Daily Dose of English 70
Boring Days
Daily Dose of English 70
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about boring days. Days that aren't really that much fun. Because they're a fact of life. Boring days happen fairly often, sadly. And, well, maybe not sadly, and that's what I want to talk a little bit about. So first let's talk about just the word boring, just to make sure that we're all on the same page, we all understand exactly what I'm talking about. Something that is boring is something that is not fun, but also not bad or terrible for some reason. It's something that is essentially doesn't have anything. It's just boring. So for example, a lot of people find mathematics really boring. They're hard to follow, hard to understand. It's just not interesting to a lot of people. But some people find mathematics really interesting. Other things that might be boring, especially if you're a kid, is listening to your parents talk, right? If they're talking to a friend of theirs, it can be pretty boring as a kid. Some people also find learning English to be boring, but you don't because you listen to Ben's Language Lab and you watch the other series that I have on my YouTube channel. And so you're not bored by learning English because it's awesome. But specifically, I want to talk about days that aren't very interesting and can feel a little bit boring. The word boring has a generally negative reputation or use in at least in the US. And so if you say something is boring, it's usually not a good thing. It's seen as a bad adjective or a bad way to describe something, right? If you describe somebody's classes as boring, that's not good. However, I don't think that it necessarily deserves to always be a bad, a word that's bad in some way. It's not a bad word, like you're not going to get in trouble by using boring, but it can sort of have this negative connotation, like I said. And I think a big reason for that is because our lives are so full of things, of stimulation, of videos and movies and advertisements and food and colors, there is so much in the world and in our lives that is the very opposite of boring, that boringness can feel rare. which is actually why I think it's an important thing. Because when something is boring, it doesn't always mean that it's bad. Like I said, it can often mean that it is just a little bit, it's normal. Right? So, for example, if you do something every single day, that can get a little bit boring. But that, again, I don't think is bad. For example, brushing your teeth. If you brush your teeth every single day, several times per day, like I do, It can be a little bit boring, right? Who enjoys brushing their teeth? Actually, I kind of like brushing my teeth, but that's a whole different thing. I think I talked about this on a different episode. But most people don't enjoy brushing their teeth. And so that's a good example of something that's boring, but also very useful and good. I also think that a lot of people find cooking or preparing their food to be pretty boring and not interesting. But again, in other episodes I've talked about how I don't think that has to be true. But I believe this shows that there are things that are important that are kind of boring. Especially if you think about learning English in some ways. I know I made a bit of a joke that it's not boring if you use Ben's Language Lab. But the truth of the matter is that you have to spend thousands of hours with English. And so some of those hours are gonna be a little bit boring. They're not gonna be maybe bad, like actively a bad thing for you, where you're going, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this. That hopefully doesn't happen. But you're probably going to have some days where you go, all right, I'm going to listen to Ben's podcast, but I don't really want to, it's like not that interesting. And maybe it doesn't happen for you, but I'm sure it happens with other things in your life. For example, maybe work. A lot of people find their job to be a little bit boring, even if it's their dream job. I don't know if you've heard the term dream job before, but it's a pretty common phrase we use to describe somebody's, well, the job that they would have if they got to choose any job in the world, so in their dreams. typically is how we think about it. But if you could choose whatever job in the world you wanted to have, let's say you wanted to be a snorkeling instructor in some beautiful sunny country somewhere. and you wanted to do that and have enough money to live and not have any worries. Right, that's a dream job for a lot of people. You just get to enjoy life every single day. However, in any job, there's gonna be stuff that you don't really wanna do. Right, if you're a scuba instructor, you're gonna have to deal with people that are not, that are kinda dumb. You're gonna have to be like, okay, here's the same thing again every single day. I'm teaching you the basics. or you'll have to gather the gear and put it away, clean up some stuff, right? There's plenty of things that happen in any job that are maybe not boring or that are maybe not, like I said, bad, but are a little bit boring, right? If you're going to work for the fifth year in a row as a scuba instructor and you're gonna give the exact same class, that's a little boring. But at the end of the day, you still like your job. You still enjoy it and you still think it's a good thing. And this is a big reason why boringness is not a bad thing necessarily, because we eventually forget about it. Boring stuff doesn't stick around in our mind the same way that really exciting and good stuff does. And this is why when you have boring days, you kind of don't remember them after a couple of weeks, right? I'm sure you've had this before where you check the calendar and you see, oh, it's already June? How did that happen? I thought it was May. June just came suddenly. What happened in May, right? Or whatever the month is. And you realize that your last month was a little bit boring. And so you don't remember a lot of the days and things that happened. And that's okay. There's a lot of good that can come from resting and being a little bit bored, especially because it means you're avoiding filling your brain with more stuff. Because something that we've seen more recently with the rise, with the new invention of short form content, so TikTok and YouTube Shorts, those sorts of things, is that a lot of people will have time in their day where they feel like they're kind of having fun or doing something but they're just scrolling TikTok and then afterwards they don't remember anything that they did in the same way of if you just sat there. However, you're like filling your brain with all of this, this information. And we do that kind of all day, right? I work at my computer. And so even though I'm not like scrolling TikTok, I still just get so much information in my brain every single day. And sometimes taking a breath and being a little bit bored is a good thing. And so even though boring days can be a little bit negative and you can be like, Oh, I'm so bored. It's okay. You don't have to have every single day be really fun. Nobody does. Even the happiest person on earth is still sometimes a little bit bored because that's what we do. We need to have that downtime. It's almost like sleep. but for your active, your awake brain. I know that doesn't really make any sense, but it's this different kind of just a being, I guess is how I'm going to say that. And so if you find yourself very frequently bored and not having fun and that your first instinct, your first reaction is to go find a way to have fun or to find a way to not be bored, Don't worry about it. Maybe just sit there, think about something, or put on a song and just lay down. You don't have to be productive in doing something every single moment of your day, even though sometimes it feels like you want to. I know as well as anyone about wanting to feel productive. And same goes for learning English. If you're being a little bit bored with something when you're learning, just try to focus on the words and what the person is saying and see what you can get out of it, even though it's a little bit of a boring piece of content. Or also you can just switch, right? There's no problem with finding a new source of content for your learning since you're going to be here for so long. So anyways, I got a little bit off topic of boring days specifically, but I hope that you enjoyed this episode and maybe learned a thing or two. Let me know down in the comments, do you have boring days? But anyways, I'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.
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