As I was studying for my upcoming Earth Sciences midterm, I came upon a very interesting quote: “life can be viewed as long periods of boredom interspersed with rare moments of terror”. Our professor was describing how modern depictions of landscapes in the Mesozoic era are bustling with life—all kinds of dinosaurs in one place, and lots of predator-prey action. Yet these illustrations are not an accurate representation of daily life in the dinosaur world. “We paint animals during their few incidents of interesting behavior”, as Stephan Jay Gould explains in his article Dinosaur Deconstruction.


Duria Antiquior – A more Ancient Dorset is a watercolour painted in 1830 by the geologist Henry De la Beche based on fossils found by Mary Anning, and was the first pictorial representation of a scene from deep time based on fossil evidence.

With a bit of research, I found that the quote appears to have originated in the First World War, where drawn-out trench warfare was common. Although previously used by soldiers to describe war, or my earth science professor to describe dinosaurs, I think it can be used to describe our own lives as well.

Life can be viewed as long periods of boredom interspersed with rare moments of [adventure]

When I was younger, my favorite thing to do on the weekend was to complain to my mom that “I was bored”. And then she’d recommend me to clean my room, practice piano, etc — basically all the things that I didn’t want to do. And as I grew up, and as technology evolved too, there were more things to do: homework, watching TV shows, playing video games, texting friends. I started to have less and less free time as I progressed through school, and so dearly treasured winter breaks and summer vacations. But I still continued my search for adventure.

Throughout my high school years, I would constantly compare my boring life to those of movie or television show leads -- envying their fast-paced, exciting, drama-filled lives. It was as if I was looking at the illusory painting of the Mesozoic landscape.

It isn’t until recently that I’ve realized movies are simply taking the most exciting parts of someone’s life story, and snipping them together for a total duration of 2 hours. And if somebody had done that with my life, I could’ve bet it would be pretty exciting as well. But expecting that every single 2 hours in my life was like a movie was such a silly comparison.

And so I stopped looking at the painting of the Mesozoic landscape, and lived in my own ordinary days. Instead of expecting something exciting or adventurous to magically pop up every couple of hours, I aimed to enjoy and do something productive each and every day. Since after all, life is just made up of an ordinary day, over and over and over again. And thus if I am happy in these ordinary days, I will be happy in life.