on being bored

suburb girl summer as an ambition, not an afterthought.

After 6 weeks of back-to-back traveling, and a 5 year schedule of switching between work and school every 4 months with just a week (or two if i was lucky!) in between, intentionally having no plans for the second half of my summer stuck in suburbia was just what I needed.

I drew this in my journal around a year ago, right after I agreed to commit to two back-to-back internships last summer in two different cities. I thought I would regret not maximizing opportunity compared to the "what ifs" with having free time, but found myself feeling like a monkey bouncing around from thing to thing without time to actually think.

For the past eight years of my life, I’ve done everything I could to avoid pockets of time without a set purpose attached to it. I realized it’s not the opportunities that are scarce, but it’s your own agency on time.

So this summer, I vowed to have no plans at all for a month and a half. Part of me felt insane fomo for not having real summer plans - no place I needed to be, job to do, or real structure to my day. But it was a riveting sense of freedom living a summer that almost paralleled closely to the ones I had in the 7th or 8th grade. Summers where days consisted of reading an entire book in one sitting, writing just because, going on long walks by the water, or diving into an entire two hour rabbithole in a topic I just came across of.

some general things I learned

Being bored creates room to be inspired

Being bored allows your mind to wander and build creative connections. You develop a better intuition of the things you truly enjoy doing, and you get the freedom to shift course on your day and work on things whenever inspiration strikes. It’s kind of like PG’s essay on the Maker vs. Manager schedule.

You don’t feel fomo if you have exciting projects/explorations in the mix that are fulfilling to you

One of my biggest fears was feeling fomo for not continuing to travel or “maximize” the summer, but I realized you don’t really feel fomo when you’re working on things that are genuinely exciting to you. Making the trek all the time for plans doesn’t seem worth the opportunity cost.

Objects that are in motion, stay in motion. and those that don’t don’t.

Something I told myself when I got back in the summer was that maybe I’ll organize another trip once I get settled back home. But I realized - if you don’t book the ticket, it’s not going to happen. I got so comfortable with being in one spot, I could not imagine myself going on a plane again for the next little while. It’s probably why backpackers are so good and used to constantly being on the move, and those who have never traveled much are more hesitant to shift their routine.

You might find yourself defaulting to fake work, if you’re not careful.

When you don’t have any real deadlines or structure to your day, it’s easy to lose the entire day on fake work tasks like scrolling the internet or replying to emails all day. Having no plans can make you more susceptible to distractions, which I wrote about in this post here.

some things I got up to this summer

This summer of nothing was filled with a ton of half-baked explorations and inspiration to help me figure out what to focus on next. Throughout the summer, I logged the things I got up to help me keep track - here are some the things I did:

• Spending time with my family and dog: Especially since I was moving so far to San Francisco, I knew my time at home with family would be limited after I moved. A lot of my days just involved hanging out with the fam and our dog Kobe!

• Organized a mini high school reunion:  It was last minute and I almost wasn't going to do it, but I'm really glad I did! I got to see people I haven't seen in almost 5 years, and it was really nostalgic meeting up at the park near our school and catching up on everyone's lives. High school is always a mixed bag where everyone's in the midst of growing up and figuring things out but it's really special to see how we all started in Scarborough and hear how much everyone has grown.
  • I learned that even if you're worried about coming across as cringey or feel nervous about trying to reach out and organize things, just fck it and do it anyways! Often other people may have wanted to do it, but didn't have the courage to reach out.
• Writing: Unintentionally I found myself writing and reflecting a lot and the free time allowed me to publish 5 blog posts in the span of two months - one about my month-long trip to Southern Europe, taste-testing cities, fake work, the job trifecta, and the one you're reading right now :). I think I'm definitely on a roll with my writing and want to continue publishing something every month or every other month or so. Now I'm at a point with my writing where I get minimal input - I mostly edit my own work or get one or two friends to read it and I just post things immediately.
• Exploring video content: I recently got the DJI vlog camera and wanted to explore video making, but man filming and editing video is a totally different ball game! I made around 4 videos around different topics - one about my trip itinerary, reviews on a product I bought, and some about my journey in tech. I'm not sure how I'll be sticking with video creation because it's pretty time consuming. It's definitely a skillset you have to build to concisely explain concepts across on video and I find writing as a medium much faster to get my ideas across.
  • I do think it's probably a matter of getting my reps in and figuring out the type of videos and vibe on my curate so maybe we'll see how it goes with time!

• Getting better at driving: As some of you might know, I just got my G2 recently in December. I haven't gotten to drive since then as I was in Waterloo and traveling after, but I finally had access to a car at home. Although I learned how to drive and passed the test, I still didn't feel as confident in my abilities. It was cool to take this skill into smaller baby steps, like driving to Walmart on my own, picking and dropping off my mom to class on my own, driving the highway and trying long distances which was a win for me!
  • I'm now seeing a lot of fruits in spending time on this! A month later I'm now driving a car on my own in South Bay and going on the highways and all :) (huge contrast to before where I'd never do that on my own.)

• Met with some startups and invested in Codédex: Now I had more free time in the summer I wanted to get back into angel/scout investing in some more companies. The summer season was definitely slower - a lot of co's I was excited about were aiming to raise closer to Sept/Oct time. I had a few conversations but I think the summer lul really helped me in choosing to be strategic about the companies to partner with and at which point in time!
  • My priority was to try to work with startups where I have a strong understanding in the space and have a clear value-add to support (not just that they're a great business). I'm excited to have invested in Codédex - kind of like Duolingo for coding education. I remember using software like Twilio Quest and I really love how they've tapped into gamifying, making learning how to code fun, and building a really strong community behind their product. I came across their product from seeing some of my friends who've joined their early team which was a great signal to me to want to learn more. I'm super excited to where they go and to continue meeting with more companies now I'm back in the Bay!

• I've been tinkering on a new app, kind of like strava but for your hobbies: As someone who loves learning & exploring things, there's not really any social platform out there where you can share your works in progress. It was fun figuring out how to build all the elements of a social app (feed, following, likes, comments etc.) and getting an end to end working! I'm excited to continue working on it.
• I started running: After bookmarking the Couch to 5k podcast for years, living in a suburb and not having much else to do for fitness I started running by the water and it was really nice. I'm not sure how much I'll keep up with running as a hobby but it was definitely nice trying it as a beginner!

closing thoughts

I wrote half of this blog post while I was bored in the suburbs, and only got around to continuing it now a few weeks into my first full-time job in the Bay Area. I'm realizing now, more than ever, how rare that bucket of free time was. You'll never really get it again, unless you go on a career break.

Work has been busy (although very interesting!) and weekends so far have been filled with lots of plans - especially during everyone's initial excitement of moving back to the city and catching up with old friends. I've been experiencing first hand how hard it is carving out time for yourself and see the value in creating pockets of time with no set purpose to it.

Going forward I encourage anyone reading this embracing empty pockets of time for what it is while they can, and try to strive towards boredom sometimes, instead of running away from it.

---

related reads

• i want to be bored by plumfield