this approach by dedicating a small amount of daily time to a creative pursuit or skill. Over time, practice accumulates into real competence and can open unforeseen possibilities. More importantly, this way of life directly targets two drivers of suffering. It counters stagnation, which breeds doubt about the point of existence and creates a foretaste of being “dead” while still alive. It also supports “flow,” an optimal state of consciousness that arises when skills are fully engaged—time distorts, the self recedes, and the activity becomes its own reward. Finally, consistent effort builds discipline, tenacity, grit, and prolonged focus—traits needed to turn a dream of an intrinsically rewarding life into something sustainable.

External success, if it arrives, must not derail the practice. Comfort and fame can tempt people off course, replacing a struggle that gave life meaning with a struggle-free emptiness. William James is invoked to underline the deeper metric: beyond wealth, intelligence, and luck, the heart is warmed by the amount of effort one can sustain. In that sense, the well-employed life is positioned as the path to a “blessed death”—not by denying mortality, but by meeting it with a life structured around worthy exertion and ongoing becoming.