What if career boredom isn’t a problem to solve?
On ambition, identity, and why even “good work” can feel off.
Some mornings, you wake up ready to take over the world.
Other days, you’re just negotiating with yourself about whether opening work email counts as productivity.
It’s weird, isn’t it?
You’re doing work you once wanted. It pays well. People respect it. Your parents have finally stopped asking what exactly you do.
And yet… something feels off.
Not dramatically wrong. Just slightly out of sync. Like you’re the right actor, reading the right lines, but the scene still feels flat.
I used to think that meant I needed a new job. A fresh challenge. A pivot.
But maybe it’s not about switching jobs. Maybe it’s about how we’ve started expecting our work to be our identity, our coping mechanism, and our LinkedIn headline, all at the same time.
Because let’s be honest, we don’t work for just money anymore.
We work for meaning. Validation. That little dopamine hit of “I’m doing something important with my life.”
I think about this often when I see my sister, she’s been at Infosys for 12 years now. Every year during appraisal season, she says she’s going to quit. That she’ll try something new, take a break, switch tracks. But every year, she stays. Not because she loves the work. Not even because it’s easy. But because it’s predictable. It fits within the life she’s built around it.
And I get it. Leaving is hard.
We like to believe that boredom is a sign to leap. But sometimes, it’s a sign that you’ve learned how to cope. That you’ve chosen stability over risk. And maybe there’s dignity in that, too.
On the other hand, some people find ways to keep the spark alive not by quitting, but by carving out slivers of meaning on the side.
There’s this cricket coach near my gym, a middle-aged man running drills for teenagers on a dusty ground. It’s not his day job, he is a PT teacher in a school nearby. But he shows up every evening after work, sets up cones, and encourages the kids. There’s something so grounded about the way he does it. Like he’s not chasing a dream, just honoring a part of himself that refuses to be forgotten.
I think that’s what a lot of us are trying to do, find some corner of our day where we’re more than our job description. Where we’re not performing, just existing in alignment with ourselves.
Because the truth is, even when you’re “doing what you love,” the system finds a way to wear you down.
The moment we turn something we love into our job, be it writing, design, coding, or building, it gets folded into this larger machinery. Suddenly, it has to scale. It has to perform. It has to justify itself. You chase creative freedom and realise you’re still working for clients, just different ones.
So, even passion becomes labour. Even autonomy comes with admin.
And then there are those who are quietly doing double shifts, not for the love of it, but because they don’t have a choice.
A few days ago, a Blinkit delivery guy came to drop off an order and handed me a business card. He’s also an electrician. “Light ka kaam ho toh bata dena,” he said. Calm, confident, no desperation in his tone. Just a man doing what he can to get work. Trying to hold multiple identities together without letting any one define him completely.
A similar story went viral recently, a Swiggy delivery partner handed over food and his resume. Turns out he was once a full-stack developer with 19 years of experience, ran a company, and is now trying to rebuild after a business loss.
I find these stories incredibly grounding. Because they remind me that people are constantly reshaping themselves. That ambition isn’t always a polished LinkedIn update. Sometimes it’s a flyer. A second hustle. A quiet refusal to give up.
And then there are people who pause to retool entirely. A friend of mine left a stable consulting job to do an executive MBA at IIM. She wasn’t stuck. She wasn’t even unhappy. But she could sense she was drifting. And rather than waiting for the boredom to calcify, she chose to move.
All of this makes me think: maybe boredom at work isn’t a personal flaw.
Maybe it’s not even a problem to be solved.
Maybe it’s just a sign that you’re still paying attention.
That somewhere beneath the performance and productivity and purpose-driven blur, you’re still in conversation with yourself.
The modern workplace is efficient, optimised, and utterly unrelenting.
There’s no room for softness. For slowness. For seasons. And yet, we keep asking our work to give us what it was never built to provide: constant meaning.
But meaning isn’t constant.
It dips. It drifts. It disappears and returns.
And maybe that’s not something to be fixed. Maybe it’s just something to be felt. Acknowledged. Lived through.
Because the real danger isn’t in being bored. It’s in becoming numb.
It’s in forgetting that you’re allowed to outgrow things, even the things you once wanted.
So if you’re feeling restless, maybe don’t panic. because not all boredom needs a solution.
Sometimes, it just needs space.
Take care, and drop a comment with some of your career stories.