boredom – Nick Grant

Nick Grant

Tag: boredom

  • All You Have to do is Nothing

    This is a story about boredom…

    Watch

    What if I offered you a six-figure salary to do nothing? Would you take it? Of course you’d take it, right? Think of all the great stuff you could buy with a six-figure income. Think of what a great house and car you could buy. Think of all the holidays you could have. Think of all the lovely things that money would buy.

    Wrong.

    Firstly, going on holiday is not “doing nothing”. If you’re on holiday, you won’t be earning your six-figure salary: you’re only paid for the time you’re doing nothing.

    Fine, you say.

    But.

    You’re going to have to spend some time doing nothing, in order to get your hands on the money. How much time do you think you could spend doing nothing in any given year? Assuming that you spend about 5 weeks each year on holiday, that means you’ll have to spend 47 weeks doing nothing. That’s achievable, right?

    Wrong.

    It’s a lot harder doing nothing than doing something. You might not realise this – because you’ve never had to do nothing – but it’s the hardest thing in the world. Perhaps if you work as a security guard or a solidier, you might be able to legitimately claim that you’ve got first-hand experience of doing nothing, but that’s not true. It’s well known that doing nothing is impossible, so security guards and soldiers get paired up or given ‘lone worker’ tasks to do, in order to break the monotony of the task.

    In fact, every time you were bored, you just walked out of that job and went and got another one; every time your situation was uncomfortable, you changed it. Your entire life consists of chatting to people, making cups of tea/coffee and undertaking a variety of tasks. You never do nothing.

    Doing nothing pays the most money.

    Boredom is directly proportional to remuneration; the more boring a job is, the more you get paid (with the exception of being a security guard, perhaps). Maybe it’s like a ‘U’ shape actually – there are really badly paid jobs which are boring, and the best paid jobs which are boring, and the jobs in the middle are the interesting ones.

    The best thing I can do at the moment is nothing. The more I keep quiet and keep my head down, the better. Far better if I avoid trouble and don’t do anything – do nothing – to earn loads of money.

    It’s unbearable.

    Most people are led by impulse and instinct, but I have to fight my gut every step of the way. If I did what ‘felt’ right then I would quit what I’m doing and just figure things out – anything’s better than being trapped doing nothing, bored. Of course, I would miss the ‘easy’ money, so I keep going, because my head says it’s the right thing to do. I know that the suffering will yield vast financial compensation, even if the means of achieving it are intolerable.

    I suppose you think that it’s a nice problem to have but you’d be mistaken. We can all prostitute ourselves, or otherwise do work which is toxic to our dignity, sense of wellbeing, sense of achievement, mental health etc. Of course, some sex workers are happy doing what they’re doing, so use your imagination: you could earn a lot of money doing crime if you wanted to.

    If you think what I’m writing is entitled and whingey, fuck off. If you’re thinking “we all have to suffer a little boredom occasionally” then you’re right… “occasionally”. When it becomes your full-time job to be bored out of your mind, then it goes beyond ‘normal’ and moves into the territory of an extreme health hazard; a threat to life.

    Of course I can see the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but I can also see the broken glass and razor blades I have to crawl over to get there. Sure, I probably will get there in the end, but I’m going to whine and complain the whole way, because it’s a ridiculous waste of time, energy and talent, to have a person tormented – in agony – with insufferable boredom.

     

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  • Flat Out

    This is a story about a demanding job…

    Bike frame

    I can’t divulge the details, but I’ve spent the last couple of days spread very thin, working for two teams at the organisation who I currently do consultancy for. One important deadline looms large, while a major issue caused me to get involved in something which I haven’t touched for nearly two months – I was roped in because, as it turned out, not only do I know the most about a particular part of the system, but unfortunately it looks like I cocked something up during the exhausted time just after I moved house.

    I’m not sure if everything is going to come together at the last minute. I certainly hadn’t bargained on having to spend two full days wrestling with something which has come back to bite my ass, having lain dormant for the best part of two months. I was feeling in a pretty strong position to finish off a whole load of good work and get it delivered before the upcoming long weekend. Now, all my contingency time has been used up and things will be a lot more of a rush, but it shouldn’t be a problem.

    All the pieces of a very complicated system are connected together to create the product(s) which I’m responsible for helping the organisation I’m working with, to develop and support. I try to change things and make them better. I try to make things more simple, elegant, efficient and performant. I try to make things as simple and easy to understand as possible. Most of the time it works just how I wanted it to, but sometimes – when I have to hack at something somebody else produced – things go wrong. In this case, things have gone with very severe consequences.

    I’m not sure whether I’m going to have damaged my reputation by being the origin of a major problem, or maintained my reputation because of my extensive involvement in resolving such a complex problem, but we’ll have to wait and see.

    I’m certainly not bored.

     

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  • Adjustment Disorder

    This is a story about provocation…

    Pathway

    I suppose the reason why my episodes of mania synchronise perfectly with periods of high stress and exhaustion, is some kind of defence mechanism – perhaps an evolutionary adaptation; something deliberately left in my genes, because it’s served a useful purpose during unsettled times throughout the history of humanity.

    It’s problematic for me to work in an open-plan office at the moment. It’s problematic for me to be surrounded by so many mild-mannered and quiet individuals, who seem happy to spend all day looking at their email inbox, waiting for something interesting to appear.

    How my colleagues manage to cope in an environment that’s pretty stale and ultra-conservative, I don’t know. Big personalities and loudmouths are not the kinds of people who become long-serving members of my organisation. In fact, a girl I dated from my office said she cried when she got her security pass, because its expiry date was 10 years in the future. “Nobody would choose to work here” she said.

    It’s not that bad.

    I like it.

    I’m just not so sure that everyone who’s within earshot of me is my greatest fan. I have a foghorn-like voice in two situations: 1) when I’m scared and insecure, and 2) when I’m manic, like I am now.

    I suppose I knew that mania was cropping up – rearing its ugly head – but it served a purpose. I needed to find a place to live and make all the necessary moving preparations. I needed to continue to work hard at my job, while also finding the extra energy and the motivation to do something I hate: Moving.

    The mania has propelled me to move very fast, but it also causes my brain to speed up dangerously. A colleague told a joke about friction coefficients – a classical physics joke – and I said I could come up with a better one about quantum mechanics, in only a few seconds. According to my colleague, it took me no more than 15 seconds to invent a “XXX walks into a bar…” type joke, which was actually pretty good considering I thought of it on the spot AND it involved two really fundamental things about quantum mechanics. Nothing to do with Schrödinger and his cats, but actually to do with Planck and his constant… but I digress… both jokes have a very small audience who’d appreciate them.

    I’m fizzing and crackling with so much energy at the moment that I’m physically uncomfortable to be around. I think I’m literally giving people near me headaches.

    One of the first things I said this morning was “do chairs really exist?” which was supposed to be funny, but my colleagues reaction was to tell me it was too early to start talking about philosophy.

    I didn’t get to sleep until 3:30am or maybe even 4am.

    Does the lack of sleep cause the mania, or is the insomnia a symptom of the mania? It’s impossible to know.

    It’s not like I couldn’t sleep, but I can’t see how else I can fit everything into the 24 hours of the day, without some late nights. I know that I need regular bedtimes. I know I need lots of sleep. But, there’s so much to do.

    The busier I am, the more productive I am, strangely. Today I did all kinds of horrible jobs that I wasn’t looking forward to, like buying a washing machine, booking a van to move my stuff, arranging to have broadband internet installed, arranging to have my post redirected and a zillion other admin jobs, but I also managed to do a piece of work that I’d been putting off for days and days.

    Where I’m finding the energy from to maintain my daily writing, as well as the development of NickBot™ and the migration of my website from one hosting provider to another, I have no idea, considering that I also have a demanding full-time job and I waste at least 50% of my time saying stupid things out loud and distracting people.

    I guess I was wasting a lot of time and energy on a bad relationship, so escaping that has released me from a lot of pointlessly exhausting nonsense. I was very trapped. I was very miserable.

    I’m very stressed now and I felt momentarily like I was very alone, but perhaps that’s what prompted me into a frenzy of activity, sending out lots of messages to people I care about, trying to surround myself with people who care about me. There’s a horrible period of stress approaching rapidly – moving day, and subsequent days – but I’m pretty well prepared for it, which I’m surprised about, because I can often become too overwhelmed by anxiety to even leave my bed. I’m surprised that depression hasn’t laid me low.

    All of my psychiatric problems can be considered acute: i.e. they have been spontaneously provoked into existence by the extreme set of life circumstances that I’m simultaneously dealing with. This is adjustment disorder which is just another way of saying “your life is hell right now” and that quite rightly, my brain and body are compensating for the extreme demands placed upon me.

    I’m pretty terrified right now, of screwing up the good relationship I have with my colleagues and my workplace. People have been patient with me, but that patience is wearing thin. It’s unusual for a manic episode to last so long, but I’ve managed to keep myself sustained for periods of 6, 8 and even 13 weeks before… but it always led to a horrible crash. There have always been disastrous consequences for allowing too much of my mania to overspill into the open-plan offices which I work in.

    I try to rein myself in. I try to put my headphones in and keep my head down. But, then somebody wants to ask me something. Then I overhear something and my red-hot brain which is travelling at a million miles an hour immediately sparks off and I’m talking – interjecting – with something which I think is profound, but nobody can keep up with me… I’m just acting a bit weird and annoying, from the point of view of my colleagues.

    I’m working from home for a couple of days. I’m going to try to pace myself and remind myself that I’ve got a nice long overlap of my tenancies, so I don’t have to move everything all at once. If I forget anything, I can always make more trips. There’s no need for me to put so much pressure on myself.

    I’m pushing hard in every area of my life, simultaneously. I want my colleagues to think I’m a brilliant genius who can do anything. I want my perfect house, fully furnished and looking beautiful. I want to feel instantly at home in a city which I’ve barely visited. I want my side project – this website – to make a giant leap forward, in terms of technology.

    It’s too much, and there will be a price to be paid.

    I need to be super careful.

    I can’t afford to lose my job, for example.

    I can’t afford to lose anything, in fact.

    Everything teeters dangerously on a cliff edge.

    But, I’ve kind of gotten used to living on the edge.

    If nothing else, at least this period is quite life-affirming and I’m coping remarkably well. Even when I got in trouble with the big boss the other day, I managed to rescue things very rapidly and get back on good terms. Even when I wasted days and days procrastinating, I caught up very rapidly. Even when I felt that there was too much to do in too little time, to move house without dying of stress and anxiety, everything seems to be falling into place.

    I’ve written twice as much as I meant to, of course, because I can’t quite rein myself in; I can’t quite pump the brakes and slow myself down.

    So long as I keep doing what my colleagues are doing, which is mostly killing time looking busy, then I’ll probably get through this difficult period without doing too much damage. Less is more.

     

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  • So Hungry

    This is a story about rushing…

    Pub grub

    My life doesn’t have a lot of highlights. I’m struggling to get up in the morning. I’m bored at work a lot of the time. I’m trying to eat fewer calories, so I’m skipping breakfast and having a very light lunch. My writing has become a bit of a marathon slog as I attempt to write the final few thousands words to reach my 1-million target. The only thing I’ve got to look forward to is my evening meal.

    Because I try to do my writing before I go to the gastropub to eat, I’m always in a bit of a rush. It’s a challenge to write ~2,000 words in between a full day at my desk in the office, and the ideal time to arrive at the pub in order to get a table and eat. I write doubly quickly, because I know that the sooner I’ve finished my daily blog post, the sooner I can go and choose my meal. With that incentive, I have no difficulty pounding out the words very rapidly on the keyboard, before rushing off to enjoy the highlight of my day – pub grub.

    You shouldn’t do your supermarket food shopping when you’re hungry, because you will strip the shelves of products and buy far more than you could ever hope to eat, before the expiry date of the perishable groceries which you’ve purchase. My eyes are always far bigger than my belly when I’ve been hungry for a while. I think that being hungry also affects the speed with which I do everything, and my attention to detail. I’m rushing everything and being sloppy, because I just want to get things done as quickly as possible.

    I need to earn money, lose some weight and cut down my drinking, but I expect instant results. My writing target is within spitting distance now, but I’d have never reached this point if I tried to do it too quickly – I’ve had to pace myself. My finances are improving but I’ll never get financial security if I don’t keep turning up at the office every day – even though it’s torturously boring – for many many more months. I’m really not enjoying my semi-sobriety, but I’m not going to feel the benefit unless I keep it up for a decent length of time.

    It’s been a month since I started my new job in a new and unfamiliar city. For a whole month I’ve been living in a hotel midweek and eating in the same pub every night. For a whole month I’ve been dividing my time between the city where I have my apartment and the city where the office is.

    In the last month I’ve managed to quit the sleeping pills and painkillers I was using to cope with stress and anxiety. In the last month, I’ve managed to cut down my drinking drastically. In the last month, I’ve stopped being so antisocial and wasting the whole summer indoors drinking wine. I’ve earned some more money, which is slowly making a dent in my debts. It’s reasonable progress.

    I don’t feel particularly good.

    My working day is a struggle. My living arrangements are a struggle. My life lacks an adequate amount of things to look forward to; moments of joy. I keep losing hope that I’ll be able to maintain the stability and keep up the routine, because there are so few moments when I’m happy and content. The struggle to get up in the morning is not just a phase – it’s going to be a struggle every morning for months, if not years. The struggle to get through the working day is not just a temporary struggle… it’ll be permanent while I remain trapped in a career which I outgrew very quickly when I was young.

    There’s no obvious reason why I shouldn’t be able to keep up the routine. What’s so bad about a well-rehearsed sequence of actions which starts with me washing and ironing my clothes for the week ahead, packing my bag, driving to the office, checking into the hotel, eating in the pub, driving home. What’s so hard about that? The problem is the lack of all the other ‘stuff’ which makes a liveable life. Where’s my social life? Where are the holidays? Where are the hobbies and interests? Where’s any of the ‘stuff’ which gives my life any meaning?

    Work is meaningless because it’s the same old crap that I’ve been doing full-time for 21+ years, which was easy and boring when I was in my late teens, let alone now. Work cannot be the thing which defines me and is all-consuming, because that’s unhealthy and I know I’m never going to find fulfilment as a member of a huge team in a gigantic organisation. I feel a lot better about the morality of what I’m doing since I quit investment banking and moved into the public sector, but the waste is pretty sickening. Of course the public sector was never going to be particularly dynamic and fast-paced, but it’s not that much slower than most of the big private sector organisations I’ve worked for. I know that startups are too demanding and too much risk though, and they’ll make me sick by using and abusing me.

    I need to get to the point where I’ve served my time and been thoroughly miserable for enough years that I have a substantial sum of money saved up, such that I can dare to dream. Perhaps things will be better when I’m financially secure enough to be able to spend my boring days in the office planning my next holiday. The misery of the unchallenging office job was much more tolerable when I spent my weekends kitesurfing, and I was jetting all over the globe looking for the best kitesurfing locations in all kinds of exotic locations. Perhaps my misery is largely due to the fact that all I do is work work work – I’m on a very tight budget.

    There’s no rushing my finances, unfortunately. There’s no way I could earn money any quicker than I am doing. Money floods in at a fairly obscene rate, but I was very very deep in the hole, so it also costs a lot of money just to stand still. I can’t believe how much money I’m earning, but yet it’s still taking agonisingly long to get ahead.

    Playing the waiting game is awful. I’m clock watching all the time. My alarm clock is the most dreadful intrusion on my day – the worst moment. Sometimes I’m not even tired, but knowing that I have to go and sit at a desk and be bored out of my mind is thoroughly depressing in a way which is soul-destroyingly exhausting. Mid-morning I panic about how slowly the day is dragging. Lunchtime is over in the blink of an eye, especially since I started having a super-light lunch which always leaves me still feeling hungry. The period from 2pm to 3:45pm is the very worst – at 2pm I can’t believe how much of the day there still is to go, with nothing to occupy or entertain me. I often think I’m going to have to walk out, because I can’t stand it. It doesn’t matter how much I’m earning – it’s not enough. Finally, it’s a respectable time to leave the office – even though I’m frequently late for work – but all I have to look forward to is another long wait until it’s a respectable time to eat my dinner. It’s 6:23pm right now, which is very early for an adult with no children to eat.

    My evenings were also unpleasant, and especially so since I’ve drastically reduced my alcohol intake. My cravings for booze were pretty incessant and it was hard to read or watch TV when all I could think about was how much I wanted to get a glass of wine. However, I’ve found some stuff that I’m enjoying watching and I’m starting to find it easier to relax and enjoy my solitary leisure time in my hotel room, without getting drunk.

    I had planned to get drunk every single night until I’d regained financial security. Getting drunk was going to be my reward for doing a job I hate in a place where I don’t want to be, all alone living in a hotel. I was prepared to put my entire life on hold so I could earn as much cash as possible as quickly as possible, and I’d have virtually unlimited quantities of alcohol to help me white-knuckle my way through to the end. The problem is that my health was being destroyed surprisingly rapidly – I was putting on weight and feeling very unfit and unwell. If I’d kept drinking as much as I was until the end of my contract in just over a year’s time, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy my hard-won wealth because I’d be fat and quite possibly have some very serious health issues to deal with as a consequence.

    Comfort-eating is my only pleasure at the moment, as I’m single, living away from home, trying not to drink, not socialising and generally in a temporary state of suspended animation. I can fulfil the very few demands of my day job with less than 1% of my brain and I’m just waiting for enough paydays to restore my financial security. I’ve stopped everything except for the few core things which keep the hamster-wheel turning.

    It’s not particularly as if it’s worthwhile making friends and getting a local girlfriend. It’s not particularly worth investing in life in a place where I have no intention of staying beyond the maximum I absolutely have to in order to achieve my purely financial objective.

    I pound out the words on the keyboard every evening after work, in groundhog day repetitive scenario. I pound out the words because it’s a fleeting distraction from the endless waiting. Waiting for the money. Waiting for the end. Wishing my life away.

    Some people would imagine that I’m impatient and impulsive, because of my mental health problems and my struggles with addiction. Stimulant abuse is particularly bad for damaging the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, which is responsible for executive decision-making, and importantly the ability to curtail stupid impulses. In fact, I spend my whole day suppressing the nearly-overpowering instinct to get up and walk out; to walk away from the torturous bullshit boring job. In fact, I’m one of the most patient people you know. Why do you think I get paid so much? If my job was pleasant and easy, everybody would be doing it.

    I spend all working day in front of the keyboard and screen, then I flip open my laptop lid and spend some more time in front of the same type of keyboard and the same type of screen. The clock is in exactly the same position in the top-right hand corner of the screen, which my eyes instinctively flick up to, constantly aware of the slow passage of time.

    Since I wrote what time it was, nearly 20 minutes have elapsed. I’m 20 minutes closer to my meal. I’m 20 minutes closer to the day when I’ve earned enough money to start to dare to dream. I’m 20 minutes closer to the moment I die, when I can finally enjoy some peace from this torture.

    I’m off to the pub. I’m tempted to have a drink.

     

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  • Crumbs on the Keyboard

    This is a story about lunch breaks…

    Pret a Manger sandwich

    I’m struggling to get to work on time. I’ve suffered periods in the past which have felt like agonising torture, getting up early in the morning to go to the office, but I’ve also had periods where I managed to adjust my body clock to become more of a morning lark than a night owl. My body clock seems to be driven by my stomach.

    I never used to eat breakfast – there simply wasn’t enough time, because I was always late for work. However, I’ve found that breakfast is the best way to tell my body what time it needs to adjust itself to, so I can cope with “normal” office hours. Unfortunately, the breakfast trick hasn’t been working for the last couple of weeks.

    I spent a whole month drinking wine every night until 1am or 2am, and not getting out of bed until midday, so I guess it should be expected that my body and brain would complain loudly about the rude intrusion of the working day upon my pleasant slumbers.

    I also had a very unsettled period where my delicate brain chemistry was sent haywire by a combination of drugs, insomnia, lack of food & drink, drug and sleep-deprivation induced mania, plus a breakup and some other madness, all of which completely destabilised me. I’m quite lucky that I managed to put the brakes on that particular period of instability and resume working without doing serious damage to myself, my finances, my home or my career… I’ve managed to pick up pretty much where I left off, minus the girlfriend of course.

    I feel bad that I turn up late to work and I want to go home early. My working days are mostly excruciatingly boring – I don’t have enough to do, to keep me busy and my mind occupied. There’s no torture quite like having to get up early to go and sit at a desk, watching the clock until it’s finally time to go home, bored out of my mind.

    I’m trying to justify the fact that I’m not working as many hours as my colleagues, or being anywhere near as productive, because I’m new and also I only take a short lunch break. If there was work I could do, I would do it, but I always seem to tear through any tasks at breakneck pace and I’m left with nothing to do again. I need a really huge project to completely immerse myself in, but instead my paymasters are quite happy to have me sitting idle – they really don’t seem to care that it’s an enormous waste of my productive capacity. Of course, nobody knows just how awful it is for me to be bored too; just how terrible it is to feel alone with my thoughts for 7 or 8 hours a day, trapped at my desk with no distractions.

    At home, I can read a book, write or watch TV/films. At home, I can distract myself from the constant noise of my brain. At home, I can easily waste time. At work, I’m simply getting paid to be present. At work, all there is to think about is how much I earn every day, every hour, every minute… every second even. Tick… that’s 2 pence… tick… that’s 2 pence… tick… that’s 2 pence… tick… that’s 2 pence… tick… another 2 pence…

    Yes, if I saw a penny on the floor it wouldn’t be worth my time to stop and pick it up. I would quite literally lose money if I watched the pennies. If my job was literally to pick up pennies that were covering every inch of the floor, and put them in my piggy bank, I would be earning less than I am now, assuming that I had to pick each one up individually. My job isn’t to watch the pennies. My job is to sit at a desk doing nothing. It pays very handsomely to be bored doing nothing.

    Things aren’t as bad as they were back in February, when I didn’t even have any colleagues to talk to. Things will get better as my colleagues start to get to know and trust me, and they ask me to do more and more stuff; bigger and bigger bits of work, hopefully. I want to be swamped with work, so that I don’t have to sit at my desk bored with nothing to do.

    My brain’s a bit broken and I feel stressed and anxious; on edge. I’m acutely aware that I’m in a lot of discomfort during most of the working day, despite the fact that it seems quite enviable to be highly paid to sit around doing nothing. At the end of every month I submit an invoice, and each invoice makes a considerable dent in my debt. By all “normal” people’s standards, I’m rocketing my way from poverty to wealth and the timescale seems like nothing… only a few more months and I’ll be getting on top of things. There’s got to be something wrong with me, because time is passing so painfully slowly.

    That’s all I’ve got to do: sit and do nothing, and everything gets sorted out in my life… at least financially.

    I feel very anxious about the fact that I’m not being productive or working the expected number of hours in the office. I’m acutely aware that my colleagues might become resentful of the fact that they’re at their desks for longer than I am. I go to bed and wake up with a horrible feeling of dread, knowing that I’ve got another working day tomorrow – and for months and months more – where I’ll be bored, underworked and overpaid. It might sound like a nice problem to have, but I promise you that you’d have walked away already if you experienced what I’m going through.

    What can I tell you? Maybe I’m a spoilt brat. I really don’t think I am – I’m a mercenary who’s figured out how to make a lot of money very quickly, but my task is not one that sits comfortably with my soul, although at least the work is not as immoral as it was when I was working for the investment banks.

    I skip breakfast, eat my sandwich at my desk, and try to stay at the office for as long as I can possibly can, before the boredom becomes unbearable and I have to escape to somewhere where I can distract myself for a short while, until it’s time to do it all over again, and again, and again… ad nauseam.

     

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  • Home Sweet

    This is a story about boredom…

    Hotel room

    As if living alone in a city where I only have 2 friends [who are completely unconnected with my work] wasn’t boring enough, I at least had to stumble to the local corner shop to buy the various unhealthy snacks and bottles of wine, which were the main constituents of my diet for the last month. Now, I’m in a very bland hotel room and I imagine that boredom is going to drive me to drink… not that I take much persuasion.

    Aspects of normal domestic life, such as cooking, cleaning, doing the washing up, taking the bins out, laundry, watering the plants and other things that would occupy a little of my time midweek, are now going to have to be done at the weekend. Perhaps you’re envious of me, having my 3 meals a day cooked for me, and having my bedroom and bathroom cleaned and tidied by somebody else every day. I’d have my shirts ironed by somebody else too, but at £3.90 each it seems a little profligate.

    As I write, the air conditioning unit squeals and whirrs to my left, while the traffic noise of the nearby motorway is clearly audible to my right. Whenever you change your sleeping arrangements, it always takes a while to get used to the new noises, bed, pillows, bedding: an unsettling change from the familiarity of home, no matter how much of a seasoned traveller you are.

    I’m in the land of the industrial estate; the science park; the new enterprise development area – basically loads of offices and warehouses. I’m in the stomping ground of the sales rep, with the car park full of shiny new company cars and the hotel rooms full of men and women who travel all over the country for a living. There are no shops round here. There is no local life – I decided to book a hotel that was as close as possible to the office, until I’ve gotten to know the city a little bit better.

    There’s a pub next door to the hotel, which is presumably where I’m going to eat tonight. There’s also a bar in the hotel. It’s all a little too tempting to camp out with a book while tipping pint after pint of beer into my greedy face.

    Back in the hotel room there’s a TV and of course I can watch Netflix etc. I guess it’s a comfortable enough existence, but it’s going to get pretty boring and monotonous. Also, it’s not like I’m going to be socialising and making local friends: everybody here is transient like me; just passing through.

    I’m killing time even writing this. Of course I want to go to the pub and look at the menu; choose my food. Of course, I don’t really need an excuse to start getting drunk… it’ll occupy the time.

    I do have a friend in the city who I’ve known for a long time, but he’s always busy doing fit and active things: at the climbing wall or the canoeing centre. His life is filled with purpose, energy and enthusiasm, where all mine seemed to just seep away over the past few years. I used to be obsessed with extreme sports and I was a total adrenalin junkie, but now I seem to be just a sad, lonely, functional alcoholic.

    It feels horribly wasteful to spend the best part of the next year simply treading water; concentrating on earning money and otherwise parking my life; being drunk all the time to minimise the amount of time I’m fully conscious. If life had a fast-forward button, I’d gladly press it down and hold it for at least 6 months; I’m wishing my life away.

    There’s an idiom that springs to mind:

    The sun is over the yardarm

    I’m trying to figure out what’s a respectable time for me to abandon this bland hotel room and go to the pub and get drunk, armed with the excuse that I need to have my evening meal.

    The boredom of my life seems to have asserted itself in my writing. I’m ashamed at how boring this blog post is, but I’m going to publish it anyway. I promise I’ll write something more interesting tomorrow.

     

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