I think humanity has grown restless due to the granularisation of work. It is no longer necessary to develop an overall understanding of an entire domain for most jobs, as they're based on the assembly line principle - learn to screw that bolt on tight enough, and your job is done. Nevermind the rest of the car, not your assignment.

I suspect this leaves a lot of cognitive bandwidth essentially unused, so the brain naturally seeks to fill it up with whatever else is at hand.

In addition, this has also somewhat stolen the satisfaction of understanding the context of our work, of seeing that it's not just wasted time, essentially. Work/production/creation/generation/transformation used to be far more significant parts of both our lives as well as our overall fulfilment, so we're now basically overclocked PCs left running Minesweeper at 100%, which yearn for meaning and something to fill up all of that available compute potential. And there's cognitive junk food a-plenty, but just like junk food, it rarely satisfies long-term.

This, I think, also spreads ripples across other aspects of our lives - I'm thinking here especially about the seeming death of nuance in general discourse as one of the main such repercussions, so it's yet another existential cascade failure.

I mostly say this and the above solely on an anecdotal basis, but it is a pretty large basis, considering it consists of roughly 80% of all previous coworkers and professional acquaintances in over a decade, both domestic and otherwise.