Ask Eva: My Life Is Good, So Why Am I So Bored?

I'm healthy, like my job and have nice friends, but I'm always counting down to the next thing, one reader tells Eva Wiseman.

30 Jan 2019
Isabella Cotier / Lipstick of London

Dear Eva,
This isn’t a huge problem, but I’m writing because it is affecting my life. I’m 26 and single, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that I’m bored. I’m bored! I work in fashion, which is stressful but sometimes fun, a job I’ve always wanted, and I live with two friends in London. I have a good relationship with my family, and I’m healthy - in fact, maybe all this contributes to my problem! My life is fine! Except - the boredom means, it doesn’t feel like enough? I spend a lot of time counting down the clock before I can do the next thing, and then, at the next thing, I start counting down again, like I’m always waiting to be interested. Why am I so bored, when my life is so good?
Ms Tidy Room

Boredom. The word makes me nostalgic. This is a concept that seems to have disappeared around 2010, along with bedazzled denim and the smell of woodsmoke. It belongs in simpler times, before young people (having watched security dissolve like a vitamin) turned themselves into brands, never to rest, to sit for a second. And, of course, before mobile phones became the wonderful horrible dangerous gorgeous objects they are today: a library, a cinema, a party, a tool of torture, something angry to stare into between the hours of 8pm and 2am. Many of us don’t dip into the internet, we fall hard, as if down a staircase, landing at the bottom at dawn having investigated the suspicious death of a dancer in 1920, seen a man do unspeakable things to himself, and bought a jug in the shape of corn. I have watched a middle-aged man miss his stop, so absorbed was he in a game where he had to match up pretty diamonds on his phone, and at the time I imagined how he must have plunged into it to avoid something else, whether the continuing anxiety of work or the emptiness of a mind left alone. Where would his brain have taken him given half an hour on a journey underground with nothing to play with? Yes, much of me wants to applaud you for managing to be bored in 2019 - that is a skill.

And not just a skill. When it’s not something triggered by, say, nights packing boxes in a factory on an industrial estate, often boredom is a privilege. An absence of things that need doing now, a return to childhood, to school holidays when it felt like the walls were closing in. Though of course, it’s possible to be bored while doing something important - there were moments on maternity leave when I would burst into tears due to boredom, of sorts, but the word isn’t entirely accurate here. It was something deeper, some dark awakening, some cracking open of my identity, caused by another rereading of That’s Not My Lion. Which makes me wonder if what you’re experiencing is not actually boredom, but a kind of depression.

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Craig McDean

Could the thing you call boredom be a stifling of something deeper? Could the thing you call boredom be the sign of an absence, a need for the ‘next thing’? The next thing being a change, not just in conversation but in life - relationship, work, home, one of those large unwieldy stones that keep us earthbound. Could it be that what you’re actually battling with is not boredom, but the fear of being boring? Could it be loneliness? Could it be that you are angry, or sad, or simply unable to articulate your feelings, so stuck? The old advice, to get a hobby, sounds like a weary cliche, possibly from the mouth of one’s frustrated mum. But, wait. In this time of grim and revelatory conversations about mental health, the evidence mounts reminding us of the possibility of climbing out of uncomfortable holes by running, and by going outside, and doing a series of things that once we called hobbies, and I’d recommend dipping into this pot. On the other hand (I have many and I gesture freely, like a camp octopus) do you know they recommend it now? Boredom? As a long-lost tool for sparking creativity? Perhaps you should lean into it, squeeze out a painting, a poem. Imagine. Perhaps, also, you should recognise that boredom can be a welcome, drunken state, a necessary part of adulthood.

There is boredom of the sort that smothers you when forced to scroll through someone’s holiday photos, and then there is the more existential boredom, a restless apathy that pricks you late at night. Both have the potential to make your life better, once you name it. We’re used to thinking of boredom as a horrible, deadening state, but it can also alert you to a need to escape from the place you feel trapped. This could be the beginning of something great - this realisation that you’re bored could be the thing, the shove, that chucks you, flailing at first, into a new kind of life.

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