How to stop being boring

The most interesting people I know aren't trying to be interesting.

Thank God.

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. The most mind-numbingly boring people I know are working overtime to seem interesting: curating their book recommendations, workshopping their opinions to be provocative but not too provocative.

The effort is palpable. And the effort is exactly what makes them forgettable.

I've come to believe that boring = personality edited down to nothing. 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.

And the result = boredom.

You've been editing yourself

Erving Goffman wrote in 1959 about how we all perform versions of ourselves depending on context. What's less normal is when the performance becomes the only thing left. When you've been editing yourself for so long that you've forgotten what the original draft looked like.

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.

This process feels like maturity, or it feels the way we think maturity ought to feel. It feels like growing up and becoming an adult or a professional. And in some sense, I suppose it is. But there's a difference between reading a room and erasing yourself to fit into it. Reading a room is social intelligence. Erasing yourself to fit into it is something else.

I can always tell when I'm talking to someone who's been over-edited. They have opinions, but the opinions are suspiciously well-calibrated. They have interests, but the interests are respectable. They never say anything that makes me uncomfortable or surprised. They're like a movie that's been focus-grouped into mediocrity: technically competent and forgettable.

Audit what you've hidden

Make a list of everything you've stopped saying or admitting to because you worried it was embarrassing. The band you used to love until someone made fun of it. The hobby you dropped because it wasn't sophisticated enough. The opinion you stopped voicing because people looked at you weird.

Most people's cringe lists are surprisingly long. And most of the items on those lists aren't actually embarrassing in any objective sense. They're just things that didn't fit the persona you decided you needed to maintain.

I stopped telling people I loved pop punk for half a decade. I hadn't stopped loving it, but I'd learned that pop punk was supposed to be embarrassing, and I wanted to seem cool, or at least not uncool. Almost everyone I know has some version of this story: the authentic enthusiasm they buried because it didn't fit.

The things on your cringe list are probably the most interesting things about you. They're the parts of your personality that survived despite the editing. The fact that you still feel something about them, even if that something is embarrassment, means they're still alive in there somewhere.

Get it back

The weird parts are never as weird as you think. Or rather, they're weird in ways that make you memorable. Being the person who's really into competitive puzzle-solving or birdwatching gives people somthing to remember. Being the person who's vaguely interested in the same five acceptable topics as everyone else gives them nothing.

The recovery protocol is simple. Start saying the thing you would normally edit out. Mention the embarrassing enthusiasm. Voice the opinion that might not land well. Do this in low-stakes situations first: with close friends, with strangers you'll never see again. Notice that the world doesn't end. Notice that some people respond positively to the unedited version, even if others don't.

The people who respond negatively aren't your people anyway. That's the benefit of being unedited: it filters your social world. The more you hide who you actually are, the more you attract people who like the persona, which means the more alone you feel even when surrounded by friends.

Be polarizing

The most memorable people are polarizing. Some people love them; some people find them insufferable. That's what having an actual personality looks like from the outside. If everyone has a mild positive reaction to you, you've probably sanded youself down into a carefully constructed average of what you think people want.

Christopher Hitchens was polarizing. So was Julia Child. So is anyone you can actually remember meeting. But provocation for its own sake is another form of performance; what actually matters is that you stop preemptively removing the parts of yourself that might provoke a reaction.

Some people are going to dislike you.

They're allowed to.

That's the price of being someone worth remembering.