We spend so much time waiting for things to be over.

The struggle is real

The sheer despair of Mondays when we know that the entire week’s work is still ahead of us and fun is temporarily over, the dread of Wednesday that is still two full days away from the weekend and the anxious anticipation of Friday morning when all we need to do is survive another day. We arrive at the finish line with the strength of someone who just ran an ultra-marathon through the Atacama desert, barefoot.

I don’t know how this happened exactly but somewhere in my mid 20s things got super intense. Partnership, homeownership, reproduction, and self-fulfillment as the 4 pillars of modern adult life all take years to accomplish and are a lot more out of my control than I care to admit. Nobody is forcing me to work towards them, I do it voluntarily and yet it requires me to spend a significant amount of my time going through tasks that leave me feeling bored, disengaged and drained.

In my humble observation, we are perfectly willing to suffer when the task at hand is meaningful to us. When I’m writing I forget about everything. Food, peeing, my boyfriend (sorry hun), Game of Thrones finale…nothing matters more than making sure my thoughts are written down the same way I would want to read them in someone else’s article. But when it’s not…

Why is it so difficult to get through the boring, the repetitive, the unengaging?

The contrast between the easy and the difficult, the fun and the boring, the engaging and the repetitive — more specifically, in seamlessly transitioning between them, over and over again every day is where some of the difficulty lies.

Every time I finish a cup of coffee I feel a little trickle of grief that the pleasant part is now over and the work must begin.

And the more times we do it in a day the more fatigued we feel. That is why taking too many short breaks isn’t productive for me, I spend too much time accepting that I now have to work again and negotiating with myself that if I somehow make it halfway, the next break is just around the corner. Pushing through just to reach the next break doesn’t make up for very productive work.

Mind resistance is futile.

There is an ever-present push-pull dynamics between the pleasant and the unpleasant activities. Anyone who has ever been down “the spiral staircase” of too much good knows that there is no bottom to it. No matter how deep you go, you will always want more and each floor you encounter on your way down is only special until you see the next one. So not only there is no end to our desire for feeling good, we can make ourselves sick trying to feed the insatiable monster within.

Knowing that whatever we did or stopped doing to make our discomfort go away probably wouldn’t be as satisfying as we think plus it would only delay the completion of our task, enables us to compare the satisfaction of right now with the disappointment of the unfinished task. Haven’t we experienced worse things before? Is it really worth it? Is the discomfort really so intolerable?

Sometimes the answer will be “hell, yes” or “I’m getting 4 donuts today.” And that’s ok.

I am guilty of making things a lot worse in my head than they are. I will convince myself that I cannot take another minute of this, effectively making the unpleasant activity impossible to complete. I will count every second and every minute, infinitely stretching the time that still needs to pass before I can finally say that I’m done. I will spiral out of control, making myself feel claustrophobic in a situation I created for myself to help the future me.

Humans only live 80 years and they spend most of it just waiting for things to be over.” -Janet #TheGoodPlace

Time seems to pass even slower when observed out of pure resentment that we’re trying to rush it.

I’ve had numerous boring jobs in my life. There was one job where I spent 8 hours a day, all summer calling people from the heavily air-conditioned call-center just to ask them if they’ve received the mail about the latest promotion and if they plan on doing anything about it. It was a repetitive, mind-numbing, soul-crushing job. After a month I completely stopped talking when I was off-duty and my body was paralyzed with pure boredom.

Knowing that this torture will persist for a limited period of time helped somewhat but it also made me more desperate for it to end. It’s like when you’re running on a treadmill and the last kilometer is more difficult than all the others, just because the end is within sight. Or if you’re not a runner, it’s like when you have to pee, like a lot, and you’ve been holding it rather successfully for a long time but when your bladder sees your building it wants to give up immediately.

The balance between the pleasant and the unpleasant seems to never really be 50:50, no matter how hard we try to get it there.

What to do…what to do…

It’s very unlikely that the boring tasks will ever completely disappear from your schedule. Sorry.

So I propose a counterintuitive strategy that I learned from someone random years ago. Immerse yourself into the task and make it the center of your focus. Jump into it like Mary Poppins and stay there for as long as possible. Embracing the work in front of you will enable you to almost time travel for stretches of time. Resistance and acceptance are both a choice and when you fantasize about all the things you’d rather be doing you are consciously indulging those thoughts.

Trust the time to pass as fast as it always does. You are not missing out on anything, most people are working right now, same as you.

To avoid compounding the mental struggle, each week should be a universe on its own. Try not to think about all the subsequent weeks that will be equally challenging because it makes the task at hand unmanageable. You don’t have to do all the other weeks today. Just this one.

Instead of having small little breaks throughout the day that leave you unsatisfied and a little frustrated, try to save up enough time for a long pleasant activity that isn’t rushed every couple of days. Some good, honest fun of your choice will make you feel recharged and most importantly, it will make the scale that weighs the good and the bad in your day seem evener.

Really Grammarly? Evener?

Anyway, my final thought is that the balance between the pleasant and the unpleasant seems to never really be 50:50, no matter how hard we try to get it there. Perhaps that’s too much, too tempting for the monster within to control its impulses or perhaps it just wouldn’t feel special anymore.

Will this always work? No. Nothing will work 100% of the time. Sometimes in life, you really need to just grit your teeth and get some donuts after.