Started thinking about this the other day through a series of intersections and videos. Let me try to walk you through it.
At Work
I think, or rather I hope, by now that people realize a lot of white-collar work doesn’t take 8 to 10 hours/day. Some work does, but not most of it. There’s a lot of sitting around pretending to be busy or general presenteeism. And, because that is what most bosses value in subordinates, this will continue. Not much of a path through on all that. But at work, the whole equation is especially toxic: we think those who even mention “boredom” must somehow lack “work ethic,” and thus we place them in a “bad” or “quiet firing” box, giving them less and less projects, even though they just identified a huge problem at your organization. Because of the negativity associated with the word “boredom” at work, many people find themselves tasks to “busy” themselves with, but “busy” is not the same as “productive” and never has been. So, because we can’t tolerate boredom, we have 37% of our workforce at a given time scrolling Instagram and claiming “so slammed this week.”
With Addiction
Good video above from Mark Manson on him being 500 days sober. One point he brings up a lot is that he’s more bored and more boring nowadays, but those might be good things. (I’d argue yes.) As someone who has struggled with addiction themselves, I can tell you that being an addict provides a saccharine way to view your life as “exciting” or “involved,” because you’re out and talking to people at bars or clubs and there’s some vague energy around you, even if the people you’re interacting with don’t know your last name. That’s one of the harder parts of fully embracing sobriety sometimes: a feeling that you will be “boring” if and when you do that. Our addiction numbers, as a collective society, are pretty bad in the last two decades. I wonder sometimes if social media and “seeing the highlight reels of others” keeps people as addicts, ya know? Because they can’t get on a yacht in Turks and Caicos per se, so they go find something to numb the pain and make their lives seem exciting.
The Divided Internet
That’s a video summarizing “Hubs Life” on TikTok, who is a guy that just posts normal stuff throughout the day, like going to work and eating a Jimmy John’s sandwich and making dinner with his wife and stuff. Half the Internet thinks this is a love letter to being a capitalist slave, and half thinks it’s endearing and the mark of a quality, good, normal life.
The sheer fact that we are even having this debate, though, is confusing and says something about modernity. Most of life is boring. I think even billionaires and models have boring existences a lot of the time, and we view those as (weird) “markers of success.” They might attend more parties, but the process of becoming a billionaire involves a lot of looking at legal documents (inherently boring) and the process of being a model involves a lot of filtering yourself on IG and tagging the right people (boring), and very few people live this everything-is-insane-and-zany-all-the-time life.
But do we now think others live this life, and thus we feel bad when we see something normal? Is boredom now so bad that it actually triggers us? Interesting.
This Hubs Life guy is expecting his first kid. They seem to be late-20s. I would guess they end up having three kids and a relatively functional suburban/exurban existence. Is that so bad? Doesn’t seem it.
I worry about this more and more each day.
It just seems like we’re all chasing more, but chasing the “more” in the wrong forms. If your entire life is a crazy high, how is there any context for the parts that are supposed to truly stand out, ya know? Can’t have peaks without valleys and vice versa.
Do you think we’ve made boredom so negative that we’ve lost perspective?