beware of the bore-out

15 Jan, 2026

Thinking back to being in school, a specific class might have been challenging when experiencing it for the first time.

Now imagine repeating that same grade, same class, same contents, same exams each year. You’d be bored out of your mind at some point, obviously. You've heard these things a hundred times now, and you’re already excelling in some areas and hit your personal ceiling in others. You have no control over what happens, there is nothing to strive for anymore, nothing to work towards, and you know it’s just going to repeat again anyway.

That’s what some jobs are like after a while. Why you’ve stayed there might be due to lack of options, loyalty, or comfort (the evil you know, and so on!). It doesn’t mean you should settle for less and cajole yourself into doing the same soul-sucking digital assembly line for even longer.

“Bore-out” means as a state of chronic boredom at work, caused by being underchallenged and feeling that your work is meaningless, understimulating, or lacking purpose. It’s often happening when there is too little work for too long, no new experiences or projects, the tasks are very repetitive and easy with no wiggle room to do things your way, and you do everything on autopilot after a while.

Complaining about this to others will usually earn this response:

Sounds great. Who doesn’t want easy work where you don’t have to think much? How nice that you have been at a job for so long that everything’s easy for you! If you're out of work to do, why don't you just watch videos, read a book, play games? Plus, some downtime is needed to balance out more stressful phases in the future.

But it's unfortunately not that easy!

Just simply having no more work to do for hours every work day doesn't magically free up the time. It's still time you're expected to look busy on your desk in the office, or be green in Microsoft Teams during home office hours. You're unable to just leave the house and tend to something else, too.

Even if you use the time for household chores, exercise, or hobbies, you are constantly aware that emails and messages could come in that you need to check periodically. You cannot fully let go of work mentally as you keep having to interrupt yourself instead of focusing on your actual non-work related activity - if you are even comfortable doing this time theft in the first place.

If it’s a chronic work situation, it can eat at you. Feeling dreadful while going into work, headaches, back pain and joint pain, nausea, exhaustion after work despite knowing you basically did nothing, and being moody and sensitive to others. Feeling like you want to sleep forever when you realize that you will have to do this for the foreseeable future unless you switch jobs. Difficulty working up the discipline and motivation to even start an easy task that would take you 3 minutes maximum.

I've experienced this for a while in my current job now¹, which is one of my three top reasons to switch jobs. I need more, as silly as it sounds when we are usually asking for less stressful jobs and less work hours. A full work day of feeling like I actually accomplished something makes it easier to go home and study for my degree or do other projects, compared to hanging around doing basically nothing for 7 hours, which has me arriving home in a sluggish, lazy and tired mood instead.

The risk I see is that continuing with such a job makes it easier to check out and only half-ass everything through the fog and therefore accidentally block every way out of this due to worse performance. Personal work ethic suffers, and confidence at work might suffer too because you get no satisfaction from completing a hard task as there are none. You don't get any feedback, either. It feels like limbo.

The waning focus, effort, care and the autopilot you’re on make mistakes and absences more likely, and that’s something that could really come back to bite you. All of this can make you feel more fragile and incompetent, which in turn could make you think that you have to stick it out with this easy job because these types of weaknesses and mistakes would be unacceptable in a more demanding job. If you don’t have what it takes to even tackle this easy thing, so why would you be suitable for more? Even team members and bosses could start to have that negative view of you.

It's not even progressed that far in that direction for me, but it's something I'm afraid would happen further down the line.

Even when it feels like you're struggling at your easy, low-workload, boring job, I believe we're potentially be far better at something harder because it actually matches our skill, gets us invested and focused, makes it worth the energy we're spending and in turn makes it easier to be motivated and disciplined. There is something to show up for, a reward, an accomplishment and feedback! The physical symptoms might disappear, too. I know I hurt after a boring office day, but can sit for hours working at a thing I love and feel almost no pain.

Listen: Of course, there are bad, boring, low, and uninspiring times at every job. These lows are temporary, and you can bridge them by thinking about the good times or romanticizing it.

I know I have had to romanticize work to make it bearable at times, whether it would be dressing up, or getting myself a specific treat as a reward on my commute, or using the commute to realize more personal goals (like reading more), or using pop culture stuff (like the Severance soundtrack), or telling myself I show up for a specific person, or making a list of things to be grateful about.

But what I’m talking about here isn’t temporary, and there’s only so much you can romanticize before it just isn’t enough anymore. You can’t romanticize away a job that just doesn’t fit anymore, and one thing I regret is not leaving sooner to give myself a chance to rise to new challenges.

It’s easy to tell yourself that it’s just another temporary low and that you have to stick it out, but staying for too long just raises the risk of a complete bore-out and total resentment for the job, despite being aware of all its good parts. You should not wait it out until it becomes unbearable, but leave while you still have a good image of that position.

I admit, it’s also a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation: After months of asking for more work and projects and suggesting new things for me to do, and even more of my tasks and projects coming to an end to be replaced by nothing, I have exhausted all my options in not only transforming my current position, but also networking, possible internal transfers or internal applications.

Having none of my options left makes it harder to get through the work day at times, and I wish I would have left before exhausting them all; but I also acknowledge that if I had left earlier, a part of me would have wondered if that unexplored option could have changed everything and made staying viable again.

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Published 15 Jan, 2026

#2026 #health