On Not Being Boring
I don't want to be boring. Particularly, I don't want my writing to be boring. I want to write good sentences. I want to be entertaining. I want to present cohesive, informed, and persuasive arguments. I want every single sentence that I write to be interesting.
What we find boring is of course subjective. What's interesting to one person can be the dullest thing to another person. We will always be boring to someone else.
To be interesting, be interested - Dale Carnegie
Most people that I find boring are people that have no deep interests. I'm stressing the word deep here because just having regular hobbies like watching movies, listening to music, and playing video games aren't enough to make you interesting. Most of the time, for most people, these activities are just ways to overcome boredom. These are the low hanging fruit of hobbies.
However, what movies you watch, what music you listen to, and what video games you play, can indeed make you interesting if you care deeply about these things. If you're able to persuade me to checkout a movie you just watched, a band you love, or a video game you played, you're interesting in my book. When you're deeply interested about something, people will find you interesting.
You also can't fake interest. You cannot force yourself to be interested in things. Logging the books you read on GoodReads, or the movies you watch on Letterboxd, or blogging about everything that you do and consume, is not interest. That's just list making.
I think there are two main reasons we are boring on the internet: 1) We are scared to have an opinion about something. 2) We want to have an opinion about something. I still struggle with both, but it all circles back to the problem of not having deep interests in the first place. When you don't care deeply about something, you're lead to safe and shallow opinions.
It's not that passive consumption makes you a bad person. Logging your interests is still fun. But if you can show me that you care about the things that you consume, than I'll care too, and that's interesting.
