“Boredom is a choice. Like tardiness. Or interrupting.” — Mike Rowe Quote

Boredom is a choice. Like tardiness. Or interrupting.

At the risk of being glib, I would say if you really want to make America great again, you have to make work cool again.

There's a belief... in the country that we can cure unemployment by creating opportunity. The skills gap proves that opportunity along is not enough to get people employed.

There is a lot of stuff we can't control, but it is completely in our power to decide what the definition of what a good job is. That's up to us.

My mother's dad dropped out of the eighth grade to work. He had to. By the time he was 30, he was a master electrician, plumber, carpenter, mason, mechanic. That guy was, to me, a magician. Anything that was broken, he could fix. Anybody anywhere in our community knew that if there was a problem, Carl was there to fix it.

I spent a fair amount of time in Communist Poland when I was young - my wife was from there - and I had the impression that boredom was one of the things that was undermining that whole society from the inside.

Around the year 2000, countries such as France, the Netherlands and the US were already five times as wealthy as in 1930. Yet nowadays our biggest challenges are not leisure and boredom, but stress and uncertainty.

My CIA colleagues were smart, dedicated, funny, and creative. Yes, there was sometimes stifling bureaucracy, boredom, colleagues who never should have been there, and later, deeply disturbing stories of the CIA's involvement in torture. Still, I got to do work I thought was incredibly important and, many times, had fun doing it.

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.