My older sister hated ironing. She did it the way you do unpleasant things: quickly, at half attention, her mind already on the next task.
Then one day she noticed that an hour had passed of which she had registered nothing. No thoughts about yesterday's argument, no list running in her head. Only fabric, steam and a crease that either comes out or doesn't. She has enjoyed ironing ever since. Nothing about the activity changed, only her presence in it.
Today we call that flow. My sister would not have used the word. She only noticed that ironing was where things finally went quiet.
On one point the research is strikingly clear: how alive someone feels depends hardly at all on what they do. An assembly-line worker can be more content than a board member. What matters is whether someone is inside what they are doing.
That says something counterintuitive: even monotonous work can be fulfilling. Not despite being monotonous, but because uniformity gives the mind little to do and so allows it to settle.
I often think about this when I'm sitting in meetings.
There are eight people in the room, and three of them are already at their next appointment in their heads. They consider that efficiency. In fact it is the opposite: whoever wants to get a task behind them makes mistakes inside it. The email that goes out too fast. The follow-up question they spare themselves. The half sentence they didn't hear, which comes back three weeks later as a misunderstanding. The calendar is full, but the work never gets finished, because it was never wholly done.
And then there is the other kind of meeting. Everyone is there. People let each other finish. After ninety minutes there is a result that would otherwise have taken three sessions. Anyone who has experienced that once stops believing the problem is the amount of work.
The Zen tradition has had an exercise for this for centuries, and it is not a spiritual one: wash the dishes, sweep the yard, breathe. Always the same plain activity, wholly. The German Zen teacher Karlfried Graf Dürckheim wrote an entire book about it, and the title already says everything: everyday life as practice.
What convinces me about it is how unspectacular it is. You need no retreat and no app. You need an activity you do every day anyway, and the willingness not to want to be rid of it.
The objection is obvious and deserves to be taken seriously: not every monotony can be rescued this way. Whoever spends their days on something they consider pointless does not become content through presence, only more precise in noticing. Attention is no substitute for a decision. It helps with what has to be done anyway — and it does not help you endure the wrong thing.
For me it is writing in the early morning, before anything else. For my sister it is the ironing board. She says her best ideas come to her there.
So this is not about talking monotony up. It is about the fact that monotony is not a verdict on the activity, but on our absence from it.