Without challenge, no creature thrives  --  (note animals in zoos, men in ennui).
The challenge common to all men is to provide the necessities for staying alive;
with technological progress and increased leisure time,
the dominant challenge becomes: keeping themselves mentally entertained,
and while nothing in the universe is as important as food to a starving man,
do not under value the significance of mental diversion to a full, bored one.

In less urban environments this takes such forms as story telling,
mythologically based rituals, and gossip, and as for the more in-town versions –
you are surrounded by them (which are but new mediums for the old ones).
 

If the challenge every morning is not to go kill, collect, or cultivate food,
or go to employment which pays in chits, tradable for same,
then the body has no challenge and will suffer from disuse
if not some form of recreational exercise be utilized;
also will, but more subtly, the mind,
and men will more tolerate the former than the latter,
witness them becoming nonchalantly overweight (with its attendant ills)
from lack of physical activity  --  which they find acceptable,
but insisting on having a television set to watch, as they sit and do nothing,
to give their mind something to do
(this being no condemnation of television  --   merely a clear example of how things are in the
routine arrangement of man and his automatic affairs).
 

There is always a faction of humanity whose job it is to censure
their time’s dominant forms of mental entertainments,
and to hold up education as the proper model;
they forswear that popular with the masses, but as always,
life has the game rigged and the majority prevails:
roman à clefs over philosophical ruminations;
gladiator games over objective observing;
from this situation ordinary men suffer not, since ordinary men are forever the
majority, and the majority is the standard for the norm, and the norm by its definition, suffers not (of course, men having the singular talent for speech, can say that they do,
but saying so, and being a lion in a zoo with your mane falling out from the boredom of
having nothing that you find worthwhile to do, are not the same);
no, if there is one salient lesson man has never been allowed to publicly learn
it is that however things are, is how they are supposed to be --  including  --
sincere assertions that they should be otherwise.
So you have some men always condemning the majority’s forms of
popular mental diversions --
proclaiming that men should be informing their minds rather than merely
entertaining them;
they make such professions while engaged in their own mental activities which are
no different in purpose  –  only in name.
 

The only purpose observable from any place in the universe for ordinary men’s
leisure time mental activities is to simply keep the mind occupied  --
and with what  --   is of no consequence;
the question of what a man’s thoughts are involved with takes on significance
in only one instance in the entire range of possible human activity, and that is:
in those rare cases regarding people born with a non standard mental interest in understanding what is going on in this thing they call “life” --
in which they unaccountably find themselves.
 

To widely varying degrees, all men have such an interest
(its overt manifestation primarily dictated by ephemeral adverse circumstances),
but only a small number have an inherent hunger sufficiently strong
to make this a central and consistent part of their lives,
yet even the majority of this minority go no further in slaking their unusual thirst
than exotic forms of mental diversions & distractions  --
notions quite outside the mainstream mental entertainments  --
but still themselves, only entertainments.
And with these too they become bored, but with a twist  --  they do not recognize it.
Ordinary men-&-minds clearly realize when they are tired of watching the same movie, playing the same video game, or listening to the same CD, and will freely say so, but not so with those who initially believe themselves on a great quest
to uncover what is going on in life and in them;
they, figuratively speaking, start watching a certain movie
(studying a system which claims to teach same),
and become weary of it (when their understanding does not expand),
but blame themselves rather than the system
(would be like a movie goer condemning himself for becoming tired of watching a particular movie after its four hundredth viewing).
Anything created by a human mind (which includes all literature, movies, religions,
video games and methods to achieve enlightenment)
will eventually --  to the mind --  become boring  --  it loses its challenge,
and in the case of the few, the challenge being:

As noted: ordinary men are not harmed by being mentally unchallenged,
but it is catastrophic for the few,
for their minds alone originally demand real challenge --
not of following the plot of some movie or novel  --
but the challenge of grasping why men have created films and books;
histories and religions, and the ultimate challenge of them individually discovering
why they were never satisfied with such,
and the radical basis for their non standard interest.
 

In the beginning someone else must provide you with the interest;
you believe that you are studying someone else’s discovery and explanation
of what is really going on in life (which is inevitable),
but this is not the real challenge, and eventually it becomes tiresome,
but an alternative is not obvious
(except to change the system you pursue, which only results in the same),
so most people, even with that CertainHunger, get as stuck in non challenging
neural diversions as a man who was initially excited and mentally inspired by reading science fiction, but now does so only through habit.
 
 

If you prove to be one of the minority’s minority, and you finally come to
dispassionately face the fact that what was originally mentally exotic, and exciting
is now boring and  non challenging,
and while men can live in physical health by eating the same food day after day
for a lifetime, not so with the mind of those with theSpecialHunger.
For that unique interest to survive and flourish, you must be able to realize, face and accept when your mind becomes thoroughly weary of the motions it is going through as directed by some system, school, or method you have adopted in
the attempt to uncover for your own eyes the reality of what is going on,
and then be able to press on after that  --  and the tricky part then seems to be:
“Press on to WHAT?!  If I give up the methods and ostensible maps I have thus far used --  and do not replace them with some other extrinsically extant ones –
what DO I use?   What materials do I have to study --  after all, a man cannot teach himself what he does not already know?!” --   and right there –
right in that very sentence which would easily flow from such a person’s own lips,
right there is the key to it all, just repeat it to yourself and consider it:
“If I abandon the study of what other people have to say and teach  --
what else is there for me to study and learn from? --   obviously not myself,
for if I already knew what it is that would satisfy me,
then I would already know it and not be anxious and looking?!” --  and yet that is how it is --   but then again consider: "How can it be?!    It cannot be like that!" --  but it is,
and that is supreme challenge  --  the one that never becomes boring,
and will forever keep you going:
what it takes to satisfy the few and reveal to their minds everything they want to know can be found no where outside of their own mental processes;
there is no answer to what the few want to know that is outside the question;
the furniture needed to satisfactorily furnish your mental room is:
                                                      the realization of what the room is.
 
 
 

The only challenge that can lead you to this realization is the  – impossible challenge,
and only you can come up with it for yourself  --
and only you can privately and futilely pursue it to its all revealing climax.
 

Only that certain impossible-challengeis the pay-off challenge  --
and only a lifetime of struggling with it will one day result in you suddenly being able to see the difference between that which is possible and that which is not.
 
 

Something that few of  the few want to hear about (which works out okay since they refuse to hear it even when they hear it)  is that:
no matter how far along you get in your understanding, if you ever stop the effort  --   everything will collapse in on you.