Pitfall Questions
Boredom Conundrum — Beating Boredom
It was a warm Saturday pre-evening in the backyard of a mountain house. Several families had gathered to celebrate the birthday of a five-year-old.
The air was filled with screams from excited two to ten-year-olds running around adults grouped in circles.
One group was discussing the differences between Roth and backdoor IRA, the other group was discussing the changes in the rules for H1B visa, and the other was discussing Amazon Prime deals.
Listening to my fellow compatriots ramble on and about topics that are no doubt utilitarian but completely boring, felt akin to listening to this podcast called Sleep with me: a podcast hosted my this human sleeping pill named Drew Ackerman who drones on about weird nonsensical anecdote after anecdote.
I am at an age where every birthday party, every baby shower and every festive gathering is nothing but an endless parade of blah people mindlessly chattering in blah conversations
I am neither a behavioral science expert nor an interesting person. I am just a self-aware, boring 30s someone who has developed a cheatsheet on how to be less boring.
Be a storyteller
Have an anecdote to share? Even something as lame as going to Costco ?
Do it, but do it in the form of a story. Open with a captivating hook, then build the conflict, head to the climax and then conclude. Humans are natural suckers for stories. We love them. We don’t mind a few tangents here and there, but don’t overdo them to the point of mosbification like in How I met your mother.
Be the right amount of vulnerable
As adults going through midlife crisis, we find nothing more annoying than someone who has figured out his/her life. People love to know that there’s shit cooking in your life too. So be a little vulnerable. Show your fault lines, enough for a person to relate to you, but no so much that you turn them into your therapist.
Birds of the same feather bore each other
A classic example of this is the Indian diaspora in the US. We make similar life choices.
Work in the tech industry
Marry within the community
Have two children
Live in the suburbs
And turn into fossils waiting for a green card
Each one of us was a wheeler from revolutionary road, basking in the hopeless emptiness of our lives. There is none, absolutely nothing remotely refreshing in knowing the other person’s life.
If you are stuck in a homogeneous group, maybe it's time you proactively make friends with people outside your sociocultural background
Having said all of this, it brings me to the fundamental question
Should we really try to escape boredom or simply learn to live with it
There is a higher chance of people willing to embrace the intense pain from childbirth or a bullet injury over the subtle lingering pain that arises from boredom. Because there is a sense of heroism in overcoming the former. But one needs to be truly heroic to be willing to be never heroic. That’s what embracing boredom is all about.
Final thoughts
Boredom breeds success
Getting comfortable with boredom is a superpower. It helps you establish discipline and a certain kind of focus which is needed to achieve success. The constant need for stimulation is the root cause of several problems we mortals manufacture.
From starting gossips to starting wars
From having affairs to falling off cliffs taking selfies
In fact, it’s a superpower we Indian expats have managed to acquire. We bore the living daylights out of our kids, so much so that they go on to win spell bees and Olympiads.
How else do you think we create Rishi Sunaks and Vivek Ramaswamys !
Mundane is the new octane
Boring is the new interesting !