Can Your Environment Be Boring, Or Are You Boring?
The variance of how we spend our time
If someone has the same routine each day, does that make them a boring person?
If a city has the same sorts of activities each day, does that make it a boring environment?
Why do people say that there’s nothing to do in Philly, while New York gets the opposite reputation of having too many things going on?
Over the weekend, I made a trip down from New York to Philadelphia for the first time. From the many interactions I had with New Yorkers who shared their opinions on Philly, I had developed the preconceived notion that it was going to be really boring.
Being ready to entertain myself, my plan was simply to visit more local coffee shops and craft beer bars.
So did I have a boring itinerary?
Let’s define boring as the property of having low variance, in the activities one does, or which a place has. And let’s also extend the definition to claim that a ‘boring person’ often feels bored, where boredom is an emotional state that implies some level of dissatisfaction.
All I did was to have coffee and beer. By traditional measures, certainly I’d be perceived to be boring. However, even though I’m perceived to be boring, I was far from bored — we have a contradiction in our initial definition.
This stems from us failing to define how we measure variance. From an outsider’s perspective, all my activities of having coffee were the same. But from my perspective, I had lots of interesting conversations with strangers in cafes and tried many different coffees. How we measure variance needs to account for individual nuances.
How we measure whether the environment is boring? That should be based on your own personal measure of variance. For example, to some, the area I stayed in (Fishtown) is just lots of cafes and bars which one might not enjoy. For myself though, it was a cool neighbourhood which had an increased surface area for serendipitous encounters.
Boring is a social construct. I’m just a boring person with the same predictable needs of coffee and beer — but I thoroughly enjoyed my trip. It doesn’t matter how it’s externally perceived.
Boredom is also our internal construct which defines how we perceive how we live our own lives. You could be doing the exact same thing, only you can judge what is, or isn’t boring.
