Very true! The most interesting people do not force themselves to be interesting. The key takeaway here is not to "edit yourself" or copy others constantly. Most people seem to play follow the leader.
There's something to be said for the social losses associated with it. People who are truly boring don't tend to get noticed for social events, dates, promotions, etc. It can be hard for someone to realize they're not all that important or significant to anyone - being a mild addition that doesn't hurt any given event or situation, but no one is bothered by their absence either.
Early in my career, I'd go to work and ask people 'do anything last night?' and we would both basically say: Not really.
I decided I did not want to be boring. I decided to spend an hour at least on something I found interesting or economically useful. I started a company, would learn programming(now I'm a pro programmer), I learned a few different arts (great for relating to a different set of people when you explain you draw, paint, sew, and crochet)...
Whatever the case, I think there was economic benefits to 'not being boring'. However you really need to push yourself, its way easier to veg out on the couch to fiction. I think caffeine and weed helped me initially, now its just my normal lifestyle.
>"Somewhere along the way, too many of us learned to sand off our weird edges, to preemptively remove anything that might make someone uncomfortable or make us seem difficult to be around."
As an adult you learn that showing your true self can be dangerous in an environment where you don't know who can be trusted. We don't get the allowance of children to be weird or awkward. Others are gunning for us, and looking for any possible weakness. One wrong impression can drastically affect your life. So you curate yourself in a way that keeps your personality for those who can be trusted to accept and understand it, and others may see that as boring until they've been let in. It's just maturity; you have to earn the right to have me let my guard down around you.
Boredom is actually a good thing to experience. Modern life seeks to devour every morsel of our attention.
Are you able to sit motionless looking at a tree for 3 minutes? Can you read a book for an hour? Can you focus intensely on a work project for 2-3 hours?
If not, you may need more boredom to enhance your connection with "mundane" things. Trying to be interesting/authentic/not boring may lead to cheap thrills and provocative experiences moment by moment, which de-train your focus and attention for those very hard tasks you need/want to do in life.
I see an analogy to the notoriously difficult-to-implement recommendation of "just be yourself. Be natural. Relax."
We all (except children generally) wear masks. Sometimes the same mask we've been wearing since teenager-hood. It's unclear what's left under the mask.
I'd lump this in with so much other inspirational advice (e.g. "Dance like nobody is watching! Love like you've never been hurt!") that is well-intended but hugely impractical.
I think there are finely-tuned social algorithms that we innately follow. For example when meeting somebody we often perform the progressive self-disclosure algorithm in an attempt to find mutual talking points, so maybe yeah you say that you're into drinking IPAs or some other stereotypical thing, that's great.
The reason such a protocol is highly effective is you want to establish somebody's feelings about you before disclosing a huge amount.
This isn't the first time that I've seen interestingness treated like a virtue.
Honestly, I like it and agree that it makes a very good virtue.
But at the same time, I don't think we have a good enough collective understanding of what it means for something to be interesting to use it this way. Complexity isn't noise or quantity. It's also not exactly measured by our emotional or cognitive response to something. It's kind of measured that way, but in a noisy and unreliable way if that makes sense?
Anyways, go read Godel Escher Bach. Much more interesting than anything I've got to say on the matter.
I've been having this conversation with some of the children in my life. They frequently refer to a subset of their peers as "boring" and I bristle ever time I hear it. I try to suggest that other people are not here for our entertainment and therefore deciding that they are boring is to misunderstand the relationship. As you might imagine, the suggestion is not sinking in.
Fear of being called pretentious has caused people to self-defensively amputate their organs of taste and discernment. They select from among the available consumer choices to build their identity instead.
What the author mistakes as interestingness is the courage to develop and render judgement, and a resolve to live a life built from the consequences of doing so.
I don't agree that personal styles of weirdness are a desirable social style. I agree that bland dinner-party persona is oversubscribed. I agree that quitting hobbies from social pressure is needless self-erasure. My take is that we need a both-and answer.
To consider an extreme obvious counter-example, think of a cross-cultural situation where social conventions vary widely and adjustment is needed, and then consider that we all hail from our own microcultures with their own customs and expectations.
The real balance to achieve is being who we are in a way that doesn't alienate others. Fully accepting both self and other.
> They're saying what they actually think and wearing what they actually like, pursuing hobbies that genuinely fascinate them, regardless of whether those hobbies are cool.
Joke's on you, OP - even being like that you'll still find people who think you're boring because it's subjective.
Truth is, once youth passes, over time people become increasingly disinterested in others. This effect was exacerbated by the recent pandemic.
You might be a genuinely fascinating and authentic person, yet all that is going to fall flat in a crowd whose reaction to going outside is "ugh, people".
What really works is showing genuine interest in others. It's such a rare thing in this day and age that many are surprised when they experience it.
Sadly, it’s a societal issue as we are told to be X or Y. Boys wear blue and hang with the fellas. Girls wear pink and have tea with the ladies. Go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, die.
No one is ever like climb Everest, surf in Indonesia, backpack Europe, get lost in the wilderness.
"Be yourself" and "be polarizing" are the author's two suggestions to... avoid boring her, specifically? Or to avoid boring everybody? I'm not sure she quite understands what makes people tick.
> This happens gradually. In middle school, you learn that certain enthusiasms are embarrassing. In high school, you learn which opinions are acceptable in your social group. In college, you refine your persona further. By the time you're an adult, you've become so skilled at reading rooms and ajusting accordingly that you don't even notice you're doing it. You've automated your own inauthenticity.
What the author is describing is called masking/social camouflage. It is usually a symptom of something deeper - be it low self-esteem, infant trauma, etc. I am not a mental health expert, but I do think that getting to the original cause and treating that will tend to give better results than concentrating on the symptoms.
It can be a symptom of that... but it's also what basically every single person does to some degree. Not doing it at all is also a sign of mental issues. Just different varieties.
1. There is a distinction between appearing boring and being boring. The object isn't to seem interesting. The object is to be what you ought. Defining yourself according to the expectations of others instead of what is objectively good is what produces boring people.
2. People often vacillate between conformity and contrarianism. This is what juvenile edgelords on the internet are about. Both conformists and contrarians are trapped inside the same silly paradigm. Both define themselves and behave not in terms of the truth, to which all intelligence and behavior must conform, but in relation to others and what they think. A conformist assumes a persona that agrees with others in their social setting, regardless of whether it is objectively good. A contrarian takes what agrees with others and negates it, regardless of whether it is objectively good. Both are mindless, reflexive, and boring. Both lack substance. Both are empty theater rooted in people-pleasing and approval-seeking. Both are dishonest, cowardly acts of deception.
3. Reading a room isn't about people-pleasing. It's about empathy so that you can response in the way that is good and needed. If you enter a funeral parlor, you don't crack jokes or paint your toenails. You recognize there are people grieving there, that a dead person is being honored. In other words, you also consider, within reason, the good of others in the room, and you respond to the facts as they are, even when pursuing your own goals.
4. One flaw in the "I gotta be ME!" schtick is that it idolizes the self. It makes a god of the self. It puts unmoored desires above the truth instead of rooting desires in the truth. There are plenty of desires that ought not to be indulged, at least not indulged in certain ways or at certain times. The point is that your behavior ought to occur within the scope of reason. What is evil and wrong is always outside of reason.
5. Life can be messy. We can be messy. When that is the case, the goal isn't to keep messing it up or to run with our own mess toward the abyss. These messes, our mess, is a kind of cross we bear for the good. They're things we struggle with, not surrender to. If someone has a tendency to overeat, it might be difficult to resist, but it is good for him to practice fasting. If someone has a habit to reach for porn, it may be painful to resist, but it is good for him to resist and to avoid so that he can overcome the habit instead of wallowing in slavish submission to that awful vice. If someone has a tendency toward irascibility and wrath, it may feel satisfying to indulge it in the moment, but practicing meekness is the true reward. If someone has trouble with envy, tearing someone down may scratch that itch, but responding with selfless good will is freedom. Triumph over vice makes us interesting. Succumbing to its easiness makes us boring.
Sure, be polarizing, have opinions. But be careful not to be judgemental. Be open minded, don't judge too soon when other opinions don't match yours, don't label people. Let's stay nice.
In that sense I don't really get the "some people wont like you". I think it pretty poor form if you don't like people that have a different opinion. How can you not be interested in learning a different view on things?
Not the first time I've read descriptions of this kind of behavior (let's call it social conformity) presented as perfectly normal, and I read comments (here and elsewhere) that largely confirm this is normal.
It's pathological dysfunction, however common it may be.
50 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 62.4 ms ] threadI decided I did not want to be boring. I decided to spend an hour at least on something I found interesting or economically useful. I started a company, would learn programming(now I'm a pro programmer), I learned a few different arts (great for relating to a different set of people when you explain you draw, paint, sew, and crochet)...
Whatever the case, I think there was economic benefits to 'not being boring'. However you really need to push yourself, its way easier to veg out on the couch to fiction. I think caffeine and weed helped me initially, now its just my normal lifestyle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnvFOaBoieE
As an adult you learn that showing your true self can be dangerous in an environment where you don't know who can be trusted. We don't get the allowance of children to be weird or awkward. Others are gunning for us, and looking for any possible weakness. One wrong impression can drastically affect your life. So you curate yourself in a way that keeps your personality for those who can be trusted to accept and understand it, and others may see that as boring until they've been let in. It's just maturity; you have to earn the right to have me let my guard down around you.
Trust me it’s not because it’s a fun way to live
Are you able to sit motionless looking at a tree for 3 minutes? Can you read a book for an hour? Can you focus intensely on a work project for 2-3 hours?
If not, you may need more boredom to enhance your connection with "mundane" things. Trying to be interesting/authentic/not boring may lead to cheap thrills and provocative experiences moment by moment, which de-train your focus and attention for those very hard tasks you need/want to do in life.
We all (except children generally) wear masks. Sometimes the same mask we've been wearing since teenager-hood. It's unclear what's left under the mask.
I think there are finely-tuned social algorithms that we innately follow. For example when meeting somebody we often perform the progressive self-disclosure algorithm in an attempt to find mutual talking points, so maybe yeah you say that you're into drinking IPAs or some other stereotypical thing, that's great.
The reason such a protocol is highly effective is you want to establish somebody's feelings about you before disclosing a huge amount.
Honestly, I like it and agree that it makes a very good virtue.
But at the same time, I don't think we have a good enough collective understanding of what it means for something to be interesting to use it this way. Complexity isn't noise or quantity. It's also not exactly measured by our emotional or cognitive response to something. It's kind of measured that way, but in a noisy and unreliable way if that makes sense?
Anyways, go read Godel Escher Bach. Much more interesting than anything I've got to say on the matter.
Also, chill out. It's not a competition.
> The things on your cringe list are probably the most interesting things about you.
What the author mistakes as interestingness is the courage to develop and render judgement, and a resolve to live a life built from the consequences of doing so.
To consider an extreme obvious counter-example, think of a cross-cultural situation where social conventions vary widely and adjustment is needed, and then consider that we all hail from our own microcultures with their own customs and expectations.
The real balance to achieve is being who we are in a way that doesn't alienate others. Fully accepting both self and other.
Joke's on you, OP - even being like that you'll still find people who think you're boring because it's subjective.
Truth is, once youth passes, over time people become increasingly disinterested in others. This effect was exacerbated by the recent pandemic.
You might be a genuinely fascinating and authentic person, yet all that is going to fall flat in a crowd whose reaction to going outside is "ugh, people".
What really works is showing genuine interest in others. It's such a rare thing in this day and age that many are surprised when they experience it.
I think it is smartphones.
Sadly, it’s a societal issue as we are told to be X or Y. Boys wear blue and hang with the fellas. Girls wear pink and have tea with the ladies. Go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, die.
No one is ever like climb Everest, surf in Indonesia, backpack Europe, get lost in the wilderness.
What the author is describing is called masking/social camouflage. It is usually a symptom of something deeper - be it low self-esteem, infant trauma, etc. I am not a mental health expert, but I do think that getting to the original cause and treating that will tend to give better results than concentrating on the symptoms.
2. People often vacillate between conformity and contrarianism. This is what juvenile edgelords on the internet are about. Both conformists and contrarians are trapped inside the same silly paradigm. Both define themselves and behave not in terms of the truth, to which all intelligence and behavior must conform, but in relation to others and what they think. A conformist assumes a persona that agrees with others in their social setting, regardless of whether it is objectively good. A contrarian takes what agrees with others and negates it, regardless of whether it is objectively good. Both are mindless, reflexive, and boring. Both lack substance. Both are empty theater rooted in people-pleasing and approval-seeking. Both are dishonest, cowardly acts of deception.
3. Reading a room isn't about people-pleasing. It's about empathy so that you can response in the way that is good and needed. If you enter a funeral parlor, you don't crack jokes or paint your toenails. You recognize there are people grieving there, that a dead person is being honored. In other words, you also consider, within reason, the good of others in the room, and you respond to the facts as they are, even when pursuing your own goals.
4. One flaw in the "I gotta be ME!" schtick is that it idolizes the self. It makes a god of the self. It puts unmoored desires above the truth instead of rooting desires in the truth. There are plenty of desires that ought not to be indulged, at least not indulged in certain ways or at certain times. The point is that your behavior ought to occur within the scope of reason. What is evil and wrong is always outside of reason.
5. Life can be messy. We can be messy. When that is the case, the goal isn't to keep messing it up or to run with our own mess toward the abyss. These messes, our mess, is a kind of cross we bear for the good. They're things we struggle with, not surrender to. If someone has a tendency to overeat, it might be difficult to resist, but it is good for him to practice fasting. If someone has a habit to reach for porn, it may be painful to resist, but it is good for him to resist and to avoid so that he can overcome the habit instead of wallowing in slavish submission to that awful vice. If someone has a tendency toward irascibility and wrath, it may feel satisfying to indulge it in the moment, but practicing meekness is the true reward. If someone has trouble with envy, tearing someone down may scratch that itch, but responding with selfless good will is freedom. Triumph over vice makes us interesting. Succumbing to its easiness makes us boring.
In that sense I don't really get the "some people wont like you". I think it pretty poor form if you don't like people that have a different opinion. How can you not be interested in learning a different view on things?
When I see "interesting" people doing "interesting" things they look fake, exhausting, or both.
It's pathological dysfunction, however common it may be.
I suppose you can't see it when you're in it.