My view is that life is meaningless. This doesn’t really bother me. I think it’s important to see the truth, not just when it’s uncomfortable, but also when it’s just boring and uninspiring.

Life’s meaninglessness doesn’t bother me existentially. I don’t wish for some kind of grand purpose or meaning for my life anymore. But what I’m now beginning to understand is that life is also mostly just boring.

We’re animals on a planet. Life goes on; the species goes on; but individuals just live and die. And most of life is boring. As an animal, if you’re life is boring, if you’re lazing about and yawning, you’re doing pretty well. You’re not hungry and feeling pretty safe from predators and not being driven by sex to chase after a mate. You’ve pretty much aced it.

Humans have also pretty much aced life. That’s our burden. Maybe we feel guilty?

This boring-ness of life is what bothers people more than meaninglessness in my opinion. As an individual you’re always prone to entropy. Your body, your mind, your surroundings, your relationships, your career; everything slowly becomes chaotic and disordered if you don’t actively put in energy to maintain things in order.

And these routine activities of keeping disorder temporarily at bay, start seeming like a chore to us. When we feel bored in life, when nothing exciting is happening to us, when all the excitement in our life is happening on a video screen to someone else, these routine tasks become tedious and we tend to ignore them.

And at first, nothing bad happens. Entropy doesn’t break things quickly. Everything keeps working so we ignore these maintenance tasks further. Over time, as we get old, entropy begins showing up as cobwebs in the corners that we haven’t looked at for years.

Accepting that life is boring is an important step in getting one’s life in order. The routine tasks might be tedious chores, but you skip them at your own peril.

What stories on our screens hide from us are the boring tedious parts of the characters living exciting lives. We never see them brushing their teeth, cleaning their house, taking a dump, or having a bath, unless something exciting happens during these activities. We especially don’t see our characters do these tedious tasks over and over again, for 75% of the movie. But that’s how our lives are.

For most of us, on most days of our life, we’ll do the same old routine. We’ll get up. We’ll not want to get up, but we’ll have to get up. Then we’ll rush to get ready and get to work on time. Then we’ll do boring tedious work that creates value for our employer, but that we can’t really see and so it feels soul-sucking. We’ll get back home tired and feel lazy and lie on our couch and order some junk food and watch stories of interesting people living exciting lives. Then we’ll yawn and decide to go to bed. We’ll feel bad about not chasing our dream or not doing some urgent maintenance task, but then we’ll fall asleep.

This typical day that keeps repeating on a loop for most of us, is what life is. This day, that I’ve shown as an example, is not a very good day. I’m not saying that you should be happy with such a day. Most of my philosophy is about figuring out how to live much better days than this one.

But, it’s still important to accept that such days, or hopefully, slightly better versions of such days, is what our life is going to be. And that’s okay. That’s just the reality. It is in fact a sign that we’re doing pretty well. We’ve pretty much aced it.

When we start with this acceptance, everything changes. Instead of feeling frustrated every night with yet another boring day, we go to bed realizing that this is exactly how most days are for most people around the world. Then we can approach improving our life from a positive place. And focusing on those routine maintenance tasks is the best place to begin. But that we’ll get to some other time.

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Cover Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash