Your personality has been focus-grouped into mediocrity

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.