We Were Never Being Boring

On rest, reinvention, and other scandalous acts

Not to alarm anyone, but I’ve started doing absolutely nothing - on purpose. No productivity hacks, no color-coded schedules, no urgent Slack messages that require 17 tabs and a gentle existential crisis to answer. Just long stretches of unstructured time, punctuated by questions like: What if I don’t optimize this moment? What if I never optimize anything, ever again? I didn’t sign up for this level of discomfort.

I recently stepped away from a Co-Executive Director role I held for nearly eight years - a position that shaped me, stretched me, and consumed more of my being than I realized. In the absence of constant meetings, countless deadlines, and hundreds of decisions that once tethered my worth to usefulness, I’m figuring out how to redirect the current of my energy. The first day without my job was like going from 1000% to 0% instantaneously - and it was really weird. And if you are in a space where you’re asking what unfolds when you let go of productivity as a measure of worth when you allow yourselves to sit in the awkward, radical stillness of rest - you are not alone.

Because it turns out, there’s no certificate for emotional recalibration. No gold stars for intentionally untangling your identity from your LinkedIn bio. No motivational soundtrack kicks in when you finally realize your self-worth was being held hostage by your Google calendar. There’s just you, and the dust motes, and another aching question: Who am I if I’m not constantly proving I deserve to exist as I am?

“Now that you are on a break, you can do so much”!

When I first told people I was taking a break, the well-meaning advice poured in like a tidal wave: “Take up pottery.” “Learn a new language.” “Travel!” Come visit me!” “Redecorate.” “Invest in being a better homemaker.” I smiled, nodded, and scribbled down notes I had zero intention of revisiting. Because tucked neatly inside all that encouragement was the same old memo: “Don’t just sit there all day - improve - even if it is improving your ability to sit all day.” Apparently, rest is only respectable if it leads to reinvention, if it makes you more beautiful, employable, or spiritually evolved. Stillness, it turns out, is suspicious - unless it performs. That rest, in and of itself, is insufficient unless it births a thing.

But then my kids, in their unexpected and clear wisdom, dropped the most liberatory instruction I’d heard yet: “Become bored with your life.” Their rationale was refreshingly clear: “If you let yourself be bored - really bored - eventually you’ll know who you are and what you actually want to do - and it won’t feel like work anymore.”

My dear pandemic-grounded children (young adults now) - who had endured months of glitchy Zoom school, stolen rites of passage and long days of dislocation - weren’t just being flippant. They were speaking from experience. They had lived through boredom not as a failure of imagination, but as its fertile ground. They know that boredom is not the enemy. It is the compost. It’s the awkward, formless, in-between space that doesn’t produce anything shiny right away. And thank goodness. Because out of that strange stretch of silence, they grew new muscles. Creativity. Resilience. A deep relationship with their interior self. Sitting without reaching for a to-do list. Navigating a seemingly unending spiral with no clear conclusion. And still finding ways to thrive.

They sparked a thought that boredom might be the most radical teacher I never meant to meet. A way to say: I will not rush to fill the quiet. I will not outsource my inner life to someone else's urgent plan. I will sit here, sip my chai, and trust that knowing will come. Eventually. I think.

Boredom as Inheritance and Interruption

But, listening to this advice and actually following it are contradictory. For me, boredom isn’t neutral - it’s an emotional battleground. It didn’t come wrapped in a cozy blanket with candles and soft lighting. It came with guilt. Lots of it. Guilt that whispered, shouldn’t you be doing something? Guilt that reminded me my ancestors didn’t survive colonization, migration, and generational hustle just so I could spend Tuesday horizontal in pajamas.

Many of us weren’t raised to be bored. We were raised to matter. To produce. To be helpful. To take up space only if we were contributing. Any eldest immigrant daughter will understand the tug-of-war here. But I think the message runs deeper and wider than this identity. If you grew up absorbing sacrifice as love, urgency as devotion, and exhaustion as proof of worth, then you know: boredom can feel like betrayal when you carry the weight of your people's sacrifice on your spine. How dare I rest when they never could? How can I idle when every moment could be proof that their journey, their hardship, was worth it? My inheritance taught me that rest is what you get if you’ve done everything else perfectly. And even then, you should feel a little guilty about it. That script lives in my bones. I didn’t just inherit brown skin, old recipes and resilience. I inherited vigilance. The belief that being a good daughter, wife and mother, worker, woman - meant putting myself last. And feeling bad if I didn’t. There is no permission for rest when that is your factory setting.

My body, my nervous system, my calendar - are all trained for high-functioning performance. Growing up, rest wasn’t modeled. It certainly wasn’t celebrated. Rest came either with collapse from exhaustion or a rare indulgence, tucked away in brief pauses between duties. If I finished homework early, there was always ironing to help with. If I tried to stay in bed too long, someone would knock and say, “You’re still sleeping? It’s already 8 o’clock! The whole day is over!” And I don’t mean to collapse this experience into a single one – my parents created plenty of joy for me and my siblings throughout our life. But, it was about earning it the right way.

But the deeper truth? That same ancestral wisdom also taught me that worth is not earned through exhaustion. That maybe, just maybe, lying down is a legacy move.

Rest as Rebellion, Scarcity as Inheritance

Now, I’ll be the first one to say that this isn’t true across the board. I’ve seen many immigrant elders after decades of backbreaking labor and survival-mode living finally choose joy, ease, travel, and comfort. I’ve witnessed them take up dance, go on pilgrimages, tend gardens, take trips with their partners or friends, learn new hobbies or finally rest without explanation. I’ve seen them exhale. Not because the world finally made it easy, but because they chose themselves anyway. Still others were actually skilled in weaving joy and rest throughout their lives as a practice, without having to wait for retirement.

But that wasn’t my parents’ story. My father worked himself into the ground, quietly, dutifully, with pride and pain. When he died almost 14 years ago, it wasn’t just grief that entered our household. It was a deep and fearful scarcity. Unpaid bills. Unfinished business. Unmade plans. Scarcity doesn’t just live in bank accounts; it embeds itself in your cells. It whispers: there is never enough. And then, more dangerously: you are never enough. The financial and emotional responsibilities shifted and landed heavily on me. And so, I did what many eldest daughters do: I rose. I figured it out. I kept going. But I also learned to mistrust downtime. Be suspicious of joy. To fear stillness. To associate joy with risk. It became such a way of life that I don’t remember when I switched to the habit of never questioning it. The first time I heard someone say “rest is a right,” it didn’t sit gently on my skin. It felt like a luxury statement. Something you said if you had generational wealth and the abundance of time. Or a lake house.

A Mirror; A Witness; An Unlearning

When my husband and I got married, I brought all my scarcity baggage and promptly began building a joint life with tenets of urgency and “never enough-ness.” I didn’t know there was another way to be.

But, my husband is an anomaly in the best way. He knows his true purpose is to love his family and community. He doesn’t flinch at stillness or fill every silence with something to solve. And what's even more striking is that he's also an immigrant, raised in the same cultural soil of duty and discipline, of scarcity and survival, of “what will people say” and “keep your head down and keep going.” And yet, somehow, he emerged with a different orientation to time. To rest. To worth. I watch how he inhabits life, how he allows time to stretch, how he trusts joy to find him rather than chasing it. It’s not that he doesn’t work hard. He does. But he does so without letting work or productivity consume the essence of who he is. Sometimes I ask myself: How did he manage to hold onto this softness? How did he protect it from the grind that shaped the rest of us? That is the topic for another essay, if he gives me permission to narrate his story.

But, his advice for me is pretty simple: “You’ve already earned the right to do nothing. Don’t rush to fill your time. Be happy doing nothing. And just… be.”

As a result, he is the calm, steady witness to my unlearning. In this strange in-between, I am anchored by his presence. He has been quietly (and sometimes, amusingly) observing me fumble my way through this transition, trying to inhabit a new rhythm. I imagine it’s a cocktail of emotions for him: relief that I’ve finally stepped off the treadmill he’s long known was grinding me down, concern for the parts of me that only know how to orient around urgency and scarcity, and genuine curiosity and excitement for what we might build now that I’m not bound to that version of myself. He doesn’t just support my rest. He insists on it. And in doing so, he’s become a mirror I didn’t know I needed: one that reflects back the version of myself that isn’t hustling, fixing or performing. But simply becoming. On my own terms.

Joy in the Ordinary, Power in the Pause

Little by little, I’m starting to understand: rest isn’t just recovery - it’s a different way of relating to the world. This transition I’m in is awkward; sometimes uncomfortable, often beautiful. A strange in-between filled with small, unexpected pleasures. Like getting completely lost in a TV series (or rewatching old favorites), not to escape, but to immerse myself in another world for a little while. Sometimes the stories aren’t profound. And that’s exactly the point. Their familiarity is soothing while I fold laundry, stir soup, or simply let the day drift around me.

I find pleasure in cooking meals slowly, chopping vegetables to the rhythm of a playlist I love. Letting the spices linger in the air. Just feeding my beloveds with care, flavor, and presence.

There are days when I tuck my phone away, shut the laptop, leave the television off, and let the hours unfold without agenda. I become a quiet witness to whatever shows up; a thought I hadn’t made space to hear; a nap that pulls me in without warning; an unplanned phone call that stretches into laughter.

I say yes more often now. To last-minute train rides into the city to visit my daughter. To discover a local brewery with my husband and son. To walks with no destination. No calendar gymnastics. Just moments embraced for their own sake.

I delight in watching the living world continue its own quiet rituals. The birds arrive at dawn. The raccoons rustle the grass at twilight. The deer move silently under moonlight. They remind me that life is always moving, even when I am still.

I am writing more. Not to finish something or impress anyone; but simply to meet myself on the page. Sometimes I write with clarity. Sometimes with fog. But always with truth.

This chapter isn’t just about finding a slower rhythm. I am not here to be optimized. I am here to be alive. To know that my only value isn’t tied to what I produce, who I care for, or how exhausted I am. My value is just me.

Not because I’ve done enough. But because I am enough.

Quiet acts - of opting out, of noticing, of saying no - are declarations

The version of me who emerges from this clearing does not have to be more productive, more strategic, or more put-together. She only needs to be more whole. More true. More attuned to what brings her back to herself. But of course, emergence is rarely tidy. I’ve started grappling with new questions that surprise me with their audacity and their permission.

What else have I been carrying all these years, quietly waiting to be used differently? What would it mean to use my lived experiences and skills for something totally unexpected?

I don’t have concrete answers yet. But I feel parts of my brain and body that have long been dormant are starting to stir. The parts that weren’t always logical or strategic or excellent in performance reviews. But, the parts that are curious, intuitive, irreverent. Sometimes I wonder: Could I sell butterflies? Not metaphorically. Actual butterflies. Or run a restaurant. Or become a wine sommelier. Or train as a librarian. Or maybe just create joy in some unnameable way.

I’m allowing myself to fantasize. To doodle ideas in the margins of my journal. To follow threads of interest without demanding they become income first. To ask: What brings me pleasure? Wonder? A sense of awe? To trust that whatever wants to emerge will arrive not by force, but by invitation. So, ultimately, the question isn’t: What do I want to do next? The question is: Who am I becoming when I finally allow all of me to show up? The only way for this to emerge is to let myself be okay not knowing for a while. Sometimes the most generative thing we can do is stop, listen, and wait for the next true yes to arrive.

Building The Practice Of Everyday Boredom

I know that most folks are not in a space to take long breaks. Life moves full tilt and when you manage to find a break from one thing, there are inevitably things to take up its space. The idea of “doing nothing” feels like even more of a distant possibility.

But, the secret capitalism doesn’t want us to know is that boredom doesn’t require a cleared calendar or a radical career shift. It simply requires a crack in the grind. A sliver of space where urgency loses its grip. It can look like ten minutes of staring out a window before diving into email. It can look like saying no to one more committee, even if it would “only take an hour.” It can look like driving in silence instead of catching up on a podcast, letting your thoughts meander without agenda. Or a weekend calendar clear of social plans to be still at home.

Boredom, in this context, is not about neglecting your responsibilities. It’s about reclaiming your relationship to time and attention, allowing your brain to wander and your body to exhale. It’s a micro-resistance to the systems that tell us every moment must be justified. Even in the most structured lives, we can still craft portals of pause.

Our Nervous Systems Need To Catch Up to Our Souls

This will likely not feel good at first. In fact, expect it to feel terrible. Disorienting. Even a little dangerous. You might find yourself wondering what you’re forgetting or feel guilty, like you’ve abandoned something (or someone) important. You might feel the pull to open your phone, check your email, start a new to-do list, or explain yourself to someone. Your nervous system, trained for vigilance, may not interpret stillness as safety - at least not right away. That’s not a failure. That’s conditioning doing exactly what it was designed to do: keep you on alert, keep you productive, keep you safe in a world that has often made rest feel like a risk.

This is especially true if you're someone whose safety, identity, or family’s survival has depended on performance, contribution, or compliance. If you’re the one others have always relied on, you may not even know who you are without that familiar weight of responsibility. So when you begin to loosen your grip, don’t be surprised if others tighten theirs. People in your life may not understand right away. Your refusal to over-function might rattle those who have come to depend on your overextension. They may question your choices, re-engage your sense of duty, or assume this is a phase. It’s okay. Be patient - with them, and with yourself.

This is a process of slow unlearning and subtle recalibration. You will forget. You will revert. You will say yes to something you wish you hadn’t. You will overbook your calendar out of muscle memory. You will mistake productivity for purpose. Again and again. That’s all part of it. Over time, your body will begin to trust the pause. Your brain will stop sprinting toward every open loop. Your sense of time will shift from scarcity to spaciousness. But like any form of healing, it needs room to breathe. To practice.

So please - go gently. Take this as an invitation, not an assignment. Find people who are experimenting alongside you. Share your awkwardness, your small wins, your resistance. Maybe even start a text thread with a friend where you simply ask each other: “Did you do one boring thing today?” Celebrate the quiet victories. Celebrate the fact that you noticed.

You don’t have to quit your job, move to the woods, or burn everything down. You just have to begin - in the midst of it all - with a breath, a pause, a different question. The discomfort is not a sign that you’re doing it wrong. It’s the doorway. Keep walking through.

The Future Will Be Well-Rested

Being imperfect as we build this muscle is the most powerful work I can do right now. If joy is a form of devotion, then perhaps boredom is the quiet path back to ourselves. I rest not to become more productive - I rest to become more free. I rest because capitalism doesn’t own my nervous system. I rest because my ancestors endured too much for me to collapse from a grind they never consented to. I rest as a spiritual and political practice. A way of being that affirms my humanity and makes space for others to reclaim theirs. I rest to rewrite the manifesto my body was forced to memorize. I rest because I want to live. And I want others to know they can too. Because enoughness is our birthright. That is the generational work.

And about that motivational soundtrack? Turns out, there is one.

It found me years ago, in a college dorm room filled with longing and possibility, through a song I played on repeat without fully knowing why. The Pet Shop Boys’ “Being Boring” became a melancholy anthem that offered defiance in disguise. It told me, even then, that a life spent feeling, failing, dressing up, making amends, and finding yourself slowly was never a waste.

And how “being boring” might just be the most beautiful, revolutionary thing of all.

'cause we were never being boring

We had too much time to find for ourselves

And we were never being boring

We dressed up and fought then thought, make amends

And we were never holding back or worried that time would come to an end

• Pet Shop Boys, 1990