How can anyone with a job and kids be bored?

Or, to put it another way, can you be bored as long as you’ve got a never ending to-do list? And if so, how does that boredom look?

I myself am often too tired to do either the stuff I should be doing, or the stuff I would like to do. But I wouldn’t call that being bored. Or is it?

I don’t know. Do you have a boring job and boring kids? :rolleyes:

Why the rolleyes? It is a genuine question.

In my case, no, the kid and the job are not boring, and I don’t feel bored. But I also don’t feel the opposite of bored, whatever that is. So that’s why I ask others.

I guess my question is, does having too much to do make it impossible to be bored? Or does boredom just look different?

I know it people often say smugly “I’m never bored, because I have a rich interesting life”. That may very well be so. But that usually implies free time to spend on interests.

Why would having a lot to do repel boredom? If none of the items on the endless list is something interesting, of course you can still be bored.

Boredom, IMHO, has nothing to do with the length of your to-do list. I’ve experienced boredom when the sink is full of dirty dishes, the cat box needs cleaning, and the living room floor needs vacuuming.

Boredom is caused by apathy and lack of motivation. Everything feels like a horrible chore, and you don’t see the point in doing anything.

So I can totally see how someone can feel bored while having a job and kids. I’m guessing a lot of depressed people feel this way.

The boredom people feel with wife and kids is the domestic hell kind. EVERY day is EXACTLY the SAME. Having kids and a job is very much requires fixed and rigid schedules. Wake up get ready, kiss wife, drop kids off, go to work, leave work and pick up kids, come home eat same old dinner, put kids to bed, too exhausted to have sex and go to bed. It’s pretty easy to see how routines can make one bored and maybe it’s not exactly the same always but there are very long stretches where it is a kind of tedious, repetitious hell.

Assembly line workers have a never ending to-do list.

I can easily understand how someone could get bored. I keep a " to do list" and I keep it caught up. Anything big or small that I don’t do right away goes on the list. It really doesn’t take much to keep the list up. At the very most maybe 15% of my spare time if averaged out over a year.

   When I was raising kids it did not come natural to me to spend time with them and I would often force myself to spend time doing stuff with them and yes I would get bored. As they got older they could go hiking with me and participate better in things I liked and it got easier to interact with them. 

 Now that I am retired I feel like I died and went to heaven, I am up at about 3 am every morning just waiting for the sun to come out.

And you try not to wish the days away because the next will be the same but just one closer to your last.

As opposed to the single person sort of hell where every day is wake up (possibly with a hangover), get ready, go to work, go to the gym, play some videogames, meet your same knucklehead friends at the same bar, try to pick up a girl, fail, go home drunk and alone, fall into bed hoping you aren’t too hungover for work tomorrow?
Whether you feel bored or not largely depends on whether you are engaged in what you are doing and the people you are doing it with. I’m generally not bored when I’m home with the wife and kids because we do things that we find fun. Plus if I get bored, I pick up the baby and run around with him until he starts laughing so hard he throws up.
My work, however, I find intolerably boring. My last job was basically like working at Entertainment 720. I mean the company was run by idiots and jerks, but for the most part I liked my boss and the people I worked with and some of the projects were interesting. Or at the very least I had a few friends there who I could grab coffee or beers with and bitch about work.

My current job is boring as fuck. I travel 4 days a week, by myself, to a client site where I have to work with a bunch of dullards (mostly contractors and client people). The work is basically project managing some back office compliance software for a large bank which nobody wants except my client. And unlike my last job (or jobs) I feel little connection with my firm since even when I’m in the home office, it’s so small there are never more than 2 people there. Maybe once a month if I’m in town, I can go to a company happy hour and meet some coworkers for the first time.

So in the case of my job, my boredom is largely a product of a) not being engaged in the work I am doing, b) not feeling any connection with my firm and c) being away from home 4 days a week by myself. While my last job I tended to feel never-ending frustration, my current one I feel never-ending apathy. Which I kind of think is worse.

I don’t understand how someone with a lot of leisure time can be bored. If it’s your time, you get to pick what to do with it. But if you have a lot of things that you have to do, some of those things may be mind-numbingly boring.

The OP sounds overworked or burned out, as opposed to bored. The OP may lack the self-awareness that having a “never-ending to-do-list” is not motivating him, but actually is encouraging procrastination because there are too many things to get done and not enough time, so why do anything? If the OP can’t get the so-called important or fun things accomplished, that’s because he is overwhelmed or a has no energy after work.

Boredom is created by perception. What’s boring for you may not be boring for someone else.

I notice some adults who have leisure time complain to me that they are bored, but that is because they have no focused energy, short or long term goals, and generally are tired from work.

Why not set a handful of simple goals and get them done one at a time?

Many people don’t have the self-awareness to fix problems. Boredom is an emotion that is telling you to do something to make the feeling go away.

Some kids and teens I know will find any excuse to procrastinate. That’s part of their nature, dare I say human nature for adults, too. However, they eventually get bored after they burn out on wasting hours and hours on their iPhones or video games. So the leisure time was ill-spent.

Zen Buddhism is about finding quality in doing “mundane” things like washing dishes or doing the laundry. Even waiting at the airport without using a smart phone could be an opportunity to meditate or reflect. It doesn’t HAVE to be boring if you don’t want it to. Other philosophies focus on living in the present as well.

Many cultures have a mentality that you always have to be “doing” something, move on to a new idea, constantly watch videos and read news, talk, listen, acquire, consume, make money, etc instead of “just being” without the judgement and labeling of emotional experiences as being “productive” or “happy”.

Exactly. There are two types of boredom in my experience- the type that comes from literally having nothing to do, and the other type, which is worse, IMO, where you have plenty to do, but the tasks that you have are boring individually and in a group as well. Both are ultimately a lack of suitable stimulation- for some people, it’s excitement, for others it’s more intellectual in nature. (i.e. the motorcycle racer vs. the voracious reader)

A LOT of family tasks fall into the category of “keeping the lights on”, meaning that they’re essentially maintenance tasks that have to be done every single day, or the whole thing kind of goes to hell. Stuff like washing dishes, washing clothes, keeping the bathrooms and kitchen cleaned up, vacuuming, picking up, mowing the yard, etc… all fall into that category of “pretty boring, but must be done”.

And a lot of people’s jobs are kind of boring as well. Some jobs are what I’d call boring by design, where the actual work is repetitive and unchanging, and others are boring because they’re more or less below the worker’s mental capacity. Again, although the workers may be busy and even overworked, that doesn’t mean that they’re not bored at the same time.

I feel ya though Maastricht; I’ve been in the same situation you’ve been in, where there are things you’d like to do and which sound on paper like they’d be entertaining, but all you want to do is vegetate or do something very low-key. That’s different than bored though.

I’m one of those people who dread long weekends. A long weekend is great when you’ve been too busy to do the things you really want to do. But I’m never this busy. I usually have plenty of time to do the things I want to do. So when confronted with a long spanse of unstructured time, I don’t know what to do with myself.

Free time is like dessert for me. I only need a little bit of it to keep me happy. But when that’s all I have, I don’t feel too good. I need veggies.

The dictionary definition of “bored” is:

So yes, one can be bored and have an everlasting to-do list because, especially with a job and kids, not all of the items on the list will be interesting but do have to get done regardless. I get easily bored doing yard work, because to me it’s an uninteresting PITA that just has to get done.

I, too, don’t think you can equate busy with engaged. I’m a workaholic and there are never enough hours in the day for me to get everything I want to do worked in, but I still get bored from time to time. Vacuuming? Snore. Boring. Ironing? Snore. Boring. Doing my taxes? Grrrr. Annoying, but also boring. It would probably be safe to say that, for me at least, anything repetitive tends to be boring.

I love my sons dearly and wish I could somehow have elongated their growing up years so I could have enjoyed them longer. But drilling multiplication tables, spelling words, etc. with them could get really boring really quickly. I understood the necessity for it, but it wasn’t very engaging at all.

I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. The rolleyes were just to indicate my post was phrased with sarcastic or humorous intent though maybe pointing to sources of boredom in your life. I have a job and I get bored with it.

A common “conversation” with the wife goes as follows:

Me sitting on couch staring at the wall
Wife: “what are you doing”
Me : “being bored, thinking of something to do”
Wife: “well go can do lists of several tedious chores
Me: “No, I’m trying to NOT be bored” drinks beerx20

That’s kind of how I felt during the summers when I was home from college. In college, I spent my time studying and partying. I had a bunch of friends I would do stuff with. But then every summer I come back to my home town and other than a core group of high school friends, I basically had months of free time with nothing to do. Usually I’d get some bullshit summer job to make extra cash and me and my friends might go drinking on the weekends. But to a large extent, it felt like coming to a place where I no longer had much of a connection with hours upon hours of free time to kill.

I have no idea what it’s like to be bored.

At my job I work four or five projects simultaneously, and am always behind in delivering reports. So much work to do - no chance for boredom there. (At the same time, there are people in our group who literally do no work whatsoever. And they are catered to. But I guess that’s another topic.)

At home my job jar is always overflowing; there are endless projects. I had a barn build a few years ago, and I am still in the process of “finishing” it. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of wiring in it. It will take me years to get it done the way I want it. And then there’s 15 acres to take care of.

I have no time to be bored.