This paper offers ethnographic insights into the everyday lives of young men, who are preparing for public job recruitment tests in a Southern Indian coaching town. It reflects on how these young men negotiate 'boredom' and hopeful 'waiting' during their stay in the town. It highlights the emergence of these men as 'Serious Men', who value rigor and despise mazaa (fun/play/pleasure) through an exploration of cultural registers embedded in memes shared by them on social media platforms. While boredom as a feeeling is usually understood in a negative sense when it comes to young cohorts, this paper argues that it must be situated within social and inter-personal contexts that render it emotionally meaningful and worth investigating. It explores the quotidian strategies that young men in search of 'serious jobs' employ to make their boredom less impinging through negotiations, whereby other kinds of boredom experienced by an-other group of men can appear less threatening to them. Meme-sharing amongst themselves about 'others' who appear to be situated better than these men, is one such strategy. Alternatively negotiating boredom also throws into relief the act of 'waiting'– an integral part of everyday lives of these men. 'Waiting' here can be understood as an act of sociability in the Simmelian sense, holding the key to a future that is only anticipated, but is not here yet. Waiting thus assumes affective values and emotional meanings that keep shifting as the future trajectories of these men shift. Therefore, this paper demonstrates how certain shifts in social contexts can alter states like boredom or the meaning attached to the act of hopeful 'waiting', as in this case, which otherwise possesses a universal, generic significance.
