This tendency toward the unnecessary and in some cases even injurious elaboration of culture is one of the most significant phenomena of human life. It proves that the development of culture has become an end in itself. Man may be a rational being, but he certainly is not a utilitarian one. The constant revision and expansion of his social heredity is a result of some inner drive, not of necessity....
It seems possible that the human capacity for being bored, rather than man's social or natural needs lies at the root of man's cultural advance.
-- Ralph Linton, The Study of Man, 1936
[via The Banquet Years]
