Work in Progress is a column about finding your way in the working world. Have a question for Rainesford Stauffer? Send it to TVworkinprogress@gmail.com.
I went from a highly stressful job to a very chill job, but now I find myself disengaged and bored. Sometimes I'm so bored I want to quit, lol. I guess I should be grateful for being at a chill place (since my last job was super unhealthy), but I find boredom really stifles creativity. Sometimes in meetings they ask for my thoughts, and I literally have nothing to say because I'm not even interested in the conversation. — MS, Washington, DC
Boredom at work often gets viewed in one of two ways: 1) as a problem that isn’t really a problem, because so much work is exploitative one should feel relieved that work is boring rather than exhausting; 2) or as a signal that you must be slacking off, since much discourse around workplace boredom focuses not on workers, but on how disengaged workers could impact a company's bottom line.
But studies on what some researchers have called “boreout” — the tuned-out version of burnout — show that it can increase poor self-rated health and stress symptoms, while other research says boredom and burnout could fuel each other. (It’s worth noting, though, that some research also connects boredom to creativity, depending on how we use it.)
Multiple things can be true at once. You can find fulfillment in many areas of life beyond work and still want more from your job than being bored to tears at your desk; you can appreciate that your job has a calmer pace and wish that the minutes wouldn’t drag by. Some of this, of course, relates to work conditions. For example, it’s hard to be engaged in your job when you aren’t being compensated fairly.
Beyond that, it’s important to recognize that boredom is telling us something. “My take on boredom is that it is one of the most informative feelings we can have in the workplace,” Anna M. Zabinski, PhD, an assistant professor at Illinois State University whose research interests include boredom, tells Teen Vogue. Everyone is going to experience boredom at some point in their job, she adds, explaining that boredom can be a signal that we desire something; our task is to figure out what that is.
There are a few solutions, including reconsidering your work structure and what you want from your job, finding fulfillment beyond work, and expanding your thoughts about meaning.
It Isn’t About Doing More
Boredom is often misunderstood. As a culture, we see boredom as something that needs to be squashed, Dr. Zabinski explains, not something that serves a function. That can lead to managers dumping more work on people in an attempt to cancel out boredom with busyness.
But in her ongoing research with colleagues, Dr. Zabinski has found evidence that too much work can be as boring as too little work. That recognition can be a point of reflection: Which aspects feel like too much and which feel like not enough? Is there any project you would be curious to take on or a shift you could make in your work structure that might feel more engaging?
If you’ve moved on from a high-pressure job, there might’ve been a lot of stress associated with that — maybe the workload was too much, maybe the stakes felt too high. It’s worth using that lens to look at your current job too. “I take boredom as this really important signal that we're experiencing misfit,” Dr. Zabinski says. In other words: Something isn’t sitting right with us.
If you like the mission or your team within the organization, Dr. Zabinski says, maybe it’s a matter of adjusting the type of work you’re doing. That means reflecting on what you want out of your job. If you love interacting with other people and your job doesn’t fulfill that, you could be bored because you’re missing that component, says Dr. Zabinski. If you feel like the work isn’t meaningful or you don’t have enough responsibility, you can brainstorm with a supervisor, colleagues, or mentors about reshaping your work tasks to meet more of those needs.
“My advice, particularly when we're first starting out in our jobs or in our careers," says Dr. Zabinski, "is take boredom as an important moment of, Okay, boredom, it's serving a function. I need to take some moment for self-reflection. What are my values? What is it that I want out of my job? And then taking that as, Okay, is this fulfilling that?”
Can Boredom Be About Belonging?
Beyond the scope of our work, boredom can also tell us something about our work environment. “I think boredom is apathy,” Kiera Penpeci, PsyD, an organizational psychologist and wellness educator, tells Teen Vogue. When we’re hiding our true emotions or selves in an effort to meet expectations for performing well, but don’t see conditions improving, we lose satisfaction in our jobs, they explain. For example, if you feel a lack of inclusion in your workplace, that absence of belonging might present as boredom, they add.
Says Dr. Penpeci, mindfulness can be useful here. They mention the concept of the “feelings wheel,” where under the umbrella category “bored,” there can be other feelings such as “apathetic,” “inferior,” “indifferent.” The more specific we get about what we’re feeling, the more “intentional we can be about how to get ourselves where we want to be,” they point out.
If we can’t leave a job after trying to approach boredom in a different way, it might be valuable to find other outlets for fulfillment. These can be entirely unrelated to work, like a hobby you love, an engaging social life, participating in your community. They can also be adjacent to work, like joining an advisory board or mentoring in your field. Being engaged in multiple pursuits gives us more avenues to find fulfillment.
“Speaking from my experience, I became a yoga instructor,” Dr. Penpeci says. Their work is challenging, so they sought out another aspect of life as a creative outlet. “I'm fulfilled because I'm getting it somewhere else, basically.” Rather than changing yourself to accommodate a workplace, it is empowering to say that you’re creating space for fulfillment that works for you.
What Can Imagination Do?
Beyond a crisis of productivity, boredom can also feel like a crisis of meaning. It’s okay for work to be work. It’s even okay for work to be boring! Our sense of meaning stems from more than a single place, whether we love our work or count down to clocking out.
But when I heard Greg M. Epstein, humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT and author of a forthcoming book about how technology is changing what it means to be human, describe boredom as a symptom of an “unequal, exploitative, winner-take-all economy,” I was curious, especially in light of other discussions and research on boredom and meaningfulness.
It’s not just money, health, and safety that are unequally distributed, Epstein tells Teen Vogue, it’s also access to meaningful experiences — or those that are “externally valued as quote-unquote meaningful.”
For instance, Epstein explains, experiences people gravitate to when they want to see life differently — such as walks by the water, concerts, sports events, arts, writing classes, even therapy — are not typically free in terms of money and access. Much of what we tend to think of as “meaningful,” he adds, is tangled up with social justice and access issues.
We see that in relation to work too. Epstein says that people ideally hope to find a meaningful experience through work, like seeking new challenges, being of benefit to others, being creative, and being meaningfully compensated for that. But we know that’s not necessarily the reality, often by design.
Says Epstein, there are multiple ways to push back: That can mean joining a union or getting involved in political organizing to leverage power; or psychologically shifting one's mindset to say that there’s got to be a better way, for our benefit and that of loved ones and colleagues.
“The process itself of planning, plotting, scheming to create something better for oneself and society can be enough to give us satisfaction,” Epstein says. “In the meantime, it's like, Okay, I know I'm just sitting at my desk job right now, but I'm more than this. I have an imagination. I have an inner life. And I can use that imagination to envision better work for myself, to envision a better society for others, to tell stories, to communicate, to rest, to plan my next steps. That can alleviate a lot of boredom.”
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