The comedian already knew

What Merijn Scholten sees in NRC is exactly what this house is building

In the weekend edition of NRC of April 25, 2026, the Dutch newspaper publishes an interview with comedian Merijn Scholten on the occasion of his new theatre show Lemming. It is not an interview about technology, not about neuroscience, not about economics. It is about a man who likes to spend an hour at the zoo watching the gerbils, who reads books about fascism over breakfast, and who says he feels lonely walking through the city because people no longer see one another.

And yet it is one of the sharpest public articulations of what we call Limbic Literacy to appear in a Dutch newspaper in recent months.

The diagnosis, without the jargon

Asked about the state of the world, Scholten describes a shift he has lived through himself. The 1990s in which he grew up he now calls, in retrospect, hedonistic — a throwaway society in which everything was permitted. The foundation he was raised on, of how we treat one another, has, in his words, eroded. Everything is geared toward scraping money off people.

Then comes the passage that the book being written here is about. Scholten says the mobile phone keeps us inside a small world made specifically for ourselves, where we feel we are in charge, where we are held and gratified and produce dopamine, but where we miss the force of what it is to push back against something with others. He feels it, he says, on the ferry across the IJ in Amsterdam: in a healthy situation you would instinctively know who you could count on if the ferry sank. Now he suspects people are thinking: let me just finish this clip first.

No neuroscience. No references to Tristan Harris or Anna Lembke. But the diagnosis is identical to the one in The Limbic Economy. The limbic system is being played, the herd protection collapses, the individual is left alone with a dopamine system that cannot beat the feed.

Loafing as resistance

Scholten gets sharpest when the interview turns to what can actually be done. In his show he argues for more loafing — wandering without purpose, sitting in front of the apes for a while, discovering that there is a particular bench with a good atmosphere. Asked whether this is, for him, an act of resistance, he weighs it carefully and then says that if you want Mark Zuckerberg not to be happy, you should go loafing without your phone. A minimal act of resistance, he calls it himself.

This is precisely the third layer the book describes, after recognition and understanding: structural resistance, not by willpower alone, but through the design of one's life and environment. Loafing is not mindfulness. It is not detox. It is not a self-help pillar. It is the conscious preservation of a capacity — the ability to do nothing — that the attention economy systematically dismantles because it is commercially worthless.

In a single subordinate clause Scholten formulates what chapter after chapter of academic sources establishes: people find it hard to do something without a goal, and the phone makes it almost impossible.

Candy-eating children

A little further on, Scholten offers the second analysis that lines up exactly with the structural argument of the book. He describes how, step by step, everyone thinks it is rather pleasant not to bear responsibility, and how that is essentially how a child thinks: ideally one would eat sweets all day and do fun things. Companies, he says, are trying to turn us into candy-eating children. Resisting that takes discipline, because it is much more relaxing to sit in the sun and not have to do anything. Pushing back quickly feels dull or preachy.

That is the infantilization thesis, in two sentences. And the shame he names, the feeling of being dull or preachy, is precisely the social mechanism that prevents the few people who do put down the phone from becoming a norm. The community that would back that behaviour is missing. Individual resistance finds no soil. The industry wins, not through superior force on the screen side, but through the absence of counterweight on the human side.

Scarcity over attention

The most relevant moment for anyone trying to build a framework that pushes back against the attention economy without becoming part of it is buried in a passage about Scholten's own media policy. He rarely gives interviews, and almost never about his private life. The sentence with which he justifies that is, in its plainness, the mission statement this entire undertaking shares: the fact that you can get attention does not mean you should seek it.

He compares it to money. The fact that you can earn it does not mean you must. It is exactly the distinction that separates a framework that commodifies attention from one that enables connection without capturing it.

What this means

The value of this interview, for the work being built here, does not lie in confirmation. It lies in something else. It shows that the analysis The Limbic Economy underpins through neuroscience, financial figures, and historical parallels is also reachable through nothing more than honest self-observation. A man in his forties who is no more than attentive — who reads, who stands on the ferry, who sits with the gerbils — arrives at exactly the same diagnosis as the literature.

That is good news. It means the concept of Limbic Literacy is not an academic import that needs to be explained to an audience, but a name for something people already feel and cannot articulate. The language is missing, not the perception.

The work of this house is to supply that language. And then to help build the structures that turn loafing from a minimal act of resistance back into what it once was: an ordinary way of living.

---

The interview with Merijn Scholten appeared on Saturday April 25, 2026 in NRC Weekend, written by Anne Dohmen, with photography by Lars van den Brink. His theatre show Lemming opens on May 13.