Boredom and psychological well-being among the self-employed

Abstract Individuals not only seek a happy and meaningful life, but an interesting rather than a boring one. In this paper, we analyze data from 19,000 individuals across 25 European countries to demonstrate that self-employment is associated with modestly lower boredom on average—a relationship that is not captured by traditional measures of hedonic or eudaimonic well-being. The negative association between self-employment and boredom is small but robust across broad sectors, significantly stronger among those with ten or more employees, and similar in size to the associations between self-employment and life satisfaction or meaning in life. While this association is not restricted to low-income individuals, the data do not allow strong conclusions about whether this association generalizes to high-income employees. We replicate our main findings in a separate sample of 1000 US participants. Using this sample, we also show that our main results are not driven by individuals with lower boredom proneness self-selecting into self-employment. Taken together, our results suggest that prior research has overlooked an important dimension of the relationship between self-employment and well-being.