I was sick this week.

Fortunately, when I am sick, I can stay home. I have enough Stormtroopers who do the day-to-day work that it doesn’t matter if I take time off. When you’re an important cog in making the machine work, sometimes it can be worse to take time off because you know the work will just pile up.

Not me. In the last 10 years or so, when I get sick, I get the man-cold. I end up on a couch in a semi-fetal position. “Big baby” is the right word.

For three days, I was in this sick state. When I am this sick, I basically have no focus and can only watch brainless TV. I don’t have enough focus to read or even scroll the internet; it just takes too much energy.

For two days after that, I was better but still recovering. I didn’t leave the house and just continued with a bit more energy and focus, but nothing that made me want to engage in anything. I was good and bored, with no outlet.

As I got better and needed to get out and about, I was surprised at how I was feeling. I thought after five days of being bored with no capability to do much of anything, I would be champing at the bit to go back to work on Monday.

I wasn’t. It had no pull for me. What. So. Ever.

I would have been just as happy to get up and have no plans. I didn’t want to go back. I had the usual sense of Sunday night dread, and then the inevitable to-do list started moving to my frontal cortex, bringing back that little hit of stress.

It’s another sign that I am ready to not work. I truthfully thought I would be looking forward to getting out of the house and doing anything. I didn’t. Not once.

There is a quote I came across from the Mr. FireStation blog that I have cut and kept. It sums up my feelings perfectly, which this sickness helped prove:

“When I have been bored, not once have I thought I should go to work.” — Unknown

It strikes me first as funny, but also as true. Not once in those five days of boredom did I wish I could go to work. On a weekend, would anyone ever think they were bored? Yes. Would they think of going to work? I hope not.

To be honest, I can’t imagine a large percentage of people, given the choice, would go to work to cure boredom. There are lots of other reasons to go, but not to cure boredom.

I always go back to my young JEDI Academy years (early 20s) to see what my back-in-time, bright-eyed, energetic self would think about some of these thoughts. They seem so ridiculous when I put myself into that frame of mind. So why do we consider it as we get older?

I suspect it is because we have trained ourselves over 30 or more years to have our own expectations of what a functioning adult has to do every day. Once you reach FI, it would be easier if we could just bury those expectations and go back to the carefree days. It would make it easier to accept.

We hear about those retirees who end up returning to work six months to a year after retiring because they are bored. I hear from many retirees how bored they are. Even my dad tells me to never retire.

I think most people think they want to go to work to solve boredom, but what they actually want is purpose or social connection. That is what I need to ensure I get right.

I hope this lack of wanting to go back to work means I have moved past the “One More Year” phase and into the “Why Am I Still Doing This?” phase. When boredom is preferable to work engagement, the exit door starts looking a lot more like a gateway than an ending.

How about you? When bored on a weekend, have you ever felt like going to work?

maybe I can figure out how to be sick next week too