So much of our lives is spent doing boring things, mundane activities, and it seems like it’s very hard to get away from that.
I mean, we all try to have more fun, and it’s almost like sometimes this kind of entertainment that we seek, we’re trying to compensate for the boredom and the dullness of so much of our time, so that we become hungry for some kind of more intense sensation, things that are more interesting and engaging and fun.
And we look to these things to fill our free time, because so much of the day is already filled up with dullness.
But this has always bothered me, because it seems like it’s not OK to spend most of our lives being bored.
I mean, we only get a short time to be alive, and we really can choose to do whatever we want in life.
Of course, also accepting the consequences that that involves. […]
But we can really do what we choose to do.
Just that of course, whatever we choose will lead to various consequences.
Because so many of those consequences are bad, we tend to funnel ourselves into doing a certain range of activities, avoiding things that would get us killed or imprisoned or make us very sick, or anything that would really make life immediately either over or very unpleasant.
We avoid doing all those things, and of course that starts to include things like OK, we have to make money in order to support ourselves so that we don’t end up being sick and miserable, and we also need to do things like cleaning.
Everything is just constantly degrading and breaking down, and we have to put effort into cleaning and arranging everything so that everything is in good order.
We choose to do that, even though of course, we don’t have to.
So we all end up making these choices of doing all these boring things, because we’ve determined that it’s better than the alternative.
But unfortunately, it seems to lead to so much of our waking lives being spent in things that just aren’t engaging, fun, that don’t really make us feel alive.
So it seems to me like if we have to do it- now of course, we can ask ourselves, do we really need to do all these things? And each of these boring things that we automatically do, we can certainly challenge each of them and really ask ourselves if we really need to do it. […]
But still, so much of what we do is going to be required.
Like you could say, you know, brushing my teeth and washing my dishes: that’s just not that fun, but the alternative of not doing those things doesn’t seem like it’s going to lead to anything fun either.
So simply there’s going to be a range of boring mundane things that we automatically have to accept as part of life, and these things take a lot of time.
So it seems like the only way, the way to really make this good, to turn this into something good, is that we have to find a way to make these boring things more meaningful to us, more fun, more engaging.
And I’ve talked in an earlier video about the idea of connecting boring things to something that is more meaningful, that’s something that you then you really care about.
So you can do a boring thing like washing dishes, because you like to eat food off a clean plate, and that’s a wonderful thing.
So if you can really feel that connection while washing dishes, that you’re giving yourself the joy of eating off a clean plate, then that really makes washing the dishes a lot more of a- maybe the word “engaging” is not quite right for washing dishes, but it feels like “Yes, this is the right thing to do.” But another way to look at it is bringing out the fun and the joy of these kind of simple activities is just in the attitude that we do them with.
We can do the most boring thing, but we can do it with an attitude of fun, simply in the way that we’re being bringing our personality, bringing humour to it.
And we’ve all seen people that, you know, you’ve seen them doing boring jobs, but they do it with kind of like a flair and a personality and a humour that really brings a kind of humanity, a kind of reality, and a kind of fun to the most boring jobs.
Just like we could see somebody doing an amazing job, they have a bad attitude about it, and then it turns into an onerous chore.
So it seems like we all have this ability to bring a certain kind of easygoing, fun playfulness to the most mundane things.
Bring a sense of humour to them.
And maybe this is one of the great things that a good sense of humour can do, by enlivening even the dullest moments of our day, so that we don’t have to spend large sections of our day feeling bored and waiting for it to end.
Of course, there’s some activities we can prefer more than others, but still, it seems like throughout our day, we can carry forward this feeling of good humour and good spirit and joy to be able to do what we’re doing.
#boringwork #chores #goodhumour