How I learned to embrace my boring life
Forget sadness, grief, or physical pain. The greatest agony in life is often boredom — if only because we experience it so frequently.
It’s the Chinese water torture of life. Each mundane task is another drip slowly compounding to drive us mad.
Waking up to the alarm — drip. Showering — drip. Brushing teeth — drip. Searching for an outfit — drip. Eating the same breakfast for the 256th day in a row — drip. Walking the dog — drip. Rehashing morning small talk with coworkers — drip.
After awhile, it all seems worthless and meaningless. And I’m not alone — according to one study, two-thirds of my generation feels bored with life.
Sometimes I feel so bored with life that I want to uproot it all. Make a big change. Move to a more vibrant city. Embark on a new career. Get another dog. Somehow, it seems these things might cure me of my endless ennui.
But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to accept and even embrace my boring life because I know that even if it were different, I probably wouldn’t be happier. And here’s why:
1. People are bad at predicting what’s going to make them happy
If you had to guess which of these three groups is happiest, which would you choose?:
- Lottery winners a year after winning the lottery
- Paraplegics a year after the accident that caused their paraplegia
- Regular joes
Most people assume the lottery winners would be happiest. But they’re wrong.
According to a 1978 study, the lottery winners were just barely happier than the paraplegics. And they weren’t any happier than regular Joes (the control group).
How could this be?
It’s due to a concept called hedonic adaptation, which is the theory that we all have a “set point” for our happiness. In other words, despite major positive or negative life changes, we always return to our “baseline” happiness. Harvard happiness researcher Dan Gilbert (who has a great Ted Talk, by the way) puts it this way:
The truth is, bad things don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That’s true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.
So the good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that winning the lottery will not make you as happy as you expect.
I’ve seen this happen over and over again in my own life.
A few years ago, I decided to move across the country from Charlotte to Phoenix. In the months leading up to the move, I kept telling myself I would enjoy west coast living way more than east coast living. Every time I walked my dogs in the rain or snow, I envisioned my future — a life of endless sunshine in paradise.
I thought I would finally find my people in Phoenix. I pictured myself making lots of new friends easily. I convinced myself that I’d fit in more with the west coast stereotype — I was a laid back, yoga practicing, flip-flop wearing 20 something. I was totally bound to love it, right?
Wrong. Well, sort of. It was fun at first. I had moved there with my boyfriend (now husband) and we basked in all the novelty. Cacti and dust storms were way different than the oak trees and regular drizzle we were used to. We explored lots of new cities and towns and saw landscapes and architecture that were foreign to us.
But after awhile, I habituated to it. It became my new normal. Day after day of sunshine — surprisingly — became boring. I hadn’t made a ton of new friends. In fact, I was lonely. And I still had to go through the same routine I had gone through on the east coast. I still had to get up every morning, walk the dogs, go to work, etc.
There’s a saying: “wherever you go, there you are.” In Arizona, I was still me. I still had all my insecurities and neuroses. I didn’t leave those behind in Charlotte. And there I was in Arizona, without friends or family (other than my boyfriend) to speak of.
I wound up heading back to Charlotte after a year and a half and I’m happier here. I don’t fit in more with the west coast after all. Being out there made me realize how much I love big leafy trees and variation in weather patterns.
And I remind myself of this — the fact that I’m bad at making predictions about my own happiness — every time I have the urge to flee to another city or make a radical change in my life.
2. Life is not supposed to be exciting all the time
I once knew a girl who was a respiratory therapist. Respiratory therapists care for patients who are having difficulty breathing — either due to chronic disease or trauma — heart attack, stroke, or a wound, for example.
I thought her job sounded fascinating. But when I told her this, she said:
“Meh, it’s ok. It can get kind of boring. I was doing CPR on a stab wound victim the other day and I noticed my mind was just wandering.”
Wait, what?
This girl was in the middle of saving someone’s life and she was bored? Her mind was wandering?
My mind was blown.
It makes sense though. Part of this goes back to point #1 — after awhile, hedonic adaptation sets in and things that were exciting to us eventually become normal.
But this “becoming normal” also serves a deeper purpose. Evolutionarily, it doesn’t make sense for us to be excited all the time. If my friend had been nervous or excited every time she had to help an injured person, she probably wouldn’t be able to do her job well.
This is the same principle behind why, after awhile, the fierce passion of romantic love fades into less exciting companionate love. As one New York Times article puts it: “if we obsessed, endlessly, about our partners and had sex with them multiple times a day — every day — we would not be very productive at work or attentive to our children, our friends, or our health.”
It’s not practical to be in a state of arousal all the time.
Our day to day life is supposed to be kind of mundane. In her book Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf calls this mundane state of existence “non-being”. She writes:
“Every day includes much more non‐being than being. Yesterday for example, Tuesday the 18th of April, was [as] it happened a good day; above the average in “being.” It was fine; I enjoyed welting these first pages; my head was relieved of the pressure of writing about Roger; I walked over Mount Misery and along the river; and save that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I like — there were the willows, I remember, all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue. I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book — the memoirs of Madame de la Fayette — which interested me. These separate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of non‐being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool.”
This nondescript cotton — the mundane moments you forget about — is really the meat of your life. But that’s ok because….
3. We enjoy these mundane moments more than we think we do
Or, at least looking back on them.
Have you ever taken a picture of something completely mundane and then later felt a ton of joy when you looked back on that moment?
My husband and I take lots of pictures and videos of random things — a slug on the sidewalk, our dogs playing, a particularly nice looking steak we made for dinner. None of these things are extraordinary, but we get a lot of joy looking back on them. It’s fun to notice all the little details we’d forgotten — like how our dog still looked like a puppy or how the house was arranged differently at the time.
This enjoyment we experience is interesting and backed up by research. In one study, participants were asked what they would rather do right now: write down the last conversation they had or watch a funny video. Then a month later, they were asked what they’d rather do — read a random conversation they’d had a month ago or watch a funny video.
Participants didn’t think they’d be interested in reading a log of an ordinary event in their everyday lives. But a month later when it came time to reread the log, they were much more interested and experienced more pleasure than they’d expected to when reading the log.
We get a lot more joy out of our daily lives than we realize.
Despite this, we tend to think of our lives as a series of milestones. When we think of our life story, we think of the big moves we made, the degrees we got, the jobs we started, our marriage, the birth of our children. And these things are important, but in reality are a small portion of what comprises our lives. It’s the little day-to-day occurrences where most of our lives are lived.
So when we look back on these moments, we’re looking back at these ordinary, beautiful moments with new eyes. The dogs playing, the loving act of making dinner, the way the laundry was scattered in that one photo. That is the true story of our lives.
And that is what I try to tell myself when I’m living through these run-of-the-mill moments. It reminds me of this moment from The Office finale:
These days — these simple, boring days — are my good old days.
4. Boredom itself is interesting and useful
Boredom is painful, but it exists for a reason.
It’s what pushes us to try new things. Psychologists believe that boredom may be responsible for man discovering new continents and creating new inventions.
After all, humans need stimulation and novelty — these things play a role in brain plasticity and encourage new brain cell birth. And boredom is the catalyst that helps us find this novelty.
You have to feel the frustration of boredom to forge new paths, to find new things.
My husband and I sometimes get so bored that we hop in the car and drive around town without destination.
Because of this, we’ve found many of our favorite restaurants or marveled at new streets we never would have known existed. We’ve gone on random day trips and produced new memories.
Thinking about this, I wonder how many times boredom has set in motion a series of events that led to a new memory, a new favorite book, a new friend, or a new favorite movie.
A lot of the good things in your life have probably come from boredom.
And when you think about it, that’s pretty damn interesting.
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