The only time I ever consistently got in trouble in grade school (or really, any school other than Broadway) was for talking loudly about how bored I was. In first grade at St. Paul’s Elementary School, I would quip about how easy a timed math test was and wonder, along with my friends who were also done early, why the school was wasting our time so.
We spent recess inside. Our reward for expressing dissatisfaction with boredom was more boredom.
The teacher pulled me aside after one of the episodes (maybe every episode – it probably got repetitive for both of us) and explained why I was missing recess. “How do you think other people feel when you say that? Maybe the test isn’t easy for them.”
This seemed truly impossible to me. I appealed to objectivity. “But it was easy.”
“For you it was easy. But it might not have been easy for everyone. And hearing you say it was easy just makes them feel bad.”
It’s been one long slow spiral into mediocrity ever since.
I think those who spend time bored in school assume that the rest of life must offer a respite from the regime of the dull. I know I was counting on this. But as the Country Quiz, countless posts in this blog and in Introspection, and hundreds of lost hopeless hours can attest, boredom is just a way of life. The real world requires boredom of its subjects, doubly so for those who work quickly and hunger for interesting uses of time.
I’ve many theories on why this is, and the truth likely lies at the crossroads between all of them. For one, as the fable of my six-year-old self attests, the average task is tailored for the lowest common denominator. Even in a high-quality job, one will generally only be expected to fulfill the bare minimum that could possibly be expected of the worst exemplar of that job. For example, modern financial CEO’s will be lavished with bonuses and praise for not losing the entire fiscal future of the company. People used to criticize the government deficit, saying that if “I ran a business like that, I’d get fired.” Not so. But if you ran a business slightly better than that, you’d get promoted! Or poached by another higher-paying firm.
We all must sit for 40 hours in our respective seats (or more for some) because 40 hours would be required by people with a pulse and little more to do their jobs. And everyone has to have a job! What would become of people if they didn’t have the meaningless drudgery of a commute, a job, and a return commute every day? If they could make use of their time rather than being wiped out to the exhaustion of a TV-only-stupor by meaningless expenditures of 40+ hours? Rebellion, creativity, mayhem, that’s what. So 40 hours for all of us, regardless of whether only 12 of it are productive.
You know what’s a good supplement to your 40-hour time-in-the-seat fiesta? Trainings. It’s like bringing school back to work! The two grand sources of boredom, together again in one impossibly unbearable package. Trainings can teach you to use buzzwords that make it sound like you’re spending your 40 hours on a more sophisticated plane than others. Or to spend more of your time trying to make it seem like you’re doing things while not criticizing others for seeming to do even less than you seem to do. Or for somehow not managing to do things, even when there is so. Much. Time. In the seat.
The thing is, people are freaking out about 5.5% unemployment, so the 45% unemployment that would be created by cracking down on boredom in the workplace just wouldn’t be palatable. See all the analysis above about people “needing” jobs.
Don’t get me wrong – I understand that about 95% of that 45% need a job to “earn a living” in this society. That they would starve or have to seek inappropriate work instead. So my complaint is not really with those people so much as the structure into which they were born and raised. One should not need to sit for 40 hours a week in utter boredom in order to feed oneself. There just has to be a better way.
I don’t know what to tell you if you’re still in school and desperately hoping that something other than boredom is waiting on the other side of your current strife. Most people would tell you to get a job where you’re sure you won’t be bored.
To which I have this to say to you: “Good luck.”
Because you will be bored, unless you get extremely lucky. Even jobs that seems like the most scintillating and interesting uses of time are filled with trainings, or sudden bouts of downtime, or so much rote work (even stressful, tight-deadline, high-pressure rote work), that you will be bored. You can put it on the board. Yes.
Even the President of the United States must be bored much of the time. State dinners? Meetings with the leaders of obscure but quietly settled countries? Fundraisers?
I was bored an uncanny amount of the time while counseling troubled young teenagers, living with other troubled young teenagers, who all sat around much of their lives waiting for perfect moments to violently attack us, each other, or themselves.
Good luck.
Collectively, something could be done with all this rotting of brainpower in wasted, monotonous time. Something momentous. Something that people currently consider physically impossible within the limitations of the planet on which we reside.
Defying boredom and finding something worthwhile to do is looking less like a good distraction and more like a moral obligation.
Maybe I just need to go out for recess.
