A friend of mine is excellent at her job and makes a very comfortable income. A little too comfortable I might add. Although she could get cosy with her position, she quits any job she picks up in less than a year. Her reason? “I was bored”. After hearing her rant about this a couple of times I recommended that she create a side project on a subject she was passionate about, I mean everyone is passionate about something. Right? That was three years ago. She still has no side project and still has the same complaint “I’m bored”.
What makes a software engineer making more than one hundred thousand dollars a year feel bored?
What can she do to stop her boredom?
Is she fulfilled?
Why isn’t she doing something about it?
These were questions that popped into my mind over the years after I saw her make absolutely zero progress in terms of her boredom and her fulfilment. She wants something from life but doesn’t know what it is. She has all the technical skill in the world but she doesn’t take a minute of her time to use it for anything apart from a paying job.
Her repeated rants about the topic caused me to wonder about two things. The first was that I couldn’t sell her well on the idea of a side hustle which could eventually become her main project and fund her for life. The second was that she is lying to herself (or to me).
I do not feel I did an awe-spiring job of getting her excited to start her own thing. However, I am a smart man and I do believe that she got my point that an own enterprise would give you a kind of respect that she would never get as an employee of the company.
The second factor is far more insidious and something that I would like to learn from. If she’s lying to herself, there isn’t much I can do as she is believing something that she wants to believe and nobody including god can make her believe anything else.
If she’s lying to me, she doesn’t have to take time to speak to me for hours on the phone and blatantly say that she’s not happy in her work despite being terribly good at it and that she’d like to do something else. If she is lying to me, and I’m not saying she is but if she is, she is deluding herself and possibly me about her plans for the future.
A question that I must ask at this point is that people do all sorts of crazy things in life and all of it is a result of their motivations. Her motivations are different from mine and she has had a different upbringing that I have had. It could be that something that is nirvana to me is blasphemy to her. I do however know one thing for sure. If one chooses to speak different versions using words and actions, actions are the ones to be trusted and not the words.
Therefore, she is lying about her passions or boredom or fulfilment. If that is not the case, she is just lying to me and wasting my time in which case I’m a dunce.