Painfully boring meaningless drudgery
Channel: Quest for a Meaningful Life
Date: 2019-11-01

Well, as I hear the winds howling outside blowing away the last of the warm season, as we get ready to bring in November and the dark, cold winter, it's a good time to remind myself and anybody listening that there is no way around drudgery. 
There's always going to be mundane drudgery, uninspired, boring. 
Now, I can accept, in theory, it could be possible, perhaps, to have a life where everything is so charged with meaning that there's never a time that is fully drudgery, and that may be an ideal. 
But I'm certainly not there yet, or near it. 
There's no way to make everything interesting, everything inspirational, charged up, at all times. 
I think even if I have a good mindset overall, sometimes I'll just- I can just not feel great. 
Little physical discomforts, all the little inconveniences that can get in the way. 
There's always going to be drudgery. 
So one thing to say is simply that it's okay. 
It's not a sign of motivational failure, a lack of inspiration if you're not at all times of day pumped up with excitement at the chance of improving yourself or doing whatever work you have that day. 
There's gonna be boring, dull, plodding work. 
And for a lot of people, that's a big part of the day, that sometimes seems like it takes over life, that sadly enough, it's not altogether uncommon for it to feel sometimes like that is what life has to offer. 
And if it goes too far, it can really get pretty dismal to just feel like what do I have to look forward to in my life? Just more days of dull, unsatisfying drudgery. 
And this is the kind of despair that can easily lead to escapism through drugs and fantasy and anything to just avoid looking at the present reality, because we cannot live in pure drudgery forever. 
We need some kind of inspiration. 
We need to believe there's something beyond everyday dullness. 
So one tool that I find very useful- or it's more general than a tool. 
It's really just a simple principle, that anything that appears like pointless drudgery, pointless, dull, meaningless, boring, all these things: we can't necessarily make them exciting. 
We can't necessarily change the activities so that they become inherently fun, and we can't necessarily trick ourselves or convince ourselves that, somehow, these really are exciting things, in and of themselves. 
But what we can do is ask, why am I doing these things? Why am I doing this mundane, dull, plodding- I'm really getting tired of saying the word drudgery. 
I'm saying the word drudgery a lot. 
It's becoming drudgery just saying the word drudgery. 
But, you know, why is it- why do we do these things? It's always connected to something bigger. 
There's always a reason why we're doing the bad thing that connects to some kind of a larger purpose, something that is not mundane and dull, something that we do actually care about. 
But it's so easy to get lost in the day-to-day mundanity, the little details that are painfully boring, that we can easily forget that connection, lose the sense of that connection. 
Like mundane, like washing the dishes. 
Daily, mundane. 
Doing paperwork of all kinds, bureaucratic formalities. 
And these things- there's nothing that we do that isn't somehow connected into something bigger. 
There's some reason why we are doing it, even if, sadly, if it's doing some kind of a job we hate just because we need to make money to pay off bills, well, we're paying those bills because we want to live, and we have ideas about what kind of life we want to have, and being able to pay those bills is one step connecting towards building the life we want. 
So no matter how dull, no matter how trivial, it always connects into something bigger, and it eventually reaches something we care about. 
And as long as what we do has meaning, feels connected to something meaningful, then it is no longer pure drudge. 
It's no longer fully mundane. 
It becomes connected to something great. 
So the next time I face this feeling of not wanting to go through the next cycle of routine dull tasks, I will attempt to remind myself why I'm doing these things. 
What is the bigger picture that this is one tiny piece of? There's nothing interesting about taking this one step itself, but it's one step along a path that leads to something meaningful and good.