When my first child was born, I discovered, as many new parents do, that my love for her was more profound than I could have anticipated. I had friends and relatives for whom I was willing to die. For my daughter, so visceral was my love, so instantaneous and complete, I knew I would kill.That I loved my daughter was never in doubt. My problem was that I didn’t much like being a father. This came as a shock. I’d wanted a baby because I had taken such pleasure in life that I’d felt driven to expand the scope of existence itself. Experience was too wonderful to hoard, so I had a child. The irony was painful in that, seemingly overnight, the very things that most enlivened and sustained me—reading, watching movies, seeing friends, making love, sitting quietly by myself—were crowded out by a child whose needs absorbed nearly all of my energy and time. From a life of freedom and agency I had entered a life of constriction and tension, of white-noise machines, parenting manuals, and fatigue.No one had warned me! Or had they? At 4 a.m. one morning, between shifts of bouncing my colicky daughter, a line from the writer Nora Johnson returned to me. Being a parent, Johnson insisted, isn’t about nobility or beauty, pride or pleasure. Rather, it is “the simple, nerve-wracking, mindless, battering-ram process of trying to teach a savage to use a fork.” I remembered this line the way Julius Caesar, his blood pooling on the senatorial marble, must have remembered, “Beware the ides of March.”This essay was excerpted from Daniel Smith’s forthcoming book, Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions.My love for my child remained fierce. When she giggled, her throat pulsed like a bullfrog’s. On the street, strangers beamed at her round cheeks and blue eyes, and at me, happily implicated in her freshness. What a doting father! Look at him carrying his baby to the park, to the market, to the playground; tying a bonnet to her head; slathering her plump pink arms with organic sunblock. I cherished the vigilant and protective forces that radiated inside me.But all of this rapturous gazing made up a terribly small fraction of the experience of being a parent. Much of the rest, as the months and years passed, consisted of nothing more than blunt, basic, run-of-the-mill boredom. The boredom of playgrounds. The boredom of picture books. The boredom of Cheerios, pasta, peanut butter, and Goldfish. The boredom, distilled and perfect, of the demand Again! Do it again, Daddy! Say it again! Play it again! Again, again, again, again, again, again![Stephanie H. Murray: Why we long for the most difficult days of parenthood]With certain intimates, I could confess just how monotonous I found parenting to be. With other people, these disclosures would have been like admitting to drowning kittens or robbing liquor stores. Children, that great adventure, boring? The care and feeding of a human soul, tedious? I came to see my parental disposition as, at best, anachronistic and, at worst, deficient. I tried to pretend that I didn’t find the whole business alienatingly dull.When my daughter was 6, her mother and I split up. That our divorce, though managed with comparative civility, caused our daughter abiding pain hardened my resolve to cap my output at one. I began to dream, longingly, of a future time, when my daughter was grown and I could return without undue guilt or strain to my own needs.Then I fell in love again. My new partner longed for children and I longed to make her happy, which scrambled my sense of self-interest. Now, alongside my eldest daughter, who is 18, I have a young son and daughter. And so I am racked, once again, with that same militant love and that same depleting boredom. And I am haunted, once again, by that old feeling of deficiency—by the belief that boredom, in this vital, intimate context, is wrong and ought to be suppressed.But I know that it can’t be. The effort to stifle a hard emotion almost always fails, and causes it to fester and breed. The only true way to endure boredom—like anger, despair, shame—is to move toward it. To listen to it. To try to understand it.Recently, I overheard a woman tell her son on the playground: “Don’t say ‘I’m bored.’ Bored is a bad word.” I, too, was raised to hold boredom in contempt. In emotional terms, my childhood home was like the set of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: You could confess to any painful feeling whatsoever and be met with empathy, curiosity, and concern. Every feeling, that is, except boredom, which was simply and firmly rejected. To be bored was to suffer from a self-imposed blindness to the wonders of life.My parents had plenty of help conveying this to me. Nearly every children’s book in our house trumpeted the same anti-boredom propaganda. How can you be bored when you can create so much with only a purple crayon? When boredom does occur in children’s books, it’s a fleeting state—the stillness before the explosion. Bang! The white rabbit dives down the hole. Bang! The manic cat bursts through the door.What these books capture so beautifully is the great luxury of time that children possess. A child’s boredom is usually a whine that there is nothing to do: “I’m booooored.” This explains why parents have so little patience for the complaint. Bored? When you are on hold with the insurance company; when you are emptying the dishwasher; wiping down the counter; fielding messages from colleagues, clients, your boss, your ex, your mother, the school, the bank, a confession of boredom from anyone, but especially from the primary beneficiary of your efforts, can feel like an insult.You’re bored? You want something to do? Go clean your room. Go dust the sconces. Take out the garbage. Go count squirrels for all I care. Dinner’s in 20 minutes. [Sophie Gilbert: Becoming a parent during the pandemic was the hardest thing I’ve ever done]Sometimes we cling to our negative emotions for what they give us: the vigor of agitation, the punishment we deserve. A friend once told me that when she was going through her divorce, she deliberately stoked her anger in order to fight more effectively with her husband and his lawyer.Boredom isn’t like this. Boredom is almost purely aversive. We yearn for it to end. This makes boredom a potentially dangerous emotion, and sufferers may grasp at anything for relief. A 2009 USAID report on the causes of violent extremism concluded that “it is difficult to over-estimate the extent to which boredom significantly enhances youth vulnerability to extremist ideas and activities.” In a 2014 study published in the journal Science, participants left alone in a room for 15 minutes grew so bored with their own quiet thinking that they willingly gave themselves electric shocks—just to feel something. “Boredom is the root of all evil,” declares a character in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.But boredom needn’t be destructive. The discomfort of boredom, even the anguish of it, can spur us into flights of imagination, resourcefulness, and invention. It can prod us to seek more absorbing circumstances: a career more aligned with our interests, a partner more aligned with our needs, a livelier town, better hobbies, new forms of beauty and inspiration.And yet, I can’t remember a time when my own boredom encouraged a more profound engagement, a more vibrant creativity. My boredom typically spurs feelings of frustration, guilt, shame—and long nutritionless spells of goggling, slack-jawed, at celebrity news on my phone while the world throbs around me. For me, boredom is a destabilizing state that infects the very experiences that make life meaningful.In 1989, at Dartmouth College, the poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky delivered what must be one of the strangest commencement addresses of all time (and definitely one of the most Russian). Brodsky told the graduates that their lives would soon be claimed by the “incurable malaise” of boredom. If they thought they already knew this feeling, they were wrong. “The worst monotonous drone coming from a lectern or the eye-splitting textbook in turgid English is nothing in comparison to the psychological Sahara that starts right in your bedroom and spurns the horizon.”Some may try to keep this feeling at bay, Brodsky explained, by changing jobs, houses, careers, or lovers; by embracing hobbies, travel, or promiscuity. Eventually, though, boredom would get them all.Brodsky advised his listeners to give up trying to evade the feeling, and start respecting it. Boredom exists “to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life,” he said, “the lesson of your utter insignificance.” Boredom puts us in our tiny, fragile, finite place—and thank goodness for that, for “the more finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life,” with love, pain, excitement, and fear.[Julie Halpert: There is no road map for the longest phase of parenthood]If you try to distract yourself from boredom, if you run from it, all will be lost. Brodsky quoted an imperishable line from Robert Frost: “The best way out is always through.” A note written by the novelist David Foster Wallace makes a similar point: “Bliss—a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom.”I don’t think we need the promise of bliss to endure and learn from boredom. Enlightenment is welcome should it come, but awareness, mere awareness—a calm and loving truce with reality—is the more realistic goal.Sunday morning. Winter. I write for a couple of hours at my desk. The work is slow, as usual. I am going over my notes, hoping to find something for my brain to latch on to. Soon enough, it’s time to watch the kids. I enter the kitchen wearing what my wife calls my “haunted” look. “Not a great morning?” she asks. I shrug. I am practicing being stoic. The floor is littered with markers, crayons, and sheets of paper. The children are … what are the children? Ceaseless. They are desperate to be seen.“Look, Daddy! Look, Daddy! Daddy, look!” “How nice. What a nice sticker. Well done, sweetheart.” “Look, Daddy! Daddy! Daddy, look!” “Yes, I saw. Very nice.” The 4-year-old is in a questioning phase. Are penguins cold? Are lions scary? Is tea hot? What is air? I refill sippy cups. I police conflicts. I toast toast. Have I ever been so bored?We’ve got errands to run. It takes the boy seven minutes to put on his Velcro sneakers and another two to zip up his jacket, which he insists he must do by himself. We need carrots, broccoli, bread, milk, cheese, tampons. The day, and my mind, start to loosen. The thin light of some minor pleasure starts to glow. Is it nostalgia? The memory of shopping with my own father? Let it in, I tell myself. The boy loves the grocery store. The colors. The smells. The possibilities. I have shopped for food a million times, at a million stores. His hand is so warm.The sun is going down. I notice the boy shivering and ask if he would like some hot chocolate. We find a small table outside the deli and sit across from each other. The hot chocolate is too hot to drink, but he wants to see the steam rise, and to tell me that steam is different from smoke. The tip of his nose and the tips of his fingers are red. When at last he drinks, the hot chocolate coats his upper lip. He smiles.“Everything that displays a pattern is pregnant with boredom,” Brodsky told those flabbergasted undergrads. Of course, much of what displays a pattern—lifelong friendships, enduring marriages, serious scholarship, the making of art, prayer, Sunday mornings in winter—is also pregnant with meaning. Boredom is the price we pay for a life rich with meaning. Recognizing this makes the feeling more endurable.Meaning and boredom. Boredom and meaning. Hand in hand.This essay was excerpted from Daniel Smith’s forthcoming book, Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions.