Somebody's boring me. I think it's Me!

The question, my dear Watson, has always been, "Do I believe in afterlife?" And even though I am no Sherlock, for me, the answer has always been a straight "NO".

Because even if there is one, it will never be the same 'ME' again and then I will anyhow prefer the 'Tortures of Hell' over the 'Boredom of Heaven' once my current self is done with the life. 

But enough about 'afterlife'. I am not writing to discuss the psychic boundaries and certainly not for their so called interpretations. I am here to write about what has become my recent state of mind - 'Boredom'.

Boredom - What an intriguing word or rather a sentence! One that has no full stop. Channel of continuity with a rather sublime streak of monotonous life.

I have been feeling bored quite lately. And a lot of it to drive me to the extent of writing a post on it. But before you start getting ideas, No...I haven't been kicked out of my employment yet. Neither have I been running less on my eccentric muses.

I am bored because I have been playing my normal self for a bit too long now.

Weird isn't it? You may ask, even rubbish this and stop reading. Who gets bored of being his usual self?

Boredom is surprisingly stressful. And when we’re busy, but still bored, it’s even more so. And I am quite sure most of you, who have managed to read so far, suffer from the same disease.

But let's discuss the premise first, A handful of times throughout my social life I have been accused of being boring. Initially, such statements were pretty boring in themselves, but then they started making me restless, because I, like so many others, have been conditioned to believe that “boring” was negative and something to aspire not to be.

But then, after much contemplation, I began to consider the source of the statement and then consider the context in which the statement was made. Having analyzed both aspects, I have come to own my boredom thesis. I was not boring, for every time I was deemed boring...in a societal meeting, I was just being ‘oblivious’ of my not-so-interesting surrounding.

By the looks of it, I have come pretty far from that state. Now I only ‘look’ boring. Yes, I do! And people who have actually met me will agree with the fact (though internally I long that someone disagrees here). But, anyhoo...that’s where it ends...looks!

As far as the real life is concerned, it’s actually quite exciting.

Well, how many of you watched the motion pictures, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"? Because I did, and loved every bit of it. The imagination, the landscapes, the story et al. However, I don’t take the protagonists life case as exacted to mine ‘cause I believe in the ‘Real’ stuff. Stuff that I can touch, feel and experience. Not imagine.

I travel a lot. Observe people. I write more than I actually read. I get to meet interesting people from society’s diverse echelons. I have been lucky enough to have some unique experiences in life. I get to spend months living full-time with teams of high performers in such unique environments as elite sports and war hospitals. I have more projects in the pipeline than I can shake a stick at. I am busy. But I am still bored.

Well, now you may ask. Why the boredom now?

My boredom stems not from having nothing to do but from having nothing that seems worthwhile doing. We human beings are addicted to meaning, and this kind of existential boredom signals its unhappy retreat. Surely, it shouldn't ever be as if you never existed at all?

The funny thing is, if boredom were due simply to lack of stuff to do it could be eradicated by giving people more to do. Even relatively mundane tasks will help alleviate the feeling of utter uselessness. However, this is only ever likely to work in the short-term if what people are asked to do does not contribute directly to something more meaningful — something bigger than themselves.

Likewise, if boredom were the result of having had too much of a good thing — the novelty has worn off, the sense of excitement has gone — it could be solved by giving people something new to do. This is one way that many people are busy but bored at work, and this type of boredom is particularly acute with high performers and with people who take to tasks quickly but are easily bored by them. There are some obvious fixes — such as job rotation, or a training program to broaden skills, or a larger portfolio of responsibilities — and usually this kind of boredom can be eradicated after a while.

But how do we fix our working lives when we suffer from the boredom of having more than enough to keep us busy all hours of the day, but nothing that gives us meaning?

And so it ultimately seems that the only obvious solution to existential boredom is to give people something more meaningful to do.

In fact, I occasionally ask the working class: if your organization disappeared overnight, aside from you and those that depend on you financially, who would actually care about this? Who would be affected by it, and why? There are many variations on these existential questions, and you will no doubt have yours, but their object is always the same: to wake people up to the realization that what they do on an everyday basis actually matters.

Left to your own devices, how might you address this? If meaningful work is too much to ask, why not develop a passion instead? Is it any surprise that many high achievers have “other lives”, or a competence in a skill unrelated to their everyday work? For example, in my own line of work, some of the most highly respected business folks are also quite accomplished in other areas. These include a poet, an adventure enthusiast and a basket-ball champion.

To sum it up, boredom or no boredom, the ifs and buts of it lies only in the single theory – would you be bored if:

a. you have nothing to do

b. you have stuff to do you don’t find interesting?

c. you have a bucket list so full that even a hole at the bottom of the bucket doesn't make a                difference?

I will go with the third personally with rather two holes in the bottom.

After all Friedrich Nietzsche was just understating when he said,” “Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?” 

It indeed is. I am bored again, and I am not yet finished!

-V!K$