On boredom

So it happens, like so many Fridays when all the week’s work is done and no one is inclined to start anything fresh, that many thousands of people are sat around in offices, twiddling their thumbs and surfing the net. Doing just about anything, that is, but work.

We, in this generation are regularly decried as being poorly equipped to manage boredom, yet it is a pre-requisite of every office worker up and down the country. Put simply, most jobs these days do not fill the time we are required to sit behind our desks looking busy, and yet no one has the good sense to call our collective bluffs and declare that our time might be better spent doing something else.

We are all too busy justifying our existence, in a world of increasing job and economic instability. That presenteeism is rife in the workplace is well known, especially among less powerful underlings who cannot leave their desk, and hide under the cover of “meetings”. Unless you’re in a hands-on profession, like teaching or nursing, most office jobs are simply about keeping the person above you in the pecking order happy enough, and in the absence of actually making anything or doing something concrete, we’re all just keyboard jockeys filling our downtime on Twitter.

Nobody wants to be the person who holds their hand up and says they’re actually not all that busy. And there comes a point at which we could, say, end the week at Friday lunchtime, or Thursday evening come to that, or even go down to a three day week, and I suspect productivity would remain about the same, although employers would always have to factor in a period of thumb twiddling, however short the working week. No one has the concentration span to sit for three and a half hour chunks working solidly, followed by another of equal duration, broken only by a hasty desk sandwich and a couple of trips to the loo.

Simply being there, bound to our desk seems to be the government’s way of controlling the nations’ employees under the guise of being “hardworking taxpayers”, ensuring no one is up to no good, pursuing their own interests and or stuffing up the roads except at rush hour.

How much is lost in this great inefficiency drive? Certainly my sense of humour, my ability to stay out late, perhaps redistributing my salary in the pursuit of the arts, say, or, at the very least, Jaegerbombs; Out of the window go my charitable intentions, my attempts at fitness fall by the wayside; links with friends and family grow increasingly tenuous as I fall inexcusably out of touch, except, occasionally on Facebook; and I simply don’t have the time, alone with my thoughts, to think. I’ve found myself waking at 4 a.m. every night this week just to get an hour where I’m not glued to a screen, which has a consequent knock on effect on all of the above. I’m just too knackered to be nice. And I suspect the rest of the nation is too. Especially on Friday, the nation’s hangover day, when office workers have traditionally let their hair down after the constraints of the week, drowning their collective sorrows the night before, taking care not to waste any of the precious weekend.

All this enforced good behavior for ten hours a day has a profound effect on our mental health as inevitably it all gets unleashed at the pub, or during rows with your loved ones, who you only see for a drowsy episode of House of Cards. Multiply these wasted minutes and hours up by orders of magnitude across the whole of society and what you’re left with is the seeds of problems, the dearth of endeavour, mass exhaustion and lack of ambition. In short, in the words of the tirelessly efficient Mary Poppins, a nanny most of us would prefer to the state, a ghastly mess. There is a massive and well known argument for better balance in the workplace, but until it gets enshrined by law, most of us just have to sit down, shut up and put up with a 40 hour week, that could, more than likely be done in 20.

It’s not even worth complaining, us privileged white collar army. At least we get to be bored at our desks rather than on a factory line, or down a mine shaft, although I rather suspect that there are stricter working time directives for doing work more dangerous than surfing Buzzfeed and checking your emails. The problem with white collar work is it increasingly has no limits, with technology meaning it’s seeping into to every corner of our lives, and companies, like Google increasingly creating a whole culture around round-the -clock working, which is only really possible for the childless. I don’t know about you, but I find the prospect of being constantly on call, with not that much to do, entirely depressing, but that’s the sorry reality for anyone in a management position today.

Like many office workers, I have found ways of keeping myself busy in the absence of anything else to do. Luckily for me, I can pursue my hobby under the cover of furious typing, so that I always look busy, even when I’m not. Most people can be found sneaking Facebook, Reddit, personal admin, or Twitter, but the furtiveness of it all annoys me – switching between screens when someone important walks past. How are we supposed to get ever thing else done if we don’t get at least some of our stuff – be it socialising or shopping –  done from our desks? Most companies tacitly acknowledge that at least a proportion of our time at work will inevitably be lost to these activities. It’s a shame we can’t be more candid about it and declare a national half day for personal admin/ doctor’s appointments/ parent teacher conferences or whatnot a week, which would make us all more efficient and less dishonest when we are actually at work.

Reading Bertrand Russell wax lyrical on Boredom and the Pursuit of Fruitful Monotony on Brainpickings.org in one such period of work based dithering this week, I was struck by how much capacity us modern folk have for boredom, rather than his proclamation of it as a lost art, and in contrast to the general believe in our shortened 21st Century attention span. But the difference is, these days, most of us develop the capability to be bored as adults rather than learning to entertain ourselves as children: in his eloquent words, doing nothing, with nobody, all alone, all by ourselves; but shackled to a screen, and alone in a crowd of similarly subdued individuals. Perhaps, as Russell argues, we might have more appetite for it had we not been so overstimulated as children.

I am inclined to agree with him that leaving children to their own devices (that is, without the devices) in the early days, without a screen for company, they grow calm and inquisitive, and we should encourage them to be bored to inventiveness more often. I feel all may be lost for Minecraft-addicted Jonah, who was bought all the gadgets by well meaning relatives (and a father who wanted an Xbox) but lost his childhood in the process, inhabiting a third dimension of technology rather than the real world at every opportunity, even where it bought us our sanity.

But I don’t believe, as Russell suggests, that kids are best left to undiluted monotony, “undisturbed in the same soil, like a young plant”; Although regular routines work a treat, especially yin the early years, it’s most parents’ inclination to expose their children to the world in all its wonder and variety and excitement; and to keep them from stimulation in order to inure them to boredom seems somehow pessimistic. But in the world they will inherit, they will exposed to it soon enough.