Your mega enemy: Boredom

Maybe because I went back to work, I began reading business books again. There I was fiddling through The 4-Hour Workweek, written by Timothy Ferriss, not sure if I liked it or not, until I hit a chapter about work being also a source of happiness. Yes, of course, I agreed. Then he asked: What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness, I thought. Sorrow? No, he wrote. The opposite of happiness is boredom.

Boredom! The word hit me between the eyes. Suddenly my life flashed by. I got married at 18, very young.   At 24, I decided to pack up my children and walk out of the house. Oh there were a million inconvenient things that happened, true, but underneath all that lay boredom, spread like a thick dirty wall-to-wall carpet. I was bored in the marriage and it forced me to other explorations. 

Don’t get me wrong. For a while I was a good wife. Learned how to cook, to sew, to embroider. Learned to play mahjong with other bored wives. Learned to make gigantic crepe paper flowers and to fix the house beautifully but in the end I was so bored. Nobody did anything to amuse me and I didn’t do anything to amuse either. Now clearly I see that was our sin. We bored each other to death.

But nobody told us not to do that. Nobody said that our duty in a marriage was to keep each other interested. We were told our duties were to make babies, which would keep us together, and incidentally keep house. No mention of boredom when, in life, I realize now, boredom is the greatest sin. It works insidiously. You don’t notice it. But it pushes you down strange paths, anything to make life more interesting, to make you feel more alive and deeply engrossed.

I worked at a Filipino ad agency for many years, learning the craft of advertising. Then out of the blue I decided to look for another job at a multinational agency because I wanted international experience. I got that, handled Coca-Cola, enjoyed it immensely for three years and then I got exhausted. I remember talking to my American boss, asking for a new assignment. How about Johnson and Johnson? He said he would talk to my clients first. Your clients love you, they won’t relinquish you, he came back saying. So I looked for another job and another after that and another after that. I went and searched always after I got bored. Apparently I get bored quickly but don’t realize it. Instead I feel restless, edgy. I look up over the wall for other options and there always are other options. 

Finally, my last job was with another Filipino ad agency. They hired me as president. My purpose was to turn it around because it was floundering. It was a family corporation. I turned it around. I wanted to sell it to a multinational corporation because I saw that was the key to survival then but the board denied me that option. In the end I now know, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I was so bored, so I quit.

I get bored with my jobs and with my relationships. Really, I get tired of them. It took me more than 40 years to realize that my problem was and probably always will be boredom. But now that I discovered it, I write about it so other people who might share this problem will become aware early, so they can assess their lives and do something.

How do you know you are bored? You wake up and don’t want to go to work. You find a million little things to do in your house. Once at the office, there is no joy in what you do. At around 3 p.m., when you’re tired of playing computer solitaire or any computer game at your desk, or walking around chatting with your office mates, you start looking at your watch. How much more time do I need to stay here? At the least provocation you leave work and go someplace else. Maybe drinking with other friends. Maybe watching a movie. Anything, just as long as it’s not work.

It could also happen the other way around. You wake up early, rush to work, stay there late and come home after everyone is asleep. There is just so much to do there that requires your presence. Maybe you just don’t want to go home and find your husband/wife awake. Maybe you are bored with your mate and don’t want to face it. What would you do? Would you have the courage to say, “I’m sorry but I am terribly bored with you.”? Can we do something about this? Can we make each other interesting again?

Can we? I don’t know. Personally, I don’t think so. But that may be because of my circumstances. When I was a baby, my father was killed by the Japanese. I grew up without a father. That never really bothered me although later I wondered why I was unable to stay interested in a man forever. When I decided to break up my marriage, I had no misgivings about how my children would feel. I grew up without a dad. It wasn’t all that bad. It bothered me more that the relationship had ceased to be interesting and could not be made interesting any more.

Take my word for it, boredom is our mega enemy. The solution to boredom is in our hands. We have to think of other paths, other things that will make life more interesting and discipline ourselves to learn them. I write, paint, sew, knit, crochet, make jewelry, fix my house. I wasn’t born knowing how to do those things. I set my mind to learn. I live alone but I am not bored. Nobody does anything for me, I do it all. You can do it, too. Just learn to do something new. Enjoy the learning. Laugh at your mistakes. Make sure you are fighting boredom because boredom is your mega enemy.

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