Is your life boring?
The reality is that most people’s lives don’t seem very interesting. Their lives are not filled with new experiences, activities, and places every day. The vast majority of our days look almost identical.
This leads people to conclude that their life is boring. Or, perhaps even worse, they believe that not just their individual life, but life as a whole is a boring experience.
And when you start believing this, there are only a couple of thing that you can do about it.
The most common response is to accept that as an unchangeable fact.
"It’s not only that my life is boring - life itself is boring. This is just the way it is. There are some lucky individuals who live adventurous lives, but real life, life of an ordinary person, is a boring life."
This is what you believe, and you keep living your life. You might even be successful in some or multiple areas of life. You might be a highly respected person and a good example for those around you. But you never fully enjoy your life. You never experience those moments of ecstasy, joy, and childlike amazement with life that some people talk about. Sure, life can be good. But there is nothing magical about it.
Another response is to think that the problem with life’s boredom is the place you are living in right now, the job that you are doing, or your whole community. Here, the solution is found in external changes, the most drastic example being to move to another part of the world. To search for life’s magic somewhere else. To be clear, I believe that being too scared or lazy to change any of these things is also an unfortunate way to go through life and that you are betraying your soul by doing so. But I want to challenge the belief that these external changes should be the first solution you go to when trying to revitalize your life.
"My life is boring because my life is here and it looks like this. If my life were somewhere else and it looked differently, it wouldn’t be boring."
So you go to another side of the world. But you quickly realize that, no matter where you are, you get used to the things around you. With time, your days start looking alike. Just like back home, eventually you are living pretty much the same day over and over again. So you settle for the same attitude as the first person: life is simply boring. Or you might think that the solution is to change your location once again, so you end up traveling the world and not being able to settle down in search of your dream life, or in search of yourself.
This response is becoming more and more common. Especially because the advantages of the modern world and the ability to work remotely have made this easier than ever.
But could it be that, if you believe life is boring, it’s not life’s fault?
Addressing those who failed to see the richness of everyday life, German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote,
"Don't blame (life); blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place."
Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow agreed with this sentiment. While studying self-actualizing people, he noticed that one of the most important traits of such individuals was the ability to immerse themselves in the simple moments of everyday life as if they were the most interesting experiences.
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