2020 is the year we learned to love the luxury of boredom

As lockdown lifted this week, I found myself ignoring the WhatsApp messages with invites to the pub. It wasn’t that I’d been having such a brilliant time trapped at home – working, eating all three meals, watching TV and doing my washing in the one small room – but the thought of going out on a weeknight, and scuppering my 10pm bedtime, made me recoil in disgust.

Prior to the pandemic, commuting into a newsroom every day of the week, followed by evening social plans (or at the very least having told myself I must exercise), and weekends filled with trips or travel, did not feel a disproportionate burden. Sure I was tired, but isn’t everyone? And tiredness was a meagre price to pay to avoid the ultimate affliction – boredom.

The first lockdown, for all its faults and economy-disrupting impact, did give many people the chance to step off that hamster wheel. It was a momentary pitstop that never felt possible in “real life”. To slow down in sync with other people, to live day-to-day and take joy in smaller things.

You couldn’t plan a holiday to the Caribbean, your wedding might have had to be put on hold, and listening to your neighbours clapping was the highlight of your week.

The modern condition of busyness is often worn as a badge of honour, rooted in the history of our puritanical culture that put productivity on a par with godliness. And it’s a mentality that can be hard to shift, even with its well-recorded toxic mental and physical health implications. Although, of course, some workers are under more demand than ever before in 2020, lockdown has put a halt to the endless “I’m booked up for the next 10 weeks” diary-competing.

Now watering the plants and staring at the wall can easily fill up a Saturday. I no longer feel that in having no plans I am “wasting time”, and the boredom I so dreaded feels safe… and appealing.

The only problem is, once you’ve stepped out of that rat race, it can be hard to rejoin. I feel like I’ve almost been too successful at doing nothing. Now going to the pub on a Wednesday feels like something I need a two-week warning for.

It’s hard to know how we will collectively remember 2020 and, while I’m certain I don’t want to live the rest of my life in a pandemic, I think I will look back fondly on the space it gave us to become familiar with boredom. There’s a luxury to being bored, in a world that always wants us to be busy.

Yours,

Sophie Gallagher

Lifestyle deputy editor