Boreout at work and life
Stress, depression, and insomnia don't only come from burnout
How on earth am I only finding out about this now? That is what I thought when I learned about the term “boreout” recently.
According to an article on the BBC, “While burnout is linked to long hours, poor work-life balance and our glamourisation of overwork, boreout happens when we are bored by our work to the point that we feel it is totally meaningless. Our job seems pointless, our tasks devoid of value”.
Lotta Harju (an assistant professor of organisational behaviour) goes on to say, “Boreout is different from burnout in the sense that bored-out employees rarely collapse out of exhaustion. Bored-out people may be present physically but not in spirit, and people can keep doing this for a good while”.
According to the article, there are health consequences of being bored-out too, “A 2021 study showed that 186 government workers in Turkey who suffered from boreout also dealt with depression and high rates of stress and anxiety. Studies show depression from boreout can follow workers outside the office, and lead to physical ailments from insomnia to headaches”. Another study cited (of 11K participants) found that boreout also increased the likelihood of employees wanting to retire early.
There is no doubt in my mind that I was suffering from boreout for a large part of my office-working existence, and it’s certainly the reason I wanted to retire early — who wouldn’t when working a meaningless and boring job?
“The fundamental experience of boreout is meaninglessness”
— Lotta Harju
It’s not just meaninglessness though, retail workers and taxi drivers (waiting for hours for their next job) get a mention in that article too. Driving a taxi or working in a shop has meaning, however, doing the same thing, day after day is undoubtedly boring. My job was the worst of both worlds; meaningless and boring.
It was in the last 6 years of my career that I reached “peak boreout” working for a huge conglomerate. It was terrible. I remember trying to convince myself that it wasn’t that bad. I’d have a recurring conversation with a work colleague where we’d try and persuade ourselves that we were lucky to have undemanding jobs that paid well. On the surface the logic made sense; being rewarded for little effort — what’s not to like? However, it didn’t matter how many times we told ourselves this — we still felt empty, unenthusiastic and in no way fortunate.
Trying to fix boreout
The quarterly staff engagement survey results were always terrible at my previous employer. There was always a “fire drill” after the awful results — senior management claimed that they would fix it — but no one ever believed them. Being an anonymous survey, it was the one time employees could stop the pretence and be honest about what it was like working there.
If satisfaction could be gained from needlessly pushing a boulder up a hill then we wouldn’t have lasted long as a species. Being neurologically rewarded to accomplish a purposeful task (finding food, building shelter etc) kept us alive. So it doesn’t matter how much you get paid, you won’t feel good about spending a large chunk of your life doing something that lacks purpose. Pointlessness is punishment. The Victorias knew that and it was the reason they punished prisoners by giving them “pointless hard labour”.
It doesn’t matter what’s done, how many offsite meetings are held, or how much an external consultancy is paid. You can’t change the fact that many of today’s jobs are “pointless soft labour”. Any attempt to fix it is lipstick on a pig.
Boreout from life
If you can get boreout from work, then you can get it from everyday life too.
I recently returned from 5 weeks in Portugal, 2 weeks of those were with a friend who retired a couple of years ago. He has boreout from life. As much as he didn’t enjoy his job before retiring, at least it gave him some structure. Now he has none. So he watches TV and drinks (excessively). It is a sad existence. He wakes up (normally past midday) and clock-watches until it’s (somewhat) socially acceptable to start drinking. This way of living doesn’t seem too uncommon for Brits who retire in the sun.
Since returning from Portugal I’ve had a bunch of repairs to do around my mum’s house. As unglamorous as the work is — when I get to see what I’ve accomplished, whether that’s painting a wall or clearing the garden — there’s a sense of satisfaction — something I never felt when bored-out from a pointless meeting or producing another PowerPoint deck.
Having things to do in retirement is essential. Everyone obsesses about the money side of retirement but forgets the most important side: what are you going to do? If you don’t have a plan then you may as well continue working. As much as you may hate your bored-out life from working, retirement could easily be worse.
"Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need"
— Voltaire
That BBC article concludes on somewhat of a positive point: “Boreout can mark a transition into something else: a different career entirely […] If people only take its cue.” It’s the taking the cue part that many of us need to get better at.
Imagine for a minute that you have a strange disposition and don’t feel boredom. You’d potentially just sit there doing nothing and be fine with that. That’s why omnipresent media and technology can ruin so many lives with its small doses of gratification — just enough to keep us going — it stops us from being bored out of our minds. But being bored-out can lead to a big change, something impactful, something significant.
As well as taking the cue from boredom we need to be conscious of our fear of change. As humans we don’t seem to like it — our pre-historic DNA wants to protect us from danger by keeping us on a well-trodden path. Whereas before that may have saved us from a saber-toothed tiger mauling, today it keeps us in a boring job or a boring life. It can make us bored-out but too frighted to do anything about it.
As the saying goes (or some variation of it) “Don't be afraid of dying, be afraid of not living”.