I don’t understand boredom.
How is it possible in a world filled with so much possibility, opportunity, content, and beauty for someone to ever be bored?
I can’t remember the last time I was bored. It’s probably been at least four decades since I was genuinely, insufferably bored.
This is not to say that every moment of my life provides entertainment, engagement, or import, but when the universe doesn’t deliver, we should take care of business ourselves.
A meeting isn’t especially necessary or enlightening?
I have a multitude of ways to make the meeting productive for me. I bring work to the meeting. Silently craft a story in my mind. Work on memorizing a poem.
I wrote over half of “Twenty-one Truths About Love” — a novel written entirely in list form — in meetings.
A colleague likes to say he’s going to “Matt Dicks” this meeting, meaning that in anticipation of a pointless and meaningless meeting, he ensures he has something to keep him engaged and productive.
A plane ride is especially long?
I ensure I have plenty to do, from writing to movies and even napping.
You can’t be bored while taking a nap.
Watching an especially bad movie — as I recently did?
I spend my time cataloging the story’s problems and identifying ways that it could’ve been improved. I make predictions about what will happen next. I attempt to envision the filmmaker’s pitch that led to this disaster.
The closest I probably come to being bored is when I am stuck in traffic, but even then, my frustration is born from lost opportunity rather than boredom. Music, audiobooks, podcasts, and conversations with the people traveling with me all prevent boredom from ever taking hold, even when I’d very much prefer to be somewhere else.
I suspect that some jobs make the possibility of boredom more likely, but even when working at McDonald’s as a crew member and manager, I was never bored.
First, I tried like hell to be excellent at everything I did. I won the Golden Spatula Award three years in a row for producing the most burgers in timed competitions, and I worked relentlessly to set records on drive-thru service times. As a manager, I had labor and food cost goals that I was constantly trying to exceed, and I was always hunting for the next great employee.
Pursuing excellence is an easy way to avoid boredom.
But I also spent lots of time talking and laughing with people who became some of my closest friends.
But when even that didn’t work, I created games to entertain myself and others.
When taking orders via the drive-thru, coworkers challenged me to use a specific word in the conversation.
“Welcome to McDonald’s, where every day is splendiferous. Can I take your order?”
“Hi, can I take your order and get that hungry Cyclops off your back?”
“Good morning! My meow-meow kitty-cat is asleep, but I am awake and ready to take your order.”
When I ran orders out the window in the drive-thru, we would battle my colleagues to see who could offer the oddest condiment to a customer and have them accept it.
“Would you like some cream or sugar with that?” I’d ask.
“With my fries?”
“Sure,” I’d say. “Why not?”
Not every job offers this flexibility, but I bet more do than is often understood.
I recently saw a woman wearing headphones and dancing behind the currency exchange counter at the Minneapolis airport. It wasn’t anything flamboyant or excessive. She was just grooving to some beat and smiling while doing so.
She was not bored.
The ticket taker at the local AMC movie theater offers a trivia fact related to the movie you’re about to see. Nothing to give away the plot, but something that you might never know about the movie unless he had offered that nugget of wisdom.
He seems to love offering these facts to customers.
My postal carrier listens to audiobooks while delivering the mail.
I knew a bank teller who spent her days subtly rearranging her boss’s desk so that after a week or two, everything on the desk was positioned somewhere else.
Then she’d begin again.
Boredom is almost always the result of a lack of effort.
An unwillingness to try.
An inability to be creative about your time and space.
An absence of imagination.
Boring people are bored.
