The key to excellence in any human endeavor is the ability to deal with boredom.
Wallace was a serious tennis player for awhile, surely he must know this.
It's as if he (and most of HN) has a kind of intellectual allergy to the word "bureaucracy" that suppresses his critical faculties.
When I go to the gym I sit in the sauna for 30 minutes just doing... nothing. Just sitting. No earbuds, no phone in hand. I'm usually the only one like this. I get asked how I can stand it. It's just normal to me. I think about stuff I need to do. I map out the next day, or the rest of the day, or next week. I reflect on last week. My mind always finds something to think about.
Office work and dealing with bureaucracy stands out as something that lots of people find themselves doing and almost all of them find unpleasant, including experiencing tons of it as very boring.