Overarchingly, I don’t mind being bored. I think it’s fine just to sit and do nothing sometimes. I don’t mind the dead time between tasks, or between train transfers. I am okay with filling my time doing something unproductive.
But there’s a different kind of boredom I can’t stand. Monotony. The drudge of everyday being the same. The lack of changing up routine. Don’t get me wrong, I think routine is good, especially for someone like me – a stone that cannot be moved without enough external force. However, sometimes it grinds on me. I listen to Living for the Weekend by Hard Fi on repeat on the way to work, just to lay in bed and watch YouTube when the weekend rolls around. I try to do stuff to make it different every now and then – I started ice skating a year ago, and I absolutely love it. I started knitting, doing colouring in books, sewing, baking, keeping my hands busy. Now those too have just become a part of the routine, which makes them less enjoyable than when they were novelties.
I dream of fucking off somewhere where I don’t have to listen to the same complaints from my dad everyday. Where my mum is no longer disabled. Where my sister doesn’t know I exist, and doesn’t care to find out. No such reality materialises. I suppose that speaks to how I really feel on the inside. I’m an adult with my own money. If I wanted to, I could leave tomorrow. I’m just waiting for the right circumstances, though these remain undefined. Having enough cash to have security, perhaps. Or waiting to grow my support network enough that I won’t feel scared to make the leap. However, the undefined never defines itself, and so the goalposts continue to move.
I wonder if I’ll be stuck here forever. A freezeframe. I watch people on the train on the commute, the same time and distance as my own. I wonder if they’re bored to their core like I am, or if they don’t think about it. I constantly think about the people who have done this for decades, and still have decades more sprawling ahead of them. How do they do it? Is it ‘out of sight, out of mind’? Surely that’s an insult to people’s intelligence – they’re as sentient as I, capable of thoughts like my own. It’s really insulting actually. They’re much smarter than me, it turns out. They’ve figured out how to cope.
When I think too much about the almost 40 years left of labour I have to do before retirement, I feel sick to my stomach. It genuinely feels like an allergic reaction, like my body is rejecting the future. More walking, sitting, walking, sitting. Laughing at my coworkers’ shitty jokes and them laughing at mine, both knowing we have nothing in common. Endless stretches of time typing, organising meetings to organise meetings, and awkward encounters at the coffee machine. For what? Is that living?
It’s like time standing still. Funnily enough, I don’t even hate my job. I don’t particularly like it, but I don’t dislike it either. It’s fine and it pays money in return. It’s just that I don’t think I could enjoy anything that requires 8 hours of daily effort for the foreseeable time horizon. I have a friend, Becca, who is so passionate about her job. She recently moved from an American firm to a British one, and she says the work is so much easier and gives her a better work-life balance … and she hates that! How crazy is that! I almost think she’s trying to wind me up. But her eyes are earnest.
“Losing that last job was worse than heartbreak – it was all encompassing for me.”
Have you ever heard such a thing! Someone so passionate about their job, and with their identity so intrinsically tied to it, that having a life outside of it feels like a fate worse than death. I simply couldn’t imagine, even if I had the most fun and emotionally fulfilling job on the planet. I wonder if it’s nature or nurture that’s caused Becca to be such a workaholic.
That aside, it doesn’t really help me. Her brain, for whatever reason, is wired differently to my own. Each to their own, and all that. But how to manage my own midlife crisis remains a mystery.
I’m trying to be more intentional – listening to others, keeping my eyes open, noticing things. Mindfulness, I hear the therapists are calling it these days. Maybe then, it’ll be more obvious to me I’m not on a perpetual loop, but that each day is ever-so-slightly different to the last. Habit is good for so many reasons, but it’s driving me insane. Maybe being more ‘present’ in the moment will take me out of the great abyss.
I think moving out wouldn’t hurt, either.