On Boring Work

Even as he rhapsodized about the division of labor in an 18th-century pin factory in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith made this observation: ''The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention. . . . The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment.

More recently, I happened on one of those online lists showing which wire-service articles have been e-mailed most frequently. The leader of the pack, by a great margin, was a Reuters article headlined ''Boring, Passive Work May Hasten Death: Study.'' In the prior six hours, it had been e-mailed 870 times, compared with the second-place item, a nutty news story about a groom who forgot to attend his own honeymoon, which had been sent 391 times. Apparently a nation of people sitting at their desks and avoiding whatever simple operations they are supposed to be performing found a certain resonance in the idea that, as the study put it, ''the meaningfulness of work may be an important contributor to the mortality experience.''

Yet how can it be that ''torpor of mind'' still clouds so many professional lives, after a decade in which the idea of work was relentlessly romanticized in scores of books and articles as a potential site of personal expression and a source of deeper meaning? In a thoughtful and provocative book called The Rise of the Creative Class (from which the Smith quotation was borrowed), Richard Florida is the latest to make the case that work today is more creativity-packed than ever, pegging the membership of this ''great emerging class of our time'' at 38 million people. Of course, to get to such a big number he has to include not just authors and software engineers but also lawyers and even ''management occupations.'' He also notes, but with rather less fanfare, the existence of a far larger group, the 55-million-member Service Class (cashiers, clerical workers and so on). So while it is true, for instance, that the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that software engineer (a ''creative'' job) is very likely to be the fastest-growing job category in percentage terms, the story is different when you look at raw-number projections. There, the Top 10 is dominated by ''combined food preparation and serving workers,'' ''customer-service representatives,'' cashiers, security guards and the like — thousands and thousands of new jobs that sound more boring with each passing day.

Maybe the real curiosity is that so many of us would expect anything other than boredom from work. But that was a great promise of the 1990's boom: sure, we would have to give up the security the work world once offered, but we would participate in the creation of something new and better — something presumably less boring. And besides, everything seemed less boring when you could break up your day by checking your portfolio's value online. But the appeal of that particular pastime has diminished, and it turns out that despite living in what we're constantly told is an age of wonder, boredom is apparently with us more than ever — and especially in our supposedly revolutionized workplaces.

Florida contends that the economy is moving away from ''manufacturing and services toward higher-value-added creative sectors'' and argues hopefully for ''tapping the creativity of the many'' for the benefit of both bored broom-pushers and society at large. Perhaps more pragmatically, Benjamin Amick, whose research at the University of Texas School of Public Health at Houston was behind the e-mailed article, simply advocates more enlightened management that lets workers at all levels at least feel as if they have some control over what they do and how they do it. On the other hand, boredom has always had its defenders, on the theory that the idle mind is inspired to create. A book by Patricia Meyer Spacks called Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (which is more interesting than it sounds) quotes Bertrand Russell arguing for boredom as ''one of the great motive powers throughout the historical epoch.'' Charlie Citrine, protagonist of Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, sets out to write a history of boredom, musing that perhaps it is ''a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents.''

But the trouble with boredom in the workplace — and the reason it persists even when more people seem to be doing more interesting things than ever — is that its definition is so fluid. In the most dynamic economy, the cutting edge can get dull fast; the threshold for nonboringness is constantly ratcheted up. And the big-project, labor-dividing, industrial mind-set seems alive and well even in the metastasizing tech sector, and it seems just as likely that today's creative jobs will evolve into the rote and meaningless boredom-spawners of tomorrow. After all, isn't Dilbert a software engineer?

The trend-watchers at the Yankelovich Monitor, an annual study of consumers, actually declared a ''boredom boom'' a couple of years ago: ''Boredom . . . is a call to action. It fuels resentment toward businesses that flood the market with boring options.'' Now, however, Yankelovich says that all this boredom has faded a bit, although it is not entirely clear why. Are we more stimulated than before, or just more easily satisfied? Perhaps we're bored with boredom itself. Just days after that news story topped the most-e-mailed list, it had fallen completely off the charts. You could almost imagine the thousands of creative information workers, peering through the day's torpor at their computer monitors, clicking and scrolling and asking, ''What else have you got?''

This essay appeared in the June 23, 2002, issue of The New York Times Magazine.