You’re Not Bored, You’ve Outgrown Your Life

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Five years ago, you woke up one morning and determined that you weren’t depressed, you were simply bored. You were on the verge of mental breakdown, crying in a steely bathroom stall at your bleak corporate office, sneaking your flask from your car to your desk, anticipating happy hour and happier hour, and popping Melatonin at night to ease the pain of an unfulfilled life.

Your therapist’s solution? Renewal. You only needed a new thought pattern to influence your actions. So you threw away the prescribed medications. You spent more time in nature. You ate right and exercised. You ditched a few toxic characters from that chapter of your life. You sought career-counseling. You negotiated a raise. You attended healing retreats. You invested in yourself. You changed your thoughts to change your life.

But where are you now? You work a decent job, making decent money, hanging with decent friends, traveling decent places. And, somehow, within the confines of decency, you’re bored again!

Have you resorted to swearing to the deities yet? Have you pleaded your case, listing your enhanced maturity, elevated economic status and improved decision-making? You followed the expert’s advice to a T. How could you be back at Point A?

The answer is simple: you changed, but you didn’t change enough. There’s a difference between leaping into your destiny and jumping in place. It’s time for you to fly. You were never bored. Boredom is a modern luxury, engineered by those who haven’t grasped that true living knows no boundaries. Not even death can hold the fruits of a person who has truly lived, because the inspiration that the person provides touches generation after generation, long after the ending of their mortality. There’s no boredom for the passionate few, but passion is best groomed after severe heartache, and you repaired your heartache in the most commercial way possible: self-improvement for the sake of acquiring more material things.

You, my dear, were not bored—you were GROWING. Yes, growing. You know, that funny thing that babies, puppies and kitties do seemingly overnight, to everyone’s amazement, that thing that no one quite understands or remotely realizes until long after it’s already happened. You were exploring yourself. You were growing, evolving, improving. Then you hit a plateau. You experienced your much-different life, and you looked around, as any god reviews her creation, and you said: “It is good.” The job is good. The crowd is good. The life is good, so there’s nothing more to fret about. And, from that point, you sank.

You sacrificed yourself, made yourself a martyr without recalling that there’s nowhere else for a martyr to go, except heaven, and, well, you’re still among the living. And to you and everyone around you, you appeared bored in the beginning, but now you just appear sad.

The therapist said you just needed a change of pace, a hiatus from the monotony of your life, but really you needed more discomfort. Yes, that’s right. You needed to be uncomfortable enough to push past the mental box you’ve placed yourself in, the thoughts you’ve allowed to hold yourself captive. You thought you changed, once you no longer recognized traces of your old life. And change cures boredom, right?

But you changed while gripping your comfort a bit too tightly. You adjusted to your pain. You didn’t heal from it. You were bored with your corporate job, but you adhered to society’s script that more money makes any activity more fulfilling. So, once you earned more, you convinced yourself that having nice dinners and better vacations made you happier. But it doesn’t really.

Do the work. Open your eyes. Open your mind. Step outside of the confines of society’s happiness prescription. Be free. Continue your growth journey. You deserve a fulfilled life, and fulfillment does not come to those who stop searching themselves and their environments to create new meaning in their lives. Don’t worry about setting your world on fire when your soul is craving such a light.