Starting with small changes may help you discover the kind of boredom you’re experiencing. Your options aren’t polarised between Bohemia and Stepford. You can have a family without living in suburbia, you can be creatively stimulated without life being tumultuous. The categories presented to us culturally – “kids and house” v “travel and freedom” – aren’t as starkly opposed as they seem. You’d have to be totally committed to the value of the babies-and-houses life for it to be worth buying it with eternal boredom.īut one thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to make every choice at once. And if all you’re getting in exchange is what “everyone else has”, that’s not a good trade. Or is it this more faceless, inevitable restlessness that comes with being finite creatures who have to close doors?īeing “incredibly bored” sounds bad. Is it an actual, bona fide, rap-your-knuckles-on-it preference for things to be different? If so, that’s worth listening to. The trick is figuring out which kind of dissatisfaction you’re experiencing. That doesn’t mean the path we chose is a bad one – there’s just a sense of loss when the future is no longer totally open. It’s natural to feel a pang of sadness when we start down one path, simply because we’re no longer surveying all the things we could choose. This is a point of transition between a period in which possibilities feel endless and open, to a time when we make choices that exclude some of them. It’s especially easy to feel the allure of the could-have-been at your stage of life. And two, more seriously, we risk throwing away a good reality to chase after an alluring fantasy. One, we don’t notice what’s beautiful in the version we’re living, because it’s been dulled by familiarity. That fictional could-have-been life can lure us into making two separate mistakes. Should I pack it all in and move or just let my life roll out into babies and houses? Can you live with both ideas concurrently? How long should I sit with boredom before doing something new?Įleanor says: On the well lit stage of imagination, there’s always the version of your life where you’ve made slightly different choices: a bit more glamorous, a bit more exciting, a bit more fulfilling.
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