Many Jobs are Boring, and That’s Okay

First of all, I hope the Americans among my modest readership have recuperated from the turkey-induced torpor of yesterday’s orgiastic feasts. In my part of the world, Thanksgiving was not celebrated, but even if it was, I would have forgone the turkey. I mean no offense to those who indulge in the traditional meal, but Turkey just isn’t at the top of my culinary hit parade.

Preliminaries aside, preferably without indigestion, let’s get down to business on this Black Friday. Amid all the shopping, whether online or in the rough-and-tumble environs of brick-and-mortar retailers, I want to focus today’s proceedings on our increasingly freighted expectations of work. Has work become, in our increasingly commercial and secular lives, a new religion, inspiring ritualistic devotion from a growing legion of faithful servants? 

I know, that seems like an odd question layered atop an odder analogy, but bear with me. 

I was roused to address this topic after reading an opinion piece in the Times (UK) by Harry Wallop (an evocative, literary surname if ever one existed). The title of his commentary eschews coyness and gets right down to unqualified business: Young people need to accept that work can be boring. 

So, do they? Do they need to accept that work can be boring? In considering the question, I’m reasonably confident in stating that most of us have suffered through periods of employment that were irrefutably boring. I can painfully recall summer jobs – working on a loading dock in a factory, or on the thankless sanitation detail at a theme park – that were not only oppressively boring but exhausting, not to mention olfactorily unpleasant. Worse, the remuneration was, at the risk of overstatement, modest. 

In later years, as I struck out on a rutted and circuitous career path, I endured jobs that redefined the boundaries of soul-sucking dreariness. At one such posting, I remember a colleague who would stare imploringly at the office clock at the far end of our sterile, cubicled workspace and literally and audibly urge time to pass faster, as though he had a bet on a thoroughbred racehorse and was exhorting it to find another gear. I would hear him, through the thin, padded walls of the cubicle, urgently repeating: “Come on, five o’clock!” 

If the retrospective narrative hasn’t made it obvious, allow me to state that I was young then. So was my esteemed and equally bored colleague. Neither of us, nor many of our cohort, expected these monotonous places of employment to offer excitement, inspiration, meaning, or even stimulation.  We were there to work, to trade our services for compensation in a purely transactional arrangement. Many young people today – I would not say all of them, but many – seek a more transcendent experience from employment, gainful or otherwise. In the column published in The Times, Wallop makes the following observation:

Radio 4’s Today programme this week interviewed an articulate 22-year-old, with anxiety, depression, autism and ADHD. He said he wanted to work, but, “nobody just wants to earn money. People want to earn money and do something they are passionate about.”

This is the problem. Too many people expect to find a job they are passionate about, rather than accept that a lot of roles, especially at the junior end, are dull and tedious.

Looking for Passion in All the Wrong Places 

Given that we’ve already established here that many roles, especially at the base of the career pyramid, are dull and tedious, what factors might be responsible for the quixotic search for passion and emotional engagement at the workplace?

Wallop posits that people are relatively overstimulated these days, thanks at least partly to the ubiquity of smartphones and the seemingly endless distractions they offer, from social media to streaming videos. Paradoxically, however, he observes that the endless procession of digital distraction has occasioned its own ennui and thudding boredom. In making his case, he briefly cites a recent study in the journal Communications Psychology. 

Another factor, he believes, is the current cultural obsession of finding passion at work, a misguided objective he attributes to “HR professionals, career coaches, podcasters who wear black T-shirts, (and) ponderous thought leaders on LinkedIn.”

Riffing, dare I say passionately, on his theme, Wallop offers the following:

The Harvard Business Review has 345 articles on its website featuring the word “passion” including “From Passion to Billionaire, Taylor Swift’s Remarkable Journey” and “Why You Should Think of Passion as a Verb”. How many articles about boredom, a constant of work life? Just 22.

The man really to blame is Steve Jobs, a brilliant product designer and visionary marketer but a terrible fridge-magnet philosopher. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do,” Jobs famously said. Possibly, though I know some artists who adore their work but nonetheless churn out dire pictures. Go figure.

The quest for passion has leached from career advice to recruitment policies. Some Harvard Business School academics calculated that the word “passion” increased tenfold in US job listings between 2007 and 2019.

This set of circumstances is apt to result in disillusionment for the teeming masses of employees who vainly search for passion in places where tedium reigns. Unfortunately, disillusionment can devolve into alienation, depression, and chronically poor self-esteem. Employees who fail to find meaningful passion in their places of work are apt to blame themselves rather than to view their plight as an inevitability of circumstance.  

Fortunately, there is a way to embrace workplace boredom constructively, if not joyfully. Wallop explains:

It is a basic human need to find some sort of meaning in one’s work, but that doesn’t mean the tasks themselves need to be imbued with purpose. There’s nothing wrong with feeling bored from sitting at a desk or driving a forklift truck around a warehouse all day. The economy needs a workforce prepared to embrace boredom in return for a decent salary. Indeed, accepting that most employment is transactional can be a liberating experience.

Much of our day-to-day interactions, most assuredly including our professional life, is transactional. It’s a fact of modern living. You can find passion in many places, and some people, based on their eager and recurring affirmations online, even manage to find it at work. 

Nonetheless, the many among us who aren’t blessed with passion for our work should in no way feel stigmatized by lack of vocational fervor. A job well done, and preferably commensurately appreciated, is its own reward. 

Embrace the boredom of the workplace! You’ll find your passions elsewhere – family, friends, hobbies, other personal eccentricities and interests. You don’t need passion at work, and perhaps it’s asking too much of yourself and the workplace to demand it.