Are you bored? Here’s how that affects you, your career, and your employers

After enduring New Delhi’s extreme temperatures and lung-killing pollution for two years, the 27-year-old IT engineer took a transfer to his employer’s office in Bengaluru. It was meant to be a new beginning amid pleasant weather, easygoing people and pubs aplenty.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite turn out that way.

Perhaps it was the city’s infamous traffic jams, or the way it alternated between water shortages and floods. Or perhaps it was something else altogether. But instead of letting his hair down and making the most of all that life in Bengaluru offered, the engineer, a high performer, slunk off at the end of the day to the accommodations where he lived as a paying guest.

Once back in his room, he would lock himself away, pull out his laptop and spend three hours watching video clips one after another. Not the ones that some Indians derive vicarious pleasure from, featuring a bunch of strangers cooped up in a house for months, viciously attacking each other. Or clips of standup comics lampooning life, or replays of India’s cricketers outdoing their rivals on the field.

Instead, just as surely as night follows day, it was videos on adult sites that grabbed him by the eyeballs and short hairs every evening.

Rather than spending time in the real world, he would immerse himself in these marathon pornography-watching sessions, with all else ceasing to exist. He was an addict looking for a fix. But no amount of ogling at performers having sex in all kinds of ways would sate him. It was akin to eating through a giant bag of potato chips, seeking to hit the spot with that one elusive chip but failing to do so, only to reach for the next one, hoping it would get him there.

Soon, things literally began to get out of hand.

“His addiction increased and he started watching pornography in the morning and a few times during office hours, which is when he decided to seek therapy,” said Manoj Sharma, coordinator of the Service for Healthy Use of Technology clinic (SHUT clinic), at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (Nimhans), Bengaluru. SHUT works with people addicted to gaming, social media, pornography, stock trading, gambling and the Internet.

The nerd was one of the many patients who end up in the clinic each week because they do not know what to do with their free time.

“Lack of social support leads to boredom, and he was new in the city, without any family or friends,” said Sharma, explaining why the geek was drawn to smut. Was boredom the cause of his porn addiction? Sharma certainly thinks so. “There is no dopamine hit, and binge-watching movies does not give similar stimulation,” he opined. (Dopamine is a hormone that induces feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and motivation.)

After eight sessions, which included getting the young man to join a gym, and enrol in a book reading class, Sharma hopes his addiction to the blue stuff will be broken.

The IT professional is not the only one whose life has been derailed by boredom. They may not be coping with it in the same manner, but the malaise of boredom has infected many employees, both male and female.

Simply put, India Inc. is grappling with a silent crisis in the form of bored employees. They deliver on the job, but many of them are just going through the motions, say experts.

The fallout of boredom is detrimental to organizations, as it leads to poor quality of work, lower productivity and higher attrition.

It is difficult to estimate the exact extent of boredom in the workforce, as no formal studies detailing the problem in India are available. But it is a clear and present danger.

Boredom at the workplace, however, is not unique to this country. In the US, for instance, research conducted by opinion pollster OnePoll (now rebranded as Talker Research) for Colorado State University Global found that 46% of the 2,000 respondents in a 2023 survey were bored at least three days of the week. Another survey conducted last year by the consultancy Gartner, covering 3,500 employees, had similar findings. Both surveys were featured in a report by HR association Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

A 2022 hiring survey by staffing company Indeed found that more than half of Indian employees were bored with their jobs and were actively looking for new opportunities. Happiness and flexibility at the workplace were top priorities for those surveyed. Demotivated by the rising layoffs at the time, two out of every three (65%) respondents also expressed an unwillingness to give their all on the job.

Why do people get bored?

A few centuries ago, the word boredom was used to describe the listless state of a person or an affliction that struck those who were idle. Today, sociologists and therapists say boredom cripples people across social circles, gender and pin codes. In particular, it affects professionals.

“I come to office, wear my jacket and head off to meet clients. I’ve been doing the same work for years. I want to exit but cannot,” said a senior partner at one of the largest consulting firms in India, who asked for anonymity in order to speak freely. The partner, now in his mid-40s, takes home a salary of more than ₹1 crore and has an equity stake in the consulting firm. And he is incredibly bored.

Exiting is not an option as the partner’s equity is invested in the firm. Even if another rival woos him, it will be to essay a similar role. Yes, there will be more money, but for those who already have a lot of it, adding to the pile means little more than a yawn.

According to sociologist Kamala Ganesh, boredom towards work sets in when there is repetition, without scope for creativity or mindfulness. “Most of our activities are instrumental, related to productivity, oriented towards goals. There is a need for space to indulge in some non-instrumental activity which is meaningful,” she explained.

Employees complaining about mundane tasks are often ignored. There is a listlessness that settles around them. A bored employee may continue to produce good results, but that can also be because the tasks are repetitive, and the outcomes are expected.

Taking a different view, Amit Chincholikar, global chief human resources officer (CHRO) at Yokohama Off-Highway Tires, blames the covid pandemic for the malaise of boredom, which he says is the result of the “boss doing your job”. The CHRO noted that during and after the pandemic, as the workforce toggled work between the home and office, there was an increase in “micro-management and accountability.”

In many cases, bosses have forgotten the art of delegation and employees find themselves at levels below what they were qualified for or capable of. At entry level, as a result, employees are working on assignments that will soon be taken over by artificial intelligence.

“The unpredictability in the economy overall has pushed leaders to micromanage, leaving a larger chunk of employees underutilized,” said Chincholikar. “Most of the employees want to do a good job, but the quality of work coming their way is below their capabilities. You do not need millions of engineers to do some of the work that most of the tech firms hire them for.”

Whether it is because of pandemic-era shifts or other reasons, boredom cannot be identified in the initial stages. By the time it shows up on the radar, the organization is on the verge of losing another member, as the employee disengages from work completely.

The last stage came to the fore as the pandemic waned, when employees the world over were reported to be “quiet quitting,” limiting themselves to just the basic requirements of the job, never stepping up when the organization needed them to go above and beyond, and continuing to draw a full salary.

Everyone is affected

Boredom is not something that afflicts one generation, though younger employees may give voice to it more often. It affects people across age groups, genders and demography, in all kinds of situations and all kinds of ways.

For instance, on a Diwali vacation in 1996, this writer’s family of four drove 600km from Patna to Kolkata in a Maruti 800. The car had a music system, but we forgot to carry the cassettes. There was one on the dashboard with four songs from the movie The Gentleman on side A and another four from the film Hum Aapke Hain Kaun on side B. For the next two days, we were bored to death as it kept playing, entertained only when we noticed how the voices of the singers changed as the car struggled to make its way over bumpy roads.

Boredom affects genders differently. “In urban regions, privileged women tend to get bored because of the demands of society. They are often seen filling their time with ‘activities’ that do not necessarily interest them,” said Sonalde Desai, a professor at the University of Maryland and the National Council of Applied Economic Research.

Desai pointed out that there is more time available to women today once the children are grown up. “But the job market is not always welcoming to returning women, so what do you do with the rest of your life?”

How do you beat boredom?

Boredom is not a symptom that people cite when they consult a therapist. “No one comes in saying: ‘I’m bored’. They come in anxious, depressed and after some time realize that they do not know how to deal with ‘nothingness’,” said a Mumbai-based clinical psychologist.

The psychologist’s clients have come seeking help with breakdowns in their relationships and eating disorders, among other things. Boredom is often the underlying cause of their problems.

One patient, in his 20s, was struggling because his relationship had ended and he had to deal with a sense of ‘nothingness’. “His manager knew about the breakup and one day pointed out that it had actually worked, in a way, because his sales numbers were up 10x,” the psychologist told Mint, noting that many latch on to work because it can be “anchoring.”

There is no one strategy to battle boredom. Therapists suggest learning new skill sets that can help an individual get another role within an organization. In particular, they recommend taking time out to pursue an interest and getting a rush of endorphins through exercise instead of social media apps.

Indeed, reducing time spent on social media can go a long way in helping people get real with their lives, say psychologists. The dependency on such apps for content has reached alarming levels and researchers have warned against the dangers of toggling between apps to alleviate one’s boredom.

In a study published this year, called Fast-Forward to Boredom: How Switching Behavior on Digital Media Makes People More Bored, researchers Katy Y. Y. Tam and Michael Inzlicht noted that boredom was “unpleasant” and people go to “great lengths to avoid it.” Upping consumption of digital media like short videos was a common way to “escape boredom and increase stimulation.”

“One common way that people watch these videos is to switch between videos and fast-forward through them, a form of viewing we call digital switching. Here, we hypothesize that people consume media this way to avoid boredom, but this behaviour paradoxically intensifies boredom,” said the researchers from the Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, and the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

All in all, boredom is an invisible threat hanging over employers, and organizations have no choice but to live with the attrition it sparks. While it is difficult to address immediately, boredom can be recognized and tackled by taking the time to understand why people are leaving, and taking corrective action for the future.