Mary Mann - Yawn: Adventures in Boredom

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

To my family, and to Grant

We were talking about work, naturally. The table was littered with beer bottles and the view out the plate-glass restaurant window was of a street in Kansas City, but it could have been a street in any number of towns. Our conversation was as typical as our surroundings, down to Nate summing up his job in the pharmaceutical industry with Yeah, Im bored at work all the time.

There are few more ordinary sentiments. Over 70 percent of Americans, and 80 percent of people worldwide, are bored with or actively dislike their jobs. None of us sitting around the table that night knew this statistic, but we did know plenty of people, which amounted to more or less the same thing. Nate said he could count on one hand the people I know who bounce out of bed excited to go to work.

One of them was his wife, Amy, sitting next to him in a crisp, white collared shirt even though it was a Saturday (Nate wore a faded Royals T-shirt). Amy had decided she wanted to be a lawyer when she was twelve and never wavered, even during her Alice Cooper yearswhich was how wed met, because her skull-and-crossbones T-shirt and my patchwork corduroys were the only non-pantsuits at a Women in Leadership seminar we both attended in college. Amy no longer dyes her hair black but shes still on the same path, still corresponds with the seminar speakers; less than a decade after the seminar, she is a woman in leadership, with an in-house counsel gig at a global bank. Meanwhile, Id burned through more careers than Nate, which, he agreed, was saying something.

It worried me, this restlessness, so much so that Id begun studying boredom itself in hopes of finding answers. I didnt know until that night in Kansas City that Nate was similarly concerned, and that hed also been talking and thinking quite a bit about boredom as a result. Most people are relieved when I bring it up, he told me. Like, Oh, thank god, someone I can talk to about this . So now Im more comfortable with talking about boredom than I used to be, and that helps a lot. Because, you know, boredom doesnt mean its not a good job. Im busy. I make a living. I just dont know if Ill ever be that into work. Which feels weird to say. Amy scooted closer to him, and he put his arm around her and smiled at his driven wife, with whom he raises chickens and dogs, plays video games, and attends Royals games. But I have other things I do care about, he added. At the end of the day, I have to ask: Whats really so shitty about being bored at work?

* * *

The question nagged me all the way back to New York, back to the fifth-floor walk-up where I live with my boyfriend, our fingers perpetually crossed in hopes that our landlord wont raise the rent. Whats really so shitty about being bored at work? It takes two jobs to cover my portion of rent: working as a writing associate at a college and as a researcher for private clients, which is kind of like being a private detective, without the danger and sex. Most of my work is done in librariesfrom the dim stacks of Columbia to the tourist-crammed halls of Schwarzman, with its grand columns and stone lionsthough sometimes I also conduct interviews. Once I interviewed a real private detective, a former city cop whod quit the force, moved to New Jersey, and found detective work a nice change of pace. He explained how he tails people on the subway (you never get in the same car as your mark; its too obvious) and described a stakeout: sitting awake and alert in his car throughout the night, no radio, no book or TV, resisting the urge to look at his phone because if you miss that momentusually the moment the adulterer leaves the hotelyou dont get paid.

I envied his single-minded focus. We both enjoyed our work, the detective and I, and both felt lucky to be doing what we were doing, but for some reason I was still restless, easily distracted, checking my phone or the fridge or jolting back into work mode after finding myself knee-deep in a daydream, even while working under multiple tight deadlines. It bothered me, this restlessness; made me wonder if something was wrong with me. But Nate had a similar experience, and so, I was finding, did many other people. The more I asked around, the more common this restlessness seemed to be. Even friends who always complained about job stress and heavy workloads confessed to checking Facebook multiple times a day, or keeping up running conversations on Slack or Gchat. It seemed that nobody was always fully engaged in what they were doing, a trend Id assumed was obviously bad, a sign of something flawed in our generation or our culture or our moment in time, until Nates question, Whats really so shitty about being bored at work?

Maybe nothing. As the light shining through the apartment window began to fade, I studied the growing piles of books referencing boredom, from academic studies to novels, that had come to dominate the living room as I embarked on a self-assigned study of the enemy, like Sherlocks obsession with Moriarty (though again, less dangerous). I picked them up, put them down again, looked out the window at the clouds, which scudded across the pinkening sky in a way that called to mind the easily forgotten fact that New York is a seaside town, which in turn reminded me of Melville and the insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs. My mom used to paint pictures of the sea, and the sunset was always the first thing on her list of reasons why not to be bored. How can you be bored in a world with sunsets? shed ask, a trace of desperation in her voice, a hint of Oh, man, you kids have no idea, and anyway, arent you supposed to be the ones reawakening our sense of childlike wonder? Boredom when we were kids was a problem to be solved, with craft projects or books or playing with our friends or TV if nothing else. It was worrying to find that these solutions just amounted to procrastination in the working world, where being busy didnt necessarily mean not being bored, not by a long shot. Friends my age were all a little bit worn-out and weary and slightly shocked, still, nearly ten years after college, by the realization that this was it: these offices were where we would spend most of our waking lives. But few people (Nate excepted) seemed to want to talk about it at length, and there were never any real solutions presented for adults, besides Be grateful for what you have and Only boring people get bored , which didnt scrub away the feeling, just coated it in a fine sheen of self-reproach. Nates attitude seemed more reasonable: boredom wasnt the problem-to-be-squelched Id grown up thinking it wasit was normal. Which maybe meant it wasnt worth thinking about so much. I could ditch the books and stop worrying about why things are the way they are.

A phone conversation with my cousin Connie only strengthened these misgivings. Connie works in an orange juice concentrate factory, an experience Id imagined as like that of the former autoworker Ben Hamper, who wrote in his memoir Rivethead : Car, windshield. Car, windshield. Drudgery piled atop drudgery. Cigarette to cigarette. Decades rolling through the rafters, bones turning to dust, stubborn clocks gagging down flesh, another windshield, another cigarette (except juice instead of cars, and no cigarettes, since food-producing factories have to be more hygienic). I expected boredom, and I expected complaining. All seemed promising at first: when I asked if her job was interesting, Connie chuckled and answered, Not really. But when I asked if she liked it, it was as if shed never even considered the question. Do I like it? she repeated. There was a moment of silence on her end. Well, its regular work. And I dont have to deal with people. I wish theyd let us have music, but nobody minds if I sing. And I have a lot of time to think and plan things. Yeah, honey, its a fine job. Why, are you looking for one?