Lessons on Boredom from “The Joy of Not Working”

An Extremely Boring Disease to Have

Two gentlemen of leisure, a North American and a European, were discussing the joys of life when the European nonchalantly stated that he knew one hundred different ways to make love. The North American, somewhat in awe of what he had just heard, replied that he knew only one. The European asked which one it was. The North American described the most natural and conventional way. The European then replied to the North American: “Most interesting, I never would have thought of that! Thanks a million. Now I know a hundred and one ways.”

Are you like the North American or the European? Do you see only one way of doing things, or do you look for many? The habit of looking for one way—and the most conventional one, at that—will set you up for the disease described in the following exercise.

This disease afflicts over twenty million North Americans. It can give you a headache or a backache. It can give you insomnia or make you impotent. It has been labeled as a cause of gambling, overeating, and hypochondria. What is is ailment?

If you, at this moment, have a headache, are reading this book because you can’t sleep, and are deeply craving a giant five-decker sandwich after having just eaten one, it’s likely you are bored. The ailment described above is none other than boredom.

Now recognized as one of North America’s most serious health problems, boredom is at the root of many psychological disorders and physical problems. Some of the common physical symptoms associated with boredom include shortness of breath, headaches, excessive sleeping, skin rashes, dizziness, menstrual problems, and sexual dysfunction.

Moreover, boredom deprives people of the meaning of life and undermines their zest for living. Although it would seem to specifically affect those who are idle and jobless, boredom often afflicts people in the workplace.

People who are chronically bored tend to have the following traits:

They are anxious for security and material things.
They are highly sensitive to criticism.
They are conformists.
They are worriers.
They lack self-confidence.
They are not very creative.

Clearly, boredom is most likely to hit people who choose the safer, no-risk path. Because they take no risks, bored people seldom reap the payoffs of accomplishment, contentment, and satisfaction.

The Real Causes of Boredom

Most of us get bored to some degree at various stages of our lives. Ironically, many of the things we strive for can end up boring us. For some people, a new job becomes boring over time. An exciting relationship may become dull. And leisure time once deemed precious may turn into dead time.

When we get bored, we can place the blame on many things: society, friends, relatives, dull TV programs, an uninteresting city, a depressed economy, the neighbor’s stupid dog, or a gloomy day. Putting the blame on external forces is the easiest way to react because then we don’t have to take responsibility for our boredom. Placing blame elsewhere, however, is as effective as a screen door on a submarine.

To overcome boredom, we can look to psychologists for guidance. They cite the following causes for this affliction:

Unfulfilled expectations
Boring jobs that have no challenge to them
Lack of physical activity
Being too often a spectator and too seldom a participant

Clearly, we are responsible for our lack of physical activity, unfulfilled expectations, remaining in boring jobs, or being a spectator instead of a participant. We end up being bored because we allow these factors to manifest themselves in our lives. In short, we are the ultimate authors of our boredom.

“Somebody is boring me,” declared Dylan Thomas. “I think it is me.” If you get bored often, it behooves you to post Thomas’s words where you can regularly read them. After all, whenever you are experiencing boredom, you have chosen it. The question you have to answer is: why? Perhaps the words of Leo Buscaglia may come in handy. “If you are bored,” stated Buscaglia, “it’s because you are boring.”

Life can be fulfilling and rewarding, or it can be boring and disappointing. Richard Bach warned us with these important words: “In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.” Overcoming boredom does require giving up the safe and familiar. It is well worth it, however. Particularly if you have wasted the first part of your adult life on boring work, you certainly don’t want to be like so many individuals who waste the second part of their adult lives on a boring retirement.

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Abolish Boredom with the Easy Rule of Life

Whether retired, unemployed, or gainfully employed, people afflicted with boredom violate the Easy Rule of Life. “What the heck is the Easy Rule of Life?” you may ask. It’s a basic principle of the universe and a very powerful one. The degree to which you follow the Easy Rule of Life will determine how much satisfaction and happiness you achieve throughout your whole life.

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The essence of the Easy Rule of Life is straightforward: if we do the easy and comfortable, life ends up being difficult. Ninety percent of us immediately choose this route because short-term comfort seems more appealing than the alternative. But one problem with a comfortable life is that it gets boring in no time.

Unfortunately, most of us gravitate toward less pain and more pleasure. Choosing the easy way, however—the one with lots of comfort and pleasure—ensures that we wind up in a rut. And the only difference between a rut and a grave is the dimensions. In the rut we get to join the living-dead, and in the grave we get to join the dead-dead. Joining the living-dead is a surefire way to have a lot of boredom in our lives.

If we do the difficult and uncomfortable, however, life ends up being easy. Ten percent of us immediately take this route because we know we must experience short-term discomfort for long-term gains. By undertaking difficult and uncomfortable activities, we experience satisfaction and accomplishment in our lives. This means being truly alive, with little or no room for boredom.

Let me warn you that the Easy Rule of Life is something like the law of gravity. Mess around with the law of gravity by walking off the top of a building and see what happens to you. It knocks you on your butt. The same thing applies with the Easy Rule of Life. Mess around with it by taking the easy way, and you wind up on your butt as well. Believe me, it works every time.

The Easy Rule of Life influences every area of our lives, including success at work, financial gain, quality of friendships, quality of family life, parenting, love, health, and satisfaction from leisure activities. For example, if you are presently a smoker, the easy and comfortable way is to keep smoking because you don’t think you have what it takes to quit. Conversely, the difficult and uncomfortable way is to challenge yourself and realize that if others can quit, then so can you.

When you eventually quit smoking, you will consider this as one of your greatest life accomplishments. It will give you incredible satisfaction and elevate your self-esteem a few notches. Of course, we can’t forget all the other benefits of quitting smoking—such as more energy, less coughing, fewer colds, fewer respiratory problems, and reduced risk of lung cancer and heart disease—not to mention all the money that will stay in your hands instead of the tobacco companies’ coffers. These benefits will make your life a lot easier and more comfortable in the long term, including being able to be more effective at work or play.

Clearly, if all of us applied the Easy Rule of Life more, we would have far fewer lingering problems, attain much more success, and be much more effective in using our leisure time. Moreover, we would abolish boredom in our lives.

If you are presently working and your job is primarily composed of tasks that you consider extremely boring, you should consider making changes in your job or leaving your job, either for another job or by retiring. You must make the Easy Rule of Life work for you. Only by doing the difficult and uncomfortable can you make your life more interesting and fulfilling.

Interestingly, the Easy Rule of Life even applies to workaholics who erroneously think that they are taking the difficult and uncomfortable route by working harder and longer than the mass of humanity. Perhaps you yourself are a workaholic and think that you are well on your way to eventually finding fulfillment when you attain more knowledge and power than everyone else. A few months of therapy should put an end to your illusion.

Workaholics are in fact doing the easy and comfortable by choosing work as an escape from other aspects of life. Workaholics work long hours to avoid job loss, criticism, bad marriages, debt, and loneliness. Peak performers, on the other hand, work for praise, satisfaction, self-respect, challenge, and fun. Regardless of the positive aspects of their jobs, peak performers indulge themselves in many of life’s other great pleasures. This is why they work as hard as they have to for a comfortable living, and as little as they can get away with.

Workaholics’ lives end up difficult not only because of boredom, but because they don’t find the contentment and peace of mind that peak performers find. For workaholics who want to overcome boredom and have an interesting life instead, the difficult and uncomfortable task is indulging in more leisure time. Only then can they get a life that leads to fulfillment.

If You Do Boring, Stupid, Monotonous Work, Chances Are You’ll End up Boring, Stupid and Monotonous

In much of the developed world, working at something that is extremely boring—even if the activity has absolutely no purpose to it—is viewed as much more noble and productive than taking it easy and enjoying one’s life. How sad indeed! Ironically, this happens in societies that consider themselves the most intelligent and advanced ever.

Weird as it may seem, the inability to conquer boredom in their personal lives is why many people shun retirement and continue to work at the most boring jobs imaginable. British-born American writer and critics W. H. Auden stated, “A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office every day. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.”

No doubt there will always be people who display impressive talent in the work world , but aspire no higher. They have no inclination to develop themselves as more rounded human beings by getting immersed in the world of leisure. These people will probably want to work at their boring jobs until they drop dead or they can no longer work due to ill health.

Unlike people who want to work, and do nothing else, until they drop dead, you no doubt have constructive leisure activities and other dreams that you have wanted to pursue for some time. These may have been suppressed because you have become too obsessed with making as much money as possible and obtaining more possessions than your neighbors and friends. Fame, as a way of attaining immortality, may also be one of your career objectives.

In your quest for fame and fortune, however, don’t ever forget this important message from Michael Pritchard: “No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather.”

Ashley Montagu also had an important message: “The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.” To put it another way, it’s not what you become, but what you don’t become that will hurt most in the end.

If you are stuck in your career, leaving a less-than-mediocre job won’t be easy. You may need the money and not have time to look for another job. If you have some opportunity to leave a boring and dehumanizing job, however, you must do it now for your long-term health and happiness. Making too many compromises to your lifestyle for the sake of your job makes for a bored (and possibly a boring) you.

In his essay “Abolish Work: Workers of the World, Relax,” Bob Black offers some food for thought. “You are what you do,” states Black. “If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, changes are you’ll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous.”

Here is a test for the true value of your present job: If your two favorite times at work are lunch time and quitting time, the message is clear as could be. It’s time to move on. Clearly, you won’t have a complete life until you have work that really matters to you. It may be difficult to leave a well-established job for a new, interesting, and challenging occupation, but not impossible. Millions have done it; so can you.

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One of the realities of modern life is that we all have many interesting things we would like to pursue, but limited time for pursuing them. We have to make decisions as to how we spend our time, not only in how much we work, but also in how we pursue the interesting and challenging things life has to offer. Irrespective of our income and net worth, we can be truly prosperous only if we get involved in a myriad of activities away from the world of work.

Clearly, being successful at work is irrelevant if you are a failure at life in general. Indeed, it’s possible to be a huge success at work and miss out on life completely. You shouldn’t be sacrificing present joy, happiness, and satisfaction for a few extra lousy bucks, especially if you are going to spend the money frivolously on some gadgets that won’t enhance your life significantly. Day-to-day life will be boring and have little meaning if your main reason for going to work is to pay for all those possessions you don’t have time to use.

What’s the point of being well-off financially if there’s no time to truly live, only enough to exist? Constructive leisure activities are at least half of what you need for a life of purpose and accomplishment. Friends, family, adventure, walking, meditating, creative loafing, and spiritual fulfillment—not working long and hard hours—are the things that make life worth living.

If you find yourself focusing on business and financial issues to the detriment and exclusion of everything else, you have a clear case of poverty consciousness—more so than many people who have much less money than you, but nevertheless get to enjoy many constructive leisure activities. Money and possessions are important to a certain extent, but not important enough to put them ahead of everything else. If you are leading a boring life to earn big money, you are poor no matter how much you earn.

The best way for us to get rid of our boredom is to take some risks in our lives. By subjecting ourselves to the chance of failure, we put our boredom at risk.

Moe Roseb put his boredom at risk. After purchasing my first book, Moe called me from San Diego to talk about the power of creativity. In our conversation we discussed the whole idea of taking risks in life.

He talked about how his friends, many of whom he had known for years, were rather boring. Some were having midlife crises. Friends still saw Moe and his wife as being the same as they were fifteen years ago, even though both of them had continued to grow and develop as individuals. Moe felt that his relationships with these friends had stagnated.

So did Moe continue to blame his friends for his situation? No. He put his boredom at risk and did something about it. At forty-six, with the children gone, Moe moved from Toronto to California to new friends, new surroundings, and a new life. Moe looked at it this way: “Many of my friends are having midlife crises. I am going to have a midlife adventure instead.”

Many people immersed in a sea of boredom during their working lives take refuge in visions of a full, adventurous, satisfying, and happy life sometime later, when they will be able to slow down and start enjoying themselves. They are waiting for the day they finally acquire a sufficient sum of money, or the day that they retire on Social Security, to really start living. Unfortunately, this day rarely comes. People either die first or don’t have the mental or physical capacity to enjoy themselves when they eventually have enough money and time.

You won’t be prosperous until you sleep enough, eat well, exercise regularly, spend sufficient time with friends and family, and have plenty of time left over to pursue interesting and challenging leisure activities. Not surprisingly, researchers have found that individuals who find the time to do the things they enjoy are much happier and live longer than people who just plod on with their work and regular routines at the expense of personal life.