Summary

The author discusses the nature of boredom in a creative career, emphasizing its temporary state and how planning and embracing humor can help overcome it.

Abstract

The author reflects on the experience of daily blogging over two months, highlighting the rarity of boredom due to the creative freedom that allows one to find inspiration in daily life. Boredom is distinguished from a creativity block, with the former being a lack of engagement due to mundanity and the latter a result of setting excessively high expectations. The author shares personal strategies for managing boredom and creativity blocks, such as planning topics in advance, acknowledging the temporary nature of these states, and using humor as an escape. The article is part of a series documenting the author's 100-day blogging streak, with a commitment to incorporating more humor, particularly sarcasm, in future posts.

Opinions

Boredom in a creative career is often short-lived, contrasting with the more persistent challenge of a creativity block.
Daily blogging provides a constant source of inspiration and activity, reducing the likelihood of feeling bored.
Planning ahead can be an effective method to prevent boredom and maintain a steady flow of content creation.
Impostor syndrome is acknowledged as a psychological barrier that can be overcome by reviewing one's previous work and recognizing personal achievements.
Humor, especially sarcasm, is seen as a valuable tool for engaging with content creation and can make writing more enjoyable and natural.
The author views moods, including boredom, as transient and not requiring excessive effort to overcome.
The personal narrative suggests that embracing a range of emotions in one's work can prevent the feeling of being stuck in a monotonous routine.

We Rarely Acknowledge The Fact That Boredom is Temporary

You are rarely bored in a creative career. I am speaking this from the experience of 2 months of practising daily blogging.

The freedom in such a career will let you find inspiration from daily activities and then create something out of it.

You are on fire, shipping new content every day and nailing as you expected.

Boredom is different from a creativity block.

Boredom happens when the task at hand feels so mundane that no effort goes in it and hence, no adventure. Creativity block, on the other hand, is the inability to harness your creativity because of setting higher expectations than usual.

When I started my blogging streak on March 25 this year, I planned a set of topics to write about in the initial days.

As the days passed, the nervosity of hitting “publish” button vanished, and it shows up whenever I brainstorm about new ideas. It comes and goes. I can’t help it. I just think of it a temporary reaction and give it time to settle down while I relax in an off-hour by walking or listening to music.

Planning helps eradicate boredom.

I even published a blog on writer’s block because of the inability to boil down to a single topic of interest.

From then on, I usually plan at least a day’s topic. It is how I have reached day 62 today, and it feels like magic sometimes.

I even get impostor syndrome occasionally, but to shake it off I just read my previous posts. I console myself that impostor syndrome is only a psychological state that often pops up when we don’t want to credit ourself for our work.

Why does boredom happen?

Boredom is a mood. And like every other mood, it is temporary. I am an avid blogger, but yes, when I don’t mix a range of emotions in my blogs, I feel like I am flowing with the same tone every day. It feels like I am a hypocrite by calling myself a follower of experimental psychology.

How to overcome boredom?

Usually, we don’t have to push too much. Just knowing that it is temporary, it is satisfying enough.

It will hardly last a minute or an hour, depending on how seriously you take it.

I also get bored with topics sometimes. My escape? Humour. Laughter is my tunnel to the imaginary world where I can smile without finding a reason to jinx it.

I am also planning to include more humour in future posts because humour comes more natural in talking ( for extroverts like me) and when you “write the way you talk”, the fun will flow in writing too!

Let’s see if I can live up to this expectation because humour also has a lot of sub-genres, and I am branching out with the one which seems most challenging right now: Sarcasm!

This blog belongs to a series of posts I am publishing in this 100-days streak. Navigate to the end of article 22, for the references from day 23 onwards. If you would like to read the ones before day 22, here is the first one that documents them in the end.

~ Sanjeev