Fear vs Boredom

I’m recently stuck between two posts - am I scared of the things I should be doing, or am I bored?

As usual my tangled mind gets stuck on a specific idea, and I turn to this blog to try and tease some sense out of my head.

Thanks to the latest therapy session, I’m now trying to work out if the work I’m putting off actually exists and I’m avoiding it out of fear, or if its a construct that I’m trying to create in order to stave off boredom and the part of me that can’t be fooled is just ignoring it.

There are elements of both. I don’t have work right now that can be reasonably considered super important, so I’m not focusing as heavily on it as I think I should.

You could count that as boredom.

You could also count that as fear; the work is important, I have tasks to complete, but they are leading to potential overwhelm and as a result the fear is taking hold and I’m not doing it.

I can’t find the boundary between the two.

A key to unlocking it might be that my tasks are not atomic enough. I don’t have a single next step to take on the larger responsibilities - and perhaps that’s because fear has taken over and is refusing to allow me to consider what is required, because then I would be firmly on my way to getting something done, and instead it’s easier to sit back and do all the admin tasks.

I’m sure there is a procrastination lesson in there, somewhere - I always have admin tasks to do, but when the going gets tough, I dig in and get the work done.

So, perhaps it’s boredom. Or I don’t assign enough importance to the work to push the priority high enough, and as a result it gets shoved onto the back burner as an exercise in boredom.

Of course, this very exercise in writing is procrastination in itself - if I keep writing about it, I can pretend I’m doing something meaningful and making progress, when I know that in practice I have nothing to show. Apart from another post on this site, which considering I’m into double figures on maintaining a weekly streak, is success in itself.

I think that deep down I know the answer.

It’s a combination of both.

I’m scared of building up a body of tasks that mean I can get things done to make future me happier and find future tasks easier, but there’s also boredom in that they aren’t prescient or exciting enough to actually do them.

It’s always easier to do nothing than it is to commit.

And as I set myself a repeating task to think of something that scares me and get it done today, I should find that little edge of a task or a project, something sticking up into the air, and tug on it enough to turn it into something that I should be doing.

Use the fear to drag up the edge, turn it into something interesting to explore further, and then stop making excuses that it’s boring - because it inevitably will be - and get it done.

Or, of course, I could just find something exciting to do.

As in the way of all these posts, this is me vomiting my brain onto the page. Sometimes it makes sense and I read it back and I’m proud of it, sometimes less so.

I suspect this will be one of the latter.