While prior research has pointed to the breadth of tools for conjecturing about the future, much less is known about how workers enact an idealized future in extreme contexts. To shed light on this process, we analyze 63 unsolicited personal diaries of UN peacekeeping officers, as well as interviews, documents, and observational data associated with peacekeeping missions in extreme contexts. We describe how peacekeeping officers navigate living in limbo between their idealized future aspirations to achieve peace and the everyday mundane aspects of their work in the field, and how boredom at work plays a vital role in these tensions. Peacekeepers resolve these tensions by either (a) embracing boredom as part of their work, thereby reframing their moral values and adjusting the meaning and the temporal orientation of the idealized future (utilitarian idealized future), or (b) renouncing boredom on moral grounds, thereby upholding the misalignment between the idealized future and their work, often leading to frustration and discontent (absolute idealized future). Our findings have theoretical implications for the literatures on futures, boredom, and extreme contexts by showing how boredom affects the enactment of the idealized future and their implications in day-to-day work.