Being 30, being bored, being happy

A two minute blog on why being bored is integral to being happy

I just turned thirty… (thank you 🤗).

My gf got me a birthday bagel… (i don’t have the original pic, so it’s a screenshot of an insta story — don’t judge)

Time, for more than half my life, was sliced into manageable intervals, progressing alongside a cohort, which concluded with a performance assessment.

School. University. Abroad stays. Internships. The bottom of the corporate ladder.

Reaching the end of another arbitrary time slice, it’s Pavlovian conditioning to ask myself: “How am I doing, compared to everyone else?”

27 was particularly bad, but turning thirty somehow wasn’t. Probably because I’m happy right now and the need to compare is cope that stems from insecurity and a desperation for validation.

If I’m not happy, then there must be a reason why I’m trading later for now.

Delayed gratification is not inherently bad, but make sure there is a later and you like it when you get there

It doesn’t help that the neatly packed time intervals in our education systems make it very easy to delay gratification. You’re doing this to set yourself up for success,and work towards an idea of who you want to be. The end is in sight and all suffering is ephemeral.

Just push through and then you graduate and one day realize there is no later.

This is it!

Real life.

True grown-up shit.

Just like that, postponing happiness no longer makes sense (it never did) but we’re utterly unprepared to deal with the situation.

The thing with a sliced-up life is that there are very few decision points.

Sure, you choose a degree or a minor. You apply to internships. But what is that? A decision every couple of months?

Now that you are working there are even fewer unless you make them happen, which is pretty strenuous

If decisions are that rare, it’s sensible to think them through. Where are you when you reach your destination and is that where you want to end up? The destination becomes more important than the journey.

Then, once you have decided, your decision turns into this big, red, loud, obnoxious thing that sorts your activities into things you should be doing and things that are useless for your goal.

But what makes you happy is what you do because you want to, not because you should or because decided you would.

The way to figure out what you want to do just because is boredom.

Why?

Boredom has no end. There is no later to strive for. It is always finished and being bored is a constant decision to stay bored.

But it’s not particularly pleasant to be bored.

So what would you rather do?

Try, dabble, explore, play, and — most importantly — observe.

What are the things you are coming back to? What do you repeat because you want to not because you decided to do it a couple months back?

Knowing what you like doing is not all there is to a happy life, but it is a pretty big step towards it.

And building a life that makes you happy is more a process than a destination. That is kind of the point; we spend so much more time becoming than being.

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Exploring the weird parts of the NY tech scene is something that makes me really happy. For example, Karaoke singing Yesterday but substituting the lines with titles of tech talks according to matching rhymes and phonemes.

More next week.

cya