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.

what's wrong with being boring?

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.

We were never bored because we were never being boring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnvFOaBoieE

>"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.

>The most memorable people are polarizing. Some people love them; some people find them insufferable.

Trust me it’s not because it’s a fun way to live

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.

Also, chill out. It's not a competition.

Love the article. My fav quote:

> The things on your cringe list are probably the most interesting things about you.

Someone once told me that boredom is often repressed anger. Got me thinking.

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.