<p>If you need that challenge to make you feel happy and satisfied, and you can’t find challenge within simpler material for yourself, then you’re probably never going to reach your ideal.</p>
<p>Everything you’ve listed are steps you’ve taken externally to challenge yourself, but you need to do some of that work yourself. What do you internally to challenge yourself? A critical, active thinker who wants to be engaged should be able to intellectually engage himself in some way given almost any prompt. You can’t just sit there in class and wait to be engaged or challenged or enlightened; you need to find the things that interest and excite you by yourself and then actively seek out further information on those things. You should be able to engage yourself when provided with all the right tools.</p>