How to build a quiet and boring life that you love
The world keeps telling us that a normal life is a wasted life.
I live a boring life. I’m 39, and most of my days look exactly the same.
I work from a small office, take walks, see my family, lift weights, read, and write. That’s about it.
And I love it.
My 19-year-old self would scoff at this. Even my 29-year-old self would. “Is that all there is to life?” he’d say. “You’ve got to be out there. In the middle of the action!”
What action?
I think I watched too many TV shows and movies.
The dream you inherit is not the dream you keep
In my head, I had a different picture of how my life was supposed to look. In my twenties, I watched shows like Mad Men and Suits. I like that life and wanted the big city.
The skyline office. The business dinners that ran past midnight.
Instead, I graduated in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis and started a business with my dad. We bought industrial laundry equipment, refurbished it, and sold it.
I was 24, driving to industrial parks to talk about used commercial washers and dryers, feeling like I was wasting my twenties.
I told myself it was temporary. I was going to grind through it and then build the loud, impressive life I was supposed to have.
It took me years to admit something simple. I didn’t actually want that life. I just thought I was supposed to want it.
Most of us are walking around with someone else’s dream in our head. You absorb it before you have any choice in the matter.
Movies, music, what your friends say, what the algorithm feeds you. By the time you’re twenty, you have a fully formed picture of what success looks like. And almost none of it came from you.
Seneca said it bluntly:
“It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the man who is always after more.”
The trap isn’t wanting things. The trap is wanting things you don’t even like, just because the world told you they were the right things to want.
Get a taste of everything you desire
Now, I’m not saying you should skip the loud life and go straight to the quiet one.
The opposite. If you desire something, go taste it. Because an untested desire never dies. It just sits in the back of your mind, whispering that you’re missing out.
Most people carry around desires like:
Backpacking through Asia or South America
Living in a big city
The nomad laptop lifestyle, working from a beach
The startup grind, building something with a team
The party years, going out every weekend
If any of those pull at you, try them. Really try them.
I got my taste of city life when I lived in London. Always on the move, always something happening. I had the picture I’d dreamed about.
And I didn’t like it.
That taste was worth everything. I still have my back and forths. Sometimes I crave more social interaction, more events, more city energy.
That’s normal.
But now I can check that craving against reality. I’ve been there. I know what it actually feels like versus what it looks like on a screen.
When the boring became beautiful
Something shifted slowly, over years.
I started writing in 2015 when I moved back to my hometown. I built a small business around it. I met my wife. We had a son.
Nothing about my current schedule would make a movie. But life feels good.
Most days I’m not in a rush. I’m not waiting for the weekend. I’m not counting down to a vacation. The actual hours of my actual week are the thing I want.
That’s the test I missed in my twenties. The right life is the one where you don’t need a vacation from your own week.
Look closely at the people you admire who built something real. Almost all of them did it from a quiet life. Boring routines. Same desk. Same hours. Same handful of close people.
So why do we keep chasing the loud version? Two reasons.
The first is the hedonic treadmill. Whatever you get, you adapt to it fast. The thrill of the new car or the new title burns off in months. Then you reach for the next one.
The second is more honest. We’re afraid of being unimpressive.
The world keeps telling us that a normal life is a wasted life. That quiet equals small.
That’s a lie. Quiet doesn’t mean small. It means undistracted.
Stop treating the present as a footnote
Here’s the deeper problem underneath all of this.
Most people are so focused on the future that the present moment becomes a footnote. Something to get through. Something to sacrifice.
Think about how insane that is. Your entire life happens in the present. There’s nowhere else it can happen.
Anthony de Mello put it this way:
“You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something.”
You don’t need the city, the title, or the airport lounge. You need to drop the idea that your life starts after you get those things.
The Dalai Lama was once asked what surprised him most about humanity.
His answer: A man sacrifices his health to make money, then sacrifices his money to restore his health. He’s so anxious about the future that he doesn’t enjoy the present. The result is that he lives in neither.
The quiet life isn’t necessarily about doing less, though
The goal is to be more present in every moment.
Making coffee. Taking a walk. Playing with your kid. When you’re fully present for those things, they stop being boring. They become your life instead of the waiting room for your life.
And here’s the part nobody wants to hear. This also means you stop looking at others.
Every minute you spend watching someone else’s life is a minute you’re absent from your own.
Your dream is allowed to change
If you’d told 24-year-old me that I’d end up running a small business and a writing career from a quiet Dutch town, raising a kid, taking walks during the day, I would have been disappointed.
That’s because 24-year-old me only knew what he was supposed to want.
Today, I wouldn’t trade this week for any version of the Suits life.
Your dream is supposed to change. The one you had at twenty was built out of incomplete information about yourself.
As you learn who you actually are, the dream catches up. Contentment and ambition aren’t opposites. You can love your current week and still build toward a bigger decade.
Marcus Aurelius kept reminding himself of one line:
“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”
If the life you’re building doesn’t look exciting from the outside but feels good from the inside, you’re doing it right.
Stop looking from the outside.
One idea from this really stayed with me:
A lot of people don't actually want an extraordinary life.
They want an ordinary life that finally feels like their own.
We're surrounded by images of success that are designed to be photographed, not lived. So we mistake visibility for fulfillment.
The older I get, the more I think the highest form of success is waking up without feeling the need to escape your Tuesday.
When your everyday life stops feeling like a waiting room for "real life," you've already won more than most people realize.
Oh, how I love this writing of yours, Darius. At this point in my life, I am satisfied with the boring, repetitive life that I am living. There are some days with structure and other days that are completely free for me to choose how I spend them - slow, deliberate, and enjoying every moment of it!