10 ms·

Why Is Everyone So Boring?

100 points by jger15 4y ago

mdorazio 4y ago
This is a pretty weird take. Seems fairly obvious to me that the boringness comes from adults having to… make a living. And for most people that equates to a 9-5 job that demands conformity and leaves little room for other things after you factor in all the other things adults have to be responsible for. I have an unproven suspicion that if UBI was a thing we would see a lot more “not boring” adults, “Social predators” be damned.
- _yb2s 4y ago
  Robin Hanson is the king of “pretty weird takes,” that is kind of the point of this blog
  - jefftk 4y ago
    I interpreted mdorazio as politely saying "clearly wrong", which is not what Hanson is trying to do.
    - _yb2s 4y ago
      I think that's nearly the same thing, and in part related to what Robin is talking about in the article- people think they already have the answers, and talking about a weird idea is socially unacceptable, and automatically rejected as nonsense. This dynamic serves to lower the social status of the person proposing the weird idea, motivating them to keep quiet next time. I am not familiar with all of Robin Hanson's work, but I have seen two other such cases that really stand out in my memory: -He advocated for intentional covid-19 exposure as "variolation" before a vaccine was developed, suggesting this would save lives -His book "The Elephant in the Brain" explains why virtually all of the supposed motives of people in public culture are dishonest, and the real motives are hidden, even from ourselves - and are mostly all about maneuvering for social status A quote from Tyler Cowen on his wikipedia page: Robin has strange ideas ... My other friend and colleague Bryan Caplan put it best: "When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'Eh, maybe.' Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'No way! Impossible!' Then I think about it for years."
- ReactiveJelly 4y ago
  Could be both. If I did not need to get along with everyone at work, I could be more lively, even without quitting my job.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Agreed that Job, Mortgage, Kids are a powerful normalizer in many places in the world. (note, my 2 cents: It's not strictly "Adulthood". My wife and I settled "late" in our lives, so we both had very different lifestyle/priorities/hobbies in our 20s and 30s - I did rock climbing, rally racing, flying lessons, professional and art photography, Karate, skiing, guitar, video games, rollerblading and kangoo boots and dragon boating and myriad other activities plus constant little experiments and fun things - vs now in our 40's that we have two young kids, full time management jobs, mortgage and expenses. This is not to say we don't, theoretically, have power to still change some of our lifestyle; but the constraints on time, energy and money are legitimately one to two orders of magnitude different) That being said, I think the blog has an interesting perspective about social normalization overall. Whatever one's inherent personal level of "interesting and exciting and weird" may be, there may be significant social pressure of various kinds to minimize it externally. And FWIW, I think it works to different magnitudes in different places and times: in my old country, especially a few decades ago, adults did NOT try new things, and did NOT do exciting things. I love Canada because I can try all these crazy new things and hobbies and activities and suck at them, and average Canadian will still say "Good on YOU! Have fun!:)". Whereas in my old country people would gossip "Who is he trying to BE? He's a [Doctor|Teacher|Programmer|Manager|Whatever] for god's sake, he shouldn't be doing things like that!". You would be judged very harshly with tremendous peer-group pressure to stay in pre-defined zones of your station and lot. Heck, my mom, against all social norms learned to ride a bike when she was 38 in the old country and she was oh my god chastised and judged for that, which feels ridiculous from Canadian perspective.
  - altdataseller 4y ago
    What were some of those little experiments you did?
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > we both had very different lifestyle/priorities/hobbies in our 20s and 30s - I did rock climbing, rally racing, flying lessons, professional and art photography, Karate, skiing, guitar, video games, rollerblading and kangoo boots and dragon boating and myriad other activities plus constant little experiments and fun things What you describe isn’t common for people who haven’t “settled” or who don’t have 40 hour per week jobs. That extreme level of hobbies and activity, some of which aren’t cheap, would be an outlier for people in your position. > This is not to say we don't, theoretically, have power to still change some of our lifestyle; but the constraints on time, energy and money are one or two orders of magnitude different. As a counter example, I watched a number of my friends slide into complacency in their lates 20s and early 30s despite having very easy jobs. I can think of several people who worked remote or for family businesses and did little more than a couple of hours of “work” per day from their phones, yet that didn’t automatically translate into a diverse and outgoing lifestyle. It seems to translate more often to a complacency and inactivity. Having kids was the catalyst for forcing these people to be active again. They now go out and do things, whether it’s going outside to go to the park or going on a mini-adventure somewhere because their kids are bored The idea that “kids make you boring” hasn’t been true in the people I know. It’s true that kids change what you can do with your time, but it’s anything but boring. Getting out of the house and doing social activities with other kids/parents really opens a whole new world of activity and engagement, even if it doesn’t mean dragon boat racing every weekend.
- randomdata 4y ago
  Couldn't you say that conformity necessity is the result of the "social predators", though? Your employer shouldn't need to care that you choose to shout crackpot theories from the rooftops. They do, but only because they don't want to catch the scrutiny by association. Further, retirees should be freed from that conformity need, yet still seem every bit as boring – if not more so.
  - jakeinspace 4y ago
    60+ years of conformity shapes your brain permanently for most people.
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    No. I don't understand why this social predators thing is even a hypothesis; it seems totally unfounded to me. This essay starts from a what-if and then bounds forward with great leaps of logic...
    - randomdata 4y ago
      Suggesting that people are inherently boring and don't conform out of social pressure but rather the random chance of evolution?
      - bilbo0s 4y ago
        Wow. This one got me thinking too. What if "boring" social groupings have proven more stable over time than "lively and outraged" social groupings? Would evolutionary pressures start shaping our social structures over the millennia? I mean, I think probably they would right?
    - wonderwonder 4y ago
      I think social predators are very real today. That is very much what "cancel culture" is. Its people acting as bandits to those who have violated the "SACRED" whatever and they shout from the mountain tops to bring down whoever has transgressed. They even intentionally ping your employer to bring you down, attacking the very reason so many of us must lead boring lives.
- nluken 4y ago
  There's a 19th century German philosopher that would agree with you (as would I): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation#From_their_Gattungswesen_(species-essence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation#...
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > Seems fairly obvious to me that the boringness comes from adults having to… make a living. And for most people that equates to a 9-5 job that demands conformity and leaves little room for other things after you factor in all the other things adults have to be responsible for. A full-time job and adult responsibilities still leave plenty of time to be “not boring” for people who make an effort to manage their time. Many jobs also provide an opportunity for social exposure, get people out of the house (or at least out of their comfort zone and interacting with others remotely). I suspect a lot of people would actually become less socialized and outgoing if they didn’t have the structure of a job to make them adopt routine and discipline in their lives. > I have an unproven suspicion that if UBI was a thing we would see a lot more “not boring” adults The only remotely feasible UBI programs wouldn’t be supplying enough money for people to go out and live their best lives. It’s more of a subsistence amount of money. In a theoretical world where large numbers of people received significant amounts of money and didn’t have to work, we wouldn’t all be going around doing leisure activities everywhere. The work of running, building, and maintaining the world we all inhabit must still be done, which would require significantly higher labor costs to make up for the decreased supply of labor. This would make everything more expensive, which means people would have to go back and get jobs if they wanted to have enough funds to do the “interesting” things beyond subsistence living on UBI. It’s a common fantasy that removing the 40 hours per week of work would cause individuals to suddenly become more outgoing, adventurous, and interesting, but if people aren’t already doing those interesting and outgoing things on the weekends then I don’t think they’d suddenly start doing more of them with the job removed.
  - chii 4y ago
    > The work of running, building, and maintaining the world we all inhabit must still be done the magic that UBI proponents bank on is automation and increased productivity of the remaining workers. And also taxing the wealthy.
    - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
      Right. It’s more of a fantasy where they don’t have to give up any of the things they enjoy about the world we inhabit, but the things they don’t enjoy (paying money and doing work) are shifted to the rich and robots.
- xwdv 4y ago
  Yup, the most interesting people I know also happen to be well off or rich and have time for eccentric hobbies.
- mynegation 4y ago
  I am pretty sure Hanson is talking about a subset of people and organizations that are vocal: i.e. they have something to say, or have to say something (e.g. issue a press release or they are journalists etc), and positions they have to take. As for UBI - you might be right, but that depends on how truly "universal" it is. If UBI is made conditional on "good behavior" or "social score", it is going to further amplify the social "dark forest".
  - __derek__ 4y ago
    > If UBI is made conditional on "good behavior" or "social score", it is going to further amplify the social "dark forest". This is true. Personally, it's hard to imagine the public supporting a UBI scheme that extends to ex-convicts, let alone the imprisoned. Ditto undocumented immigrants.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    If UBI is conditional than it is not UBI. The 'U' stands for 'Universal'.
- aaroninsf 4y ago
  A bit of a buried lede to amplify to the mountain tops: it doesn't have to be this way. The lives of wage-slavery most lead is a manufactured state of affairs, very much to the liking of and very useful for the so-called 1%. If you aren't aware, since 1971 the US reversed post-WWII decade of increasing widespread prosperity during which gains in GDP and hence quality of life were relatively equitably shared across wealth-holders and wage-earners, and social mobility was on the rise. Access to high-quality health care, home ownership, and world-class education was understood increasingly as a goal and staple of a growing middle-class—and that often in the context of single earner households. In the last 50 years that story has changed profoundly for the worst. Why? Because the top 10% and most of all the top few % of wealth-holders found their (already biggest) part of the pie not big enough, and they have systematically and very effectively eviscerated the middle class and social mobility, producing not just lives of economic desperation and despair, barriers to stability security prosperity health and happiness, but deep political unrest. Why is the (class) enemy not known to the masses? Because this same period saw an intentional program of consolidated media ownership and the undoing of provisions for fair-and-balanced reporting, and the cooption even of national media like NPR and PBS, and the quiet acquisition of nominally "left" leaning bastions like the NYT and now CNN. Media market consolidation and the founding of FOX were literally, openly, intended to steer the discontent of the disenfranchised and increasingly desperate into tribal nationalist (and racist) action, rather than labor and class mobilization. Seriously, if you aren't familiar with the ways in which wealth has been consolidated since especially Reagan, it's not hard to find. So to with correlated numbers on social mobility, media consolidation, percentage of full-time wage earners, etc ad nauseum. This is not "Socialism 101," it's American history many of us have lived. Things could be drastically better, but we are right f---d now because wealth consolidation is now so total that both government and the media have been all but entirely captured. There is no conspiracy, there is just the aggregated impact of decades of venal self-serving manipulation by wealth of the mechanisms whereby wealth is secured and its accumulation accelerated. 99% of those who played a part believed in good faith they were merely acting according to their self-interest, as "anyone would." Anyone but the 90%+ of us being turned into miserable "boring" adults apparently. Me? I'm part of the precariate, the 10% of white collar wage earners being brought to heel (so we read) by corporate masters discomforted by too much intrusion into the sacred space of the managerial 1% capital class—like most of you reading this. We are part of the problem. We are the anxious halo around the truly rich, deeply enamored of and deeply dependent on our meager bag of formerly middle-class lifestyle affordances, like access to decent health care, decent education, and a modest amount of leisure. I like you am in no way interested in losing those things. I am interested instead of returning our society to one in which such things are vastly more commonly shared. The problem is NOT wealth to support this. It's there. We just have smarmy self-satisfied very old white men sneering at the notion that the bounty is to be shared. You know what's an X factor? The fascism lite and racist nationalism those men have unleashed, believing a seething mob of enraged deluded conspiracy theorists serve as useful shock troops... ...it may bring down the whole house. They're going to bring it down it all down one way or another—if not with civil war lite, with the slow burn of climate change bred massive upheaval courting logistic collapse. Don't forget the empty shelves and hoarding of the early pandemic, the stuck cargo chips, or if you have slightly longer memory, the unavailability of hard drives after Thailand flooded. So yeah. UBI? Bring it ASAP and remember: the enemy is above.
- musicale 4y ago
  > boringness comes from adults having to… make a living Companies want boring robots, and schools produce them. They're driven by efficiency reasons - narrow specialization can improve performance on a narrow range of tasks, but increases boredom. Working at your own business, while perhaps more interesting, still constrains many of your working hours to specific activities. Humans are so much more capable, but generally the working world isn't structured to support human creativity and potential.
raspberry1337 4y ago
>Upon seeing the adult world in detail, teens often lament “But it’s all so boring!” >I propose that the main reason that most of us look more boring in public is that social predators lie in wait there. What a weird connection between two radically different aspects of life. I'm pretty sure it's not the _look_ that teenagers are intending when they conclude that grown ups are boring,
- JohnFen 4y ago
  The fact is that what is interesting to a teenager and what is interesting to an adult are often very, very different. As an adult, the life of teens seems boring to me. I totally understand that teens would feel similarly about adults.
throwanem 4y ago
Of all the many complaints I've ever seen about Twitter culture, this might be the most mealymouthed.
ReactiveJelly 4y ago
Anonymity gives me the strength to be lively instead of boring, but it only works online.
- HeckFeck 4y ago
  I wish we could refresh our IRL personas daily, imagine the resultant mayhem.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    In a big city, you basically can. Go to a neighborhood you've never been in before and everyone (most likely) you meet is the first time you've ever seen them and vice-versa.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Drama classes perhaps?
  - postsantum 4y ago
    Speaking a different language works for me. I'm way more talkative when travelling abroad and speaking in English as opposed to travelling my home country barely meeting new people
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
BirAdam 4y ago
Eh. That we are subject to opprobrium when we dissent is somewhat normal, and I do not believe social predators play much part in societal pressure to conform. Most people are good otherwise society couldn’t exist, and we can further assume that most people’s views are in a spectrum that doesn’t actually vary too wildly as society more or less seems to reflect a mild uniformity. If you want things to be “not boring” you would need to disrupt society severely. I have always felt that until Americans cannot feed themselves and send their kids to school, America would remain boring. Indeed, during the shelter in place orders when this began to happen, there was major social unrest… it took that much to make Americans care to do anything about serious social injustice. If you combine the responsibilities and demands of adulthood with social pressure and mild uniformity, boringness is the result and it’s a good thing. When society falls apart, everything becomes unboring… This is just an amateur view. Probably wise to talk to a sociologist or something about this topic.
DelaneyM 4y ago
When I read overwrought complaints like this, I can't help but wonder what heretical "revolutionary/exciting" thoughts they are "prohibited" from expressing?" There are lots of courageous people out there challenging societal norms, but without fail it's reactionary conservatives complaining about being criticized for picking on them. Trans kids in Texas? Unquestionably brave and very likely fascinating people. Conservative lawmakers trying to legislate them out of existence and upset about being criticized? Not so much on either count. If the author wants to meet interesting people, they're out there. If he's looking for permission to express his inner monologue, he's not one of them.
kubb 4y ago
Or, hear me out, adults are boring, because they spend most of their lives in a job where they fulfill uninspiring, repetitive tasks. More broadly, the real world seems boring, because your interaction with it is repetitive. You see, hear, do, talk about and think things that you've already seen, heard, talked about and thought before. Things feel fresh, new and exciting when they're different from what you're used to, but not completely alien. E.g. travel to exotic places, fantasy novels, meeting new people. Of course the theory about peasants on the road is an interesting perspective. But explaining social phenomena is not always possible using such parallels, neat as they may seem.
- randomdata 4y ago
  > travel to exotic places, fantasy novels, meeting new people. Interesting for the actor, perhaps, but probably still boring for the observer. Generally, there is nothing interesting about people doing those things. They are common things people commonly do. A lifelong hermit who has never met another person finally deciding it is time to meet someone would be interesting, but that's an exceptional case. Which brings us back to the article questioning why people don't shake things up sometimes. Like, why didn't the preacher at church not wear a KISS costume last Sunday? That would be interesting for me to see. It could become boring if done regularly, but one time out of the blue to the shock and awe of the congregation would be quite interesting. Is there some underlying mechanism that would keep said preacher from being willing to do that?
  - kubb 4y ago
    I don't know what religious community you're part of. Chances are, it's mostly adults and they have certain expectations about the attire of the preacher. The community likely has its norms, and such a costume would violate them, i.e. be too alien for the participants to be able to appreciate it. The preacher might still shake things up by introducing new subjects to a sermon or singing new songs, but there's only so much they can do. Which is why churches are usually boring.
    - randomdata 4y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
Having grown up with broken-glass-topped walls, and armed nightwatchmen, I can understand his take. It may apply in some cultures, and not in others. "Boring" is in the eye of the beholder. I personally know some very interesting people. Many of them are reformed predators (of all types). It may be as simple as the fact that being "not-boring" takes a lot of work. I suspect that most of us find that we aren't really interested in the rewards (and risks) of all the work. When we're insecure teenagers, we probably feel that it's worth the work.
_ktx2 4y ago
> I propose that the main reason that most of us look more boring in public is that social predators lie in wait there. With friends, family, and close co-workers, we are around people that mostly want to like us, and know us rather well. Yes, they want us to conform too, but they apply this pressure in moderation. > Out in public, in contrast, we face bandits just looking for chances to gain social credit by taking us down, vis accusing us of violating the sacred. And like townspeople traveling among the bandits, we are in public pretty vulnerable to the kinds of bandits that afflict us. As someone else said, people have to make a living. If you don't have a job you cannot live, and most average people can't imagine surviving expulsion from society. Frankly, the people who belong to outrage cliques are generally toying with a weapon in capitalism that they understand well: if you cannot make money, you don't survive, even if you do your psyche and feeling of safety are likely lost. We have no perfect barometer for what makes someone fireable under the right circumstances. I remember years ago a key Drupal developer was outted for having a Gorean relationship with his wife that was mutually consenting. The mob succeeded and he was fired. Last I checked his blog he's doing fine, but I attribute that to kink becoming more mainstream around the time. Had it been a decade earlier he would've been unhireable in any place that employed women for how those folks had postured him. Anecdotally, this is the only place I talk about using mushrooms or LSD. I'm very selective, especially in tech, of going into any detail of my military service. There are some things you just know people won't know how to interpret or where their lack of familiarity will be a playground for their imagination. I say all that to say that the wise man says fewer words. You don't know what tomorrow's weapon will be, so it's easier to be boring except among a select few. Even people who believe outrage cliques are exceptional or rare will follow these same patterns.
- derwiki 4y ago
  > You don’t know what tomorrow’s weapon will be Very true, and a reason I’ve been trying to “clean up” older posts in various places from when (I thought) I was an un-boring youth.
drewcoo 4y ago
This is from the same person who recently wrote: Religion Can Divert Sacred Energy https://www.overcomingbias.com/2023/02/religion-can-divert-sacred-energy.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2023/02/religion-can-divert-s... Middle aged garbage fire. I've been there. Outta marshmallows.
frgtpsswrdlame 4y ago
I think he's off base. There are lots of places on the internet I could go to where the users are anonymous and the conversations are frequently about sacred subjects. In this sense they would be considered 'lively' but to me they are also boring because they are all alive in exactly the same way. It's the same sacred cows being slain the same way, day after day after day. I think real liveliness doesn't come from avoiding social sanction per se, I think it comes from the interaction of different viewpoints in some sort of measured fashion (ie no one viewpoint overwhelms) and important that will include some degree of social sanctioning. But even that liveliness doesn't survive long because it's very uncomfortable. One side always overwhelms the other and when I see posts like this (there's lots of them) it always feels like the true reasoning underneath is: "if my ideas were considered fairly in a marketplace of ideas they would win and overwhelm." So no one is really seeking liveliness, just a boringness that they happen to agree with.
cokeandpepsi 4y ago
I just can't agree with this one
fullshark 4y ago
Adults don't care about impressing their peers by and large, whereas teenagers/young adults are singularly obsessed with it. At least I decided to stop caring about making it seem like I wasn't boring and I'm happier for it.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  All of adult life seems like an elaborate status game to me.
  - Loughla 4y ago
    Play a different game, then. I 100% see where you're coming from, and I know I've missed professional opportunities because I refuse to play that game. But. I know I'm happier that I can spend the weekend tromping around in the woods instead of dealing with whatever drama is currently happening at the Rotary Club or local Country Club. I know I'm happier that I can drink some beers with my neighbors instead of going to a wine mixer for whatever local 'name' is hosting one this weekend as a fundraiser. So I have to buy a new mid-sized or compact car instead of the huge stupid truck I would like, and I can't afford a lawn tractor to help with jobs around my property. So what? Do those things mean I'm not living to my fullest?
    - mattgreenrocks 4y ago
      I suspect many adults play status games to fill voids in their own small lives. This is seen as a socially acceptable and laudable thing to do. I loathe the fact that ambition is often filed down to one-dimensional idea of making lots of money, dominating others in the workplace, and generally succeeding in the business world. It's little wonder there's so many people are on anti-depressants.
- _yb2s 4y ago
  The authors book "The Elephant in the brain" argues that virtually all adult behavior is unconsciously about status seeking, while pretending and convincing ourselves that it is not. In that sense, it's not that this goes away as you get older, but it becomes more psychologically sophisticated, and less transparent.
helen___keller 4y ago
> And that, my children, is why the world looks so boring. If you conflate “the world” with “social media”, sure, I guess
mouse_ 4y ago
very hot take: I agree.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  me too, but I think the article could go into more specific vivid detail? maybe it suffers from what it proposes.
  - _yb2s 4y ago
    Absolutely, nearly everything Robin Hanson says suffers from this dynamic, so he is very familiar with it. He is consciously trying to do this, and stands out as really really weird as a result.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
PurpleRamen 4y ago
Reads like a Dark Forest[1] for human society. Stay low, don't make a noise, because the predators might come. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
wonderwonder 4y ago
This article actually makes a lot of sense, perhaps more so in our media driven, social media fueled society. Everyone has the responsibilities of adulthood, mortgage, job, kids, etc. and all of these things are very important. If one was to be not boring, acting in a new or exciting manner or a way in which might violate anyone's opinion of what is sacred, trans rights, racist, advocate that the poor 'pull themselves up by the bootstraps', attend drag shows, whatever. Each side has their sacred cows and any normal person that catches the eye of the media or socal media "bandits" runs the very real risk of being pulled down, called out and losing their job and career. You even have to fear the police deciding that they dont like you and arresting you as evidenced by multiple stories of parents being arrested for allowing their kids to "free roam". Anything outside of the norm is very much a risk and in todays social media wild west the "bandits" have more power than ever.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
slackfan 4y ago
Mostly because people have forgotten how to tell stories, and, more importantly, how to listen to stories.
bena 4y ago
Because you're seeing them at the boring times. I don't need buying groceries to be exciting. I need it to be done. I seriously don't need my drive anywhere to be exciting. Also, I notice that for a lot of people, their definition of "boring" is some version of sitting at home and watching Netflix while their definition of exciting is sitting in a different building and watching people do things. What is the difference between seeing a movie in the theater and in your home? A play? A concert? Etc. Anyone who is promoting replacing a passive activity with another passive activity is only offering the illusion of excitement.
moffkalast 4y ago
> The new somewhat-god-like A.I.s that have recently joined our world are also designed to seem boring. If there was a paid plan for ChatGPT that eliminated the lame content filters, it would sell like hot cakes.
- ben_w 4y ago
  My guess is that in 5 years, an equally capable but fully open source model will run on a (high-end) home computer. All of us collectively have about that long to decide how to deal with this.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    I highly doubt that'll be the case. GPU memory and average RAM numbers have only increased by like 3-5x in the past 10 years. Even if we follow that growth rate while making models a lot more compact it'll still be nowhere enough. It currently takes like what, 400 or 500 GB of VRAM to load ChatGPT according to some estimates? You can't realistically compress that data much further without final performance degradation. I'd expect something one tenth as good as it running locally in 5 years at best.
CocaKoala 4y ago
As a teen I thought adults were boring because they didn't do any of the things I wanted to spend my time doing - as an adult, I have a bunch of hobbies that are pretty inaccessible to children and I think they're very neat hobbies, but I would also forgive a child for thinking that I'm boring because I like to drive my car or go on wine tastings instead of watching cartoons on saturday morning.
FigurativeVoid 4y ago
As I have gotten older, I have noticed a lot of people conflate 'boring' and 'stable.' One of my friends who would air a complaint that everyone is 'so boring' is the same person that can't hold a job and still uses all sorts of drugs. When I was young, I would find myself attracted to potential partners even if they lacked stability. Now I can't even imagine that. Stability is a great thing to have in life, but the price you pay for stability is having a plan and knowing what comes next. That might make it boring, but I'll make that trade every time. Edit: spelling
- bilbo0s 4y ago
  That might make it boring, but I'll make that trade every time I was just musing below that evolutionary pressures have very likely conditioned all humankind to make that trade every time. The great advantage of "boring" social groupings is stability. Humans have discovered over the millennia that "lively" or "outraged" groupings find lots of adventure, but don't last very long.
- randomdata 4y ago
  Stable is boring when stable reflects what has been done time and time again. Interestingness requires novelty. Someone who seeks stability in living on the moon and has a plan to make it happen would be hard to call boring – until many more people follow the same blueprint, at which point it too will become boring.
ydnaclementine 4y ago
>Someone murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand? Who cares? I'm sure it's a nothingburger
diydsp 4y ago
This will vary greatly with age, location, culture, ethnicity, etc. But generally, the Western world, particularly the heavily industrialized corridors such as the US and Europe, are going through a tribalization phase. This is one of Marshall McLuhan's theories. In this phase, conformity is rewarded, because communications have "shrunk" the world, allowing almost anyone to reach other to other's as if they were in the same village. He called the networks formed by international speed-of-light communications the "global village." Since a village can be a harsh physical environment, it requires a strict social environment to survive. Therefore anyone branching out is own their own.... ...unless of course, they're so far out that they're successful (e.g. Elon Musk), in which case they become the new center to rally around. You might call it the Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer Effect[0] But that's exactly what the author concluded: "It takes unusual art, allies, and energy, in a word “eliteness”, to survive while choosing lively." Freud also discussed this balance between the individual and society in _Society and Its Discontents_. I personally feel the pull all the time. I want to be weird in certain ways I won't discuss here... But presently, deviation has an accepted form and that's not me. [0] https://miro.medium.com/max/720/1*nLHfkNG67b6fi-ccF_G4yA.webp https://miro.medium.com/max/720/1*nLHfkNG67b6fi-ccF_G4yA.web...
jacknews 4y ago
The boringness comes from nuance, which this post seems to lack, and that truly revolutionary ideas are rare. Sure, you can be not boring by shouting your hot take from the rooftops, bluster like trump etc, but the truth is that 'truth' is not absolute, everyone has a slightly different perspective, and adults take that into consideration.
semidetached 4y ago
The basic problem is that if you're bored you're boring. If you want to be interesting try to be interested.
readthenotes1 4y ago
Being bored (it's not something someone else can do to you) is a reflect of your own and ability to find something interesting in the world around you. It's very childish to assume people have a responsibility to entertain you...
JohnFen 4y ago
I don't know if I agree with the premise. Most people I meet and interact with are very interesting. The article seems to be talking about why people don't tend to be flashy. That's a very different thing than boring.
sacnoradhq 4y ago
The old saying (no pun intended): "Those who complain about boredom are the boring ones." People who aren't boring don't need other to entertain them. It's a consumption mindset vs. a creator one, with the former being the predominant one.
Barrin92 4y ago
Not sure if I agree with the notion that people have become more boring. There always have been what the author calls 'social predators', try coming out as gay even as recently as two or three decades ago and you'd be hounded for it. Or even something banal as being atheist was controversial, still is even today in many places. But overall it seems like we've become more tolerant, not less of different ways of living. It's not even that long ago that it was normal to think that D&D, videogames and Marilyn Manson's music are the devil's work. When the author says we treat to many things as sacred now I don't really see it. People seem to have already forgotten what kind of silly social stigmas existed not that long ago.
renewiltord 4y ago
It's the same thing always. Groupies can't make art. So when the artists go somewhere else, the groupies think the art has died. It's why people in SF lament the loss of the city's culture, etc. They're the ones who never created. They're the groupies. It's why people think that everyone is boring. They're groupies and now they've surrounded themselves with groupies.
fistfucker3000 4y ago
This person sounds boring as fuck
FrontierPsych 4y ago
Yes. When you are in your 20s, you only can go out to your first sushi restaurant or first thai restaurant *one time.* You only can be a virgin once. The second time is pretty good, but if you go out to sushi 100 times, it's not too special, it is boring. By the time you hit 27 or 30, it's pretty much "been there, done that" on most everything. Sure, once in a while there's a new experience, but for me, it's usually only once a year, maybe twice on a good year. I've been to the Monteray Aquarium in Monteray, CA. As a matter-of-fact, I went to a special dinner where the company rented it out and had dinner there, and I sat in front of the biggest glass wall where sharks and sea turtles and stuff swam by the whole dinner. I read an article about a hotel room in Dubai or someplace like that, where the room had an aquarium from floor to ceiling and had some boring-ass fish in it. They rented it out for $10,000 per night because of this fish tank. I'm like, YAWN, I had dinner at the Monteray Aquarium. But why go to another aquarium again - I've seen one, the best one. Yeah, ok, I'd go to one, but let's be honest, it would be pretty anti-climatic. Boring, at least to me. Yes, the world does become boring.
Mikho 4y ago
For people who are themselves boring and forgot how to be curious or passionate to feel life, everyone and everything around is boring. Such people got used to being entertained by outside signals like TV, games, social etc. They often can't even be on their own in silence without any outside noise that would distract them from looking deeper inside themselves and be on their own with their own thoughts. Such "human vegetables" often blame others for their own inability to have a spark in life. They basically blame others for their own life choices while forgetting that nobody owes them anything and their life is a direct result of their own behavior.

100 points by jger15 4y ago

This is a pretty weird take. Seems fairly obvious to me that the boringness comes from adults having to… make a living. And for most people that equates to a 9-5 job that demands conformity and leaves little room for other things after you factor in all the other things adults have to be responsible for. I have an unproven suspicion that if UBI was a thing we would see a lot more “not boring” adults, “Social predators” be damned.

_yb2s 4y ago
Robin Hanson is the king of “pretty weird takes,” that is kind of the point of this blog
- jefftk 4y ago
  I interpreted mdorazio as politely saying "clearly wrong", which is not what Hanson is trying to do.
  - _yb2s 4y ago
    I think that's nearly the same thing, and in part related to what Robin is talking about in the article- people think they already have the answers, and talking about a weird idea is socially unacceptable, and automatically rejected as nonsense. This dynamic serves to lower the social status of the person proposing the weird idea, motivating them to keep quiet next time. I am not familiar with all of Robin Hanson's work, but I have seen two other such cases that really stand out in my memory: -He advocated for intentional covid-19 exposure as "variolation" before a vaccine was developed, suggesting this would save lives -His book "The Elephant in the Brain" explains why virtually all of the supposed motives of people in public culture are dishonest, and the real motives are hidden, even from ourselves - and are mostly all about maneuvering for social status A quote from Tyler Cowen on his wikipedia page: Robin has strange ideas ... My other friend and colleague Bryan Caplan put it best: "When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'Eh, maybe.' Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'No way! Impossible!' Then I think about it for years."
ReactiveJelly 4y ago
Could be both. If I did not need to get along with everyone at work, I could be more lively, even without quitting my job.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
Agreed that Job, Mortgage, Kids are a powerful normalizer in many places in the world. (note, my 2 cents: It's not strictly "Adulthood". My wife and I settled "late" in our lives, so we both had very different lifestyle/priorities/hobbies in our 20s and 30s - I did rock climbing, rally racing, flying lessons, professional and art photography, Karate, skiing, guitar, video games, rollerblading and kangoo boots and dragon boating and myriad other activities plus constant little experiments and fun things - vs now in our 40's that we have two young kids, full time management jobs, mortgage and expenses. This is not to say we don't, theoretically, have power to still change some of our lifestyle; but the constraints on time, energy and money are legitimately one to two orders of magnitude different) That being said, I think the blog has an interesting perspective about social normalization overall. Whatever one's inherent personal level of "interesting and exciting and weird" may be, there may be significant social pressure of various kinds to minimize it externally. And FWIW, I think it works to different magnitudes in different places and times: in my old country, especially a few decades ago, adults did NOT try new things, and did NOT do exciting things. I love Canada because I can try all these crazy new things and hobbies and activities and suck at them, and average Canadian will still say "Good on YOU! Have fun!:)". Whereas in my old country people would gossip "Who is he trying to BE? He's a [Doctor|Teacher|Programmer|Manager|Whatever] for god's sake, he shouldn't be doing things like that!". You would be judged very harshly with tremendous peer-group pressure to stay in pre-defined zones of your station and lot. Heck, my mom, against all social norms learned to ride a bike when she was 38 in the old country and she was oh my god chastised and judged for that, which feels ridiculous from Canadian perspective.
- altdataseller 4y ago
  What were some of those little experiments you did?
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > we both had very different lifestyle/priorities/hobbies in our 20s and 30s - I did rock climbing, rally racing, flying lessons, professional and art photography, Karate, skiing, guitar, video games, rollerblading and kangoo boots and dragon boating and myriad other activities plus constant little experiments and fun things What you describe isn’t common for people who haven’t “settled” or who don’t have 40 hour per week jobs. That extreme level of hobbies and activity, some of which aren’t cheap, would be an outlier for people in your position. > This is not to say we don't, theoretically, have power to still change some of our lifestyle; but the constraints on time, energy and money are one or two orders of magnitude different. As a counter example, I watched a number of my friends slide into complacency in their lates 20s and early 30s despite having very easy jobs. I can think of several people who worked remote or for family businesses and did little more than a couple of hours of “work” per day from their phones, yet that didn’t automatically translate into a diverse and outgoing lifestyle. It seems to translate more often to a complacency and inactivity. Having kids was the catalyst for forcing these people to be active again. They now go out and do things, whether it’s going outside to go to the park or going on a mini-adventure somewhere because their kids are bored The idea that “kids make you boring” hasn’t been true in the people I know. It’s true that kids change what you can do with your time, but it’s anything but boring. Getting out of the house and doing social activities with other kids/parents really opens a whole new world of activity and engagement, even if it doesn’t mean dragon boat racing every weekend.
randomdata 4y ago
Couldn't you say that conformity necessity is the result of the "social predators", though? Your employer shouldn't need to care that you choose to shout crackpot theories from the rooftops. They do, but only because they don't want to catch the scrutiny by association. Further, retirees should be freed from that conformity need, yet still seem every bit as boring – if not more so.
- jakeinspace 4y ago
  60+ years of conformity shapes your brain permanently for most people.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  No. I don't understand why this social predators thing is even a hypothesis; it seems totally unfounded to me. This essay starts from a what-if and then bounds forward with great leaps of logic...
  - randomdata 4y ago
    Suggesting that people are inherently boring and don't conform out of social pressure but rather the random chance of evolution?
    - bilbo0s 4y ago
      Wow. This one got me thinking too. What if "boring" social groupings have proven more stable over time than "lively and outraged" social groupings? Would evolutionary pressures start shaping our social structures over the millennia? I mean, I think probably they would right?
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    I think social predators are very real today. That is very much what "cancel culture" is. Its people acting as bandits to those who have violated the "SACRED" whatever and they shout from the mountain tops to bring down whoever has transgressed. They even intentionally ping your employer to bring you down, attacking the very reason so many of us must lead boring lives.
nluken 4y ago
There's a 19th century German philosopher that would agree with you (as would I): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation#From_their_Gattungswesen_(species-essence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation#...
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> Seems fairly obvious to me that the boringness comes from adults having to… make a living. And for most people that equates to a 9-5 job that demands conformity and leaves little room for other things after you factor in all the other things adults have to be responsible for. A full-time job and adult responsibilities still leave plenty of time to be “not boring” for people who make an effort to manage their time. Many jobs also provide an opportunity for social exposure, get people out of the house (or at least out of their comfort zone and interacting with others remotely). I suspect a lot of people would actually become less socialized and outgoing if they didn’t have the structure of a job to make them adopt routine and discipline in their lives. > I have an unproven suspicion that if UBI was a thing we would see a lot more “not boring” adults The only remotely feasible UBI programs wouldn’t be supplying enough money for people to go out and live their best lives. It’s more of a subsistence amount of money. In a theoretical world where large numbers of people received significant amounts of money and didn’t have to work, we wouldn’t all be going around doing leisure activities everywhere. The work of running, building, and maintaining the world we all inhabit must still be done, which would require significantly higher labor costs to make up for the decreased supply of labor. This would make everything more expensive, which means people would have to go back and get jobs if they wanted to have enough funds to do the “interesting” things beyond subsistence living on UBI. It’s a common fantasy that removing the 40 hours per week of work would cause individuals to suddenly become more outgoing, adventurous, and interesting, but if people aren’t already doing those interesting and outgoing things on the weekends then I don’t think they’d suddenly start doing more of them with the job removed.
- chii 4y ago
  > The work of running, building, and maintaining the world we all inhabit must still be done the magic that UBI proponents bank on is automation and increased productivity of the remaining workers. And also taxing the wealthy.
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    Right. It’s more of a fantasy where they don’t have to give up any of the things they enjoy about the world we inhabit, but the things they don’t enjoy (paying money and doing work) are shifted to the rich and robots.
xwdv 4y ago
Yup, the most interesting people I know also happen to be well off or rich and have time for eccentric hobbies.
mynegation 4y ago
I am pretty sure Hanson is talking about a subset of people and organizations that are vocal: i.e. they have something to say, or have to say something (e.g. issue a press release or they are journalists etc), and positions they have to take. As for UBI - you might be right, but that depends on how truly "universal" it is. If UBI is made conditional on "good behavior" or "social score", it is going to further amplify the social "dark forest".
- __derek__ 4y ago
  > If UBI is made conditional on "good behavior" or "social score", it is going to further amplify the social "dark forest". This is true. Personally, it's hard to imagine the public supporting a UBI scheme that extends to ex-convicts, let alone the imprisoned. Ditto undocumented immigrants.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  If UBI is conditional than it is not UBI. The 'U' stands for 'Universal'.
aaroninsf 4y ago
A bit of a buried lede to amplify to the mountain tops: it doesn't have to be this way. The lives of wage-slavery most lead is a manufactured state of affairs, very much to the liking of and very useful for the so-called 1%. If you aren't aware, since 1971 the US reversed post-WWII decade of increasing widespread prosperity during which gains in GDP and hence quality of life were relatively equitably shared across wealth-holders and wage-earners, and social mobility was on the rise. Access to high-quality health care, home ownership, and world-class education was understood increasingly as a goal and staple of a growing middle-class—and that often in the context of single earner households. In the last 50 years that story has changed profoundly for the worst. Why? Because the top 10% and most of all the top few % of wealth-holders found their (already biggest) part of the pie not big enough, and they have systematically and very effectively eviscerated the middle class and social mobility, producing not just lives of economic desperation and despair, barriers to stability security prosperity health and happiness, but deep political unrest. Why is the (class) enemy not known to the masses? Because this same period saw an intentional program of consolidated media ownership and the undoing of provisions for fair-and-balanced reporting, and the cooption even of national media like NPR and PBS, and the quiet acquisition of nominally "left" leaning bastions like the NYT and now CNN. Media market consolidation and the founding of FOX were literally, openly, intended to steer the discontent of the disenfranchised and increasingly desperate into tribal nationalist (and racist) action, rather than labor and class mobilization. Seriously, if you aren't familiar with the ways in which wealth has been consolidated since especially Reagan, it's not hard to find. So to with correlated numbers on social mobility, media consolidation, percentage of full-time wage earners, etc ad nauseum. This is not "Socialism 101," it's American history many of us have lived. Things could be drastically better, but we are right f---d now because wealth consolidation is now so total that both government and the media have been all but entirely captured. There is no conspiracy, there is just the aggregated impact of decades of venal self-serving manipulation by wealth of the mechanisms whereby wealth is secured and its accumulation accelerated. 99% of those who played a part believed in good faith they were merely acting according to their self-interest, as "anyone would." Anyone but the 90%+ of us being turned into miserable "boring" adults apparently. Me? I'm part of the precariate, the 10% of white collar wage earners being brought to heel (so we read) by corporate masters discomforted by too much intrusion into the sacred space of the managerial 1% capital class—like most of you reading this. We are part of the problem. We are the anxious halo around the truly rich, deeply enamored of and deeply dependent on our meager bag of formerly middle-class lifestyle affordances, like access to decent health care, decent education, and a modest amount of leisure. I like you am in no way interested in losing those things. I am interested instead of returning our society to one in which such things are vastly more commonly shared. The problem is NOT wealth to support this. It's there. We just have smarmy self-satisfied very old white men sneering at the notion that the bounty is to be shared. You know what's an X factor? The fascism lite and racist nationalism those men have unleashed, believing a seething mob of enraged deluded conspiracy theorists serve as useful shock troops... ...it may bring down the whole house. They're going to bring it down it all down one way or another—if not with civil war lite, with the slow burn of climate change bred massive upheaval courting logistic collapse. Don't forget the empty shelves and hoarding of the early pandemic, the stuck cargo chips, or if you have slightly longer memory, the unavailability of hard drives after Thailand flooded. So yeah. UBI? Bring it ASAP and remember: the enemy is above.
musicale 4y ago
> boringness comes from adults having to… make a living Companies want boring robots, and schools produce them. They're driven by efficiency reasons - narrow specialization can improve performance on a narrow range of tasks, but increases boredom. Working at your own business, while perhaps more interesting, still constrains many of your working hours to specific activities. Humans are so much more capable, but generally the working world isn't structured to support human creativity and potential.

raspberry1337 4y ago

>Upon seeing the adult world in detail, teens often lament “But it’s all so boring!” >I propose that the main reason that most of us look more boring in public is that social predators lie in wait there. What a weird connection between two radically different aspects of life. I'm pretty sure it's not the _look_ that teenagers are intending when they conclude that grown ups are boring,

JohnFen 4y ago
The fact is that what is interesting to a teenager and what is interesting to an adult are often very, very different. As an adult, the life of teens seems boring to me. I totally understand that teens would feel similarly about adults.

throwanem 4y ago

Of all the many complaints I've ever seen about Twitter culture, this might be the most mealymouthed.

ReactiveJelly 4y ago

Anonymity gives me the strength to be lively instead of boring, but it only works online.

HeckFeck 4y ago
I wish we could refresh our IRL personas daily, imagine the resultant mayhem.
- capableweb 4y ago
  In a big city, you basically can. Go to a neighborhood you've never been in before and everyone (most likely) you meet is the first time you've ever seen them and vice-versa.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Drama classes perhaps?
- postsantum 4y ago
  Speaking a different language works for me. I'm way more talkative when travelling abroad and speaking in English as opposed to travelling my home country barely meeting new people
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BirAdam 4y ago

Eh. That we are subject to opprobrium when we dissent is somewhat normal, and I do not believe social predators play much part in societal pressure to conform. Most people are good otherwise society couldn’t exist, and we can further assume that most people’s views are in a spectrum that doesn’t actually vary too wildly as society more or less seems to reflect a mild uniformity. If you want things to be “not boring” you would need to disrupt society severely. I have always felt that until Americans cannot feed themselves and send their kids to school, America would remain boring. Indeed, during the shelter in place orders when this began to happen, there was major social unrest… it took that much to make Americans care to do anything about serious social injustice. If you combine the responsibilities and demands of adulthood with social pressure and mild uniformity, boringness is the result and it’s a good thing. When society falls apart, everything becomes unboring… This is just an amateur view. Probably wise to talk to a sociologist or something about this topic.

DelaneyM 4y ago

When I read overwrought complaints like this, I can't help but wonder what heretical "revolutionary/exciting" thoughts they are "prohibited" from expressing?" There are lots of courageous people out there challenging societal norms, but without fail it's reactionary conservatives complaining about being criticized for picking on them. Trans kids in Texas? Unquestionably brave and very likely fascinating people. Conservative lawmakers trying to legislate them out of existence and upset about being criticized? Not so much on either count. If the author wants to meet interesting people, they're out there. If he's looking for permission to express his inner monologue, he's not one of them.

kubb 4y ago

Or, hear me out, adults are boring, because they spend most of their lives in a job where they fulfill uninspiring, repetitive tasks. More broadly, the real world seems boring, because your interaction with it is repetitive. You see, hear, do, talk about and think things that you've already seen, heard, talked about and thought before. Things feel fresh, new and exciting when they're different from what you're used to, but not completely alien. E.g. travel to exotic places, fantasy novels, meeting new people. Of course the theory about peasants on the road is an interesting perspective. But explaining social phenomena is not always possible using such parallels, neat as they may seem.

randomdata 4y ago
> travel to exotic places, fantasy novels, meeting new people. Interesting for the actor, perhaps, but probably still boring for the observer. Generally, there is nothing interesting about people doing those things. They are common things people commonly do. A lifelong hermit who has never met another person finally deciding it is time to meet someone would be interesting, but that's an exceptional case. Which brings us back to the article questioning why people don't shake things up sometimes. Like, why didn't the preacher at church not wear a KISS costume last Sunday? That would be interesting for me to see. It could become boring if done regularly, but one time out of the blue to the shock and awe of the congregation would be quite interesting. Is there some underlying mechanism that would keep said preacher from being willing to do that?
- kubb 4y ago
  I don't know what religious community you're part of. Chances are, it's mostly adults and they have certain expectations about the attire of the preacher. The community likely has its norms, and such a costume would violate them, i.e. be too alien for the participants to be able to appreciate it. The preacher might still shake things up by introducing new subjects to a sermon or singing new songs, but there's only so much they can do. Which is why churches are usually boring.
  - randomdata 4y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

Having grown up with broken-glass-topped walls, and armed nightwatchmen, I can understand his take. It may apply in some cultures, and not in others. "Boring" is in the eye of the beholder. I personally know some very interesting people. Many of them are reformed predators (of all types). It may be as simple as the fact that being "not-boring" takes a lot of work. I suspect that most of us find that we aren't really interested in the rewards (and risks) of all the work. When we're insecure teenagers, we probably feel that it's worth the work.

_ktx2 4y ago

> I propose that the main reason that most of us look more boring in public is that social predators lie in wait there. With friends, family, and close co-workers, we are around people that mostly want to like us, and know us rather well. Yes, they want us to conform too, but they apply this pressure in moderation. > Out in public, in contrast, we face bandits just looking for chances to gain social credit by taking us down, vis accusing us of violating the sacred. And like townspeople traveling among the bandits, we are in public pretty vulnerable to the kinds of bandits that afflict us. As someone else said, people have to make a living. If you don't have a job you cannot live, and most average people can't imagine surviving expulsion from society. Frankly, the people who belong to outrage cliques are generally toying with a weapon in capitalism that they understand well: if you cannot make money, you don't survive, even if you do your psyche and feeling of safety are likely lost. We have no perfect barometer for what makes someone fireable under the right circumstances. I remember years ago a key Drupal developer was outted for having a Gorean relationship with his wife that was mutually consenting. The mob succeeded and he was fired. Last I checked his blog he's doing fine, but I attribute that to kink becoming more mainstream around the time. Had it been a decade earlier he would've been unhireable in any place that employed women for how those folks had postured him. Anecdotally, this is the only place I talk about using mushrooms or LSD. I'm very selective, especially in tech, of going into any detail of my military service. There are some things you just know people won't know how to interpret or where their lack of familiarity will be a playground for their imagination. I say all that to say that the wise man says fewer words. You don't know what tomorrow's weapon will be, so it's easier to be boring except among a select few. Even people who believe outrage cliques are exceptional or rare will follow these same patterns.

derwiki 4y ago
> You don’t know what tomorrow’s weapon will be Very true, and a reason I’ve been trying to “clean up” older posts in various places from when (I thought) I was an un-boring youth.

drewcoo 4y ago

This is from the same person who recently wrote: Religion Can Divert Sacred Energy https://www.overcomingbias.com/2023/02/religion-can-divert-sacred-energy.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2023/02/religion-can-divert-s... Middle aged garbage fire. I've been there. Outta marshmallows.

frgtpsswrdlame 4y ago

I think he's off base. There are lots of places on the internet I could go to where the users are anonymous and the conversations are frequently about sacred subjects. In this sense they would be considered 'lively' but to me they are also boring because they are all alive in exactly the same way. It's the same sacred cows being slain the same way, day after day after day. I think real liveliness doesn't come from avoiding social sanction per se, I think it comes from the interaction of different viewpoints in some sort of measured fashion (ie no one viewpoint overwhelms) and important that will include some degree of social sanctioning. But even that liveliness doesn't survive long because it's very uncomfortable. One side always overwhelms the other and when I see posts like this (there's lots of them) it always feels like the true reasoning underneath is: "if my ideas were considered fairly in a marketplace of ideas they would win and overwhelm." So no one is really seeking liveliness, just a boringness that they happen to agree with.

cokeandpepsi 4y ago

I just can't agree with this one

fullshark 4y ago

Adults don't care about impressing their peers by and large, whereas teenagers/young adults are singularly obsessed with it. At least I decided to stop caring about making it seem like I wasn't boring and I'm happier for it.

hotpotamus 4y ago
All of adult life seems like an elaborate status game to me.
- Loughla 4y ago
  Play a different game, then. I 100% see where you're coming from, and I know I've missed professional opportunities because I refuse to play that game. But. I know I'm happier that I can spend the weekend tromping around in the woods instead of dealing with whatever drama is currently happening at the Rotary Club or local Country Club. I know I'm happier that I can drink some beers with my neighbors instead of going to a wine mixer for whatever local 'name' is hosting one this weekend as a fundraiser. So I have to buy a new mid-sized or compact car instead of the huge stupid truck I would like, and I can't afford a lawn tractor to help with jobs around my property. So what? Do those things mean I'm not living to my fullest?
  - mattgreenrocks 4y ago
    I suspect many adults play status games to fill voids in their own small lives. This is seen as a socially acceptable and laudable thing to do. I loathe the fact that ambition is often filed down to one-dimensional idea of making lots of money, dominating others in the workplace, and generally succeeding in the business world. It's little wonder there's so many people are on anti-depressants.
_yb2s 4y ago
The authors book "The Elephant in the brain" argues that virtually all adult behavior is unconsciously about status seeking, while pretending and convincing ourselves that it is not. In that sense, it's not that this goes away as you get older, but it becomes more psychologically sophisticated, and less transparent.

helen___keller 4y ago

> And that, my children, is why the world looks so boring. If you conflate “the world” with “social media”, sure, I guess

mouse_ 4y ago

very hot take: I agree.

quickthrower2 4y ago
me too, but I think the article could go into more specific vivid detail? maybe it suffers from what it proposes.
- _yb2s 4y ago
  Absolutely, nearly everything Robin Hanson says suffers from this dynamic, so he is very familiar with it. He is consciously trying to do this, and stands out as really really weird as a result.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

PurpleRamen 4y ago

Reads like a Dark Forest[1] for human society. Stay low, don't make a noise, because the predators might come. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

wonderwonder 4y ago

This article actually makes a lot of sense, perhaps more so in our media driven, social media fueled society. Everyone has the responsibilities of adulthood, mortgage, job, kids, etc. and all of these things are very important. If one was to be not boring, acting in a new or exciting manner or a way in which might violate anyone's opinion of what is sacred, trans rights, racist, advocate that the poor 'pull themselves up by the bootstraps', attend drag shows, whatever. Each side has their sacred cows and any normal person that catches the eye of the media or socal media "bandits" runs the very real risk of being pulled down, called out and losing their job and career. You even have to fear the police deciding that they dont like you and arresting you as evidenced by multiple stories of parents being arrested for allowing their kids to "free roam". Anything outside of the norm is very much a risk and in todays social media wild west the "bandits" have more power than ever.

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slackfan 4y ago

Mostly because people have forgotten how to tell stories, and, more importantly, how to listen to stories.

bena 4y ago

Because you're seeing them at the boring times. I don't need buying groceries to be exciting. I need it to be done. I seriously don't need my drive anywhere to be exciting. Also, I notice that for a lot of people, their definition of "boring" is some version of sitting at home and watching Netflix while their definition of exciting is sitting in a different building and watching people do things. What is the difference between seeing a movie in the theater and in your home? A play? A concert? Etc. Anyone who is promoting replacing a passive activity with another passive activity is only offering the illusion of excitement.

moffkalast 4y ago

> The new somewhat-god-like A.I.s that have recently joined our world are also designed to seem boring. If there was a paid plan for ChatGPT that eliminated the lame content filters, it would sell like hot cakes.

ben_w 4y ago
My guess is that in 5 years, an equally capable but fully open source model will run on a (high-end) home computer. All of us collectively have about that long to decide how to deal with this.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  I highly doubt that'll be the case. GPU memory and average RAM numbers have only increased by like 3-5x in the past 10 years. Even if we follow that growth rate while making models a lot more compact it'll still be nowhere enough. It currently takes like what, 400 or 500 GB of VRAM to load ChatGPT according to some estimates? You can't realistically compress that data much further without final performance degradation. I'd expect something one tenth as good as it running locally in 5 years at best.

CocaKoala 4y ago

As a teen I thought adults were boring because they didn't do any of the things I wanted to spend my time doing - as an adult, I have a bunch of hobbies that are pretty inaccessible to children and I think they're very neat hobbies, but I would also forgive a child for thinking that I'm boring because I like to drive my car or go on wine tastings instead of watching cartoons on saturday morning.

FigurativeVoid 4y ago

As I have gotten older, I have noticed a lot of people conflate 'boring' and 'stable.' One of my friends who would air a complaint that everyone is 'so boring' is the same person that can't hold a job and still uses all sorts of drugs. When I was young, I would find myself attracted to potential partners even if they lacked stability. Now I can't even imagine that. Stability is a great thing to have in life, but the price you pay for stability is having a plan and knowing what comes next. That might make it boring, but I'll make that trade every time. Edit: spelling

bilbo0s 4y ago
That might make it boring, but I'll make that trade every time I was just musing below that evolutionary pressures have very likely conditioned all humankind to make that trade every time. The great advantage of "boring" social groupings is stability. Humans have discovered over the millennia that "lively" or "outraged" groupings find lots of adventure, but don't last very long.
randomdata 4y ago
Stable is boring when stable reflects what has been done time and time again. Interestingness requires novelty. Someone who seeks stability in living on the moon and has a plan to make it happen would be hard to call boring – until many more people follow the same blueprint, at which point it too will become boring.

ydnaclementine 4y ago

>Someone murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand? Who cares? I'm sure it's a nothingburger

diydsp 4y ago

This will vary greatly with age, location, culture, ethnicity, etc. But generally, the Western world, particularly the heavily industrialized corridors such as the US and Europe, are going through a tribalization phase. This is one of Marshall McLuhan's theories. In this phase, conformity is rewarded, because communications have "shrunk" the world, allowing almost anyone to reach other to other's as if they were in the same village. He called the networks formed by international speed-of-light communications the "global village." Since a village can be a harsh physical environment, it requires a strict social environment to survive. Therefore anyone branching out is own their own.... ...unless of course, they're so far out that they're successful (e.g. Elon Musk), in which case they become the new center to rally around. You might call it the Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer Effect[0] But that's exactly what the author concluded: "It takes unusual art, allies, and energy, in a word “eliteness”, to survive while choosing lively." Freud also discussed this balance between the individual and society in _Society and Its Discontents_. I personally feel the pull all the time. I want to be weird in certain ways I won't discuss here... But presently, deviation has an accepted form and that's not me. [0] https://miro.medium.com/max/720/1*nLHfkNG67b6fi-ccF_G4yA.webp https://miro.medium.com/max/720/1*nLHfkNG67b6fi-ccF_G4yA.web...

jacknews 4y ago

The boringness comes from nuance, which this post seems to lack, and that truly revolutionary ideas are rare. Sure, you can be not boring by shouting your hot take from the rooftops, bluster like trump etc, but the truth is that 'truth' is not absolute, everyone has a slightly different perspective, and adults take that into consideration.

semidetached 4y ago

The basic problem is that if you're bored you're boring. If you want to be interesting try to be interested.

readthenotes1 4y ago

Being bored (it's not something someone else can do to you) is a reflect of your own and ability to find something interesting in the world around you. It's very childish to assume people have a responsibility to entertain you...

JohnFen 4y ago

I don't know if I agree with the premise. Most people I meet and interact with are very interesting. The article seems to be talking about why people don't tend to be flashy. That's a very different thing than boring.

sacnoradhq 4y ago

The old saying (no pun intended): "Those who complain about boredom are the boring ones." People who aren't boring don't need other to entertain them. It's a consumption mindset vs. a creator one, with the former being the predominant one.

Barrin92 4y ago

Not sure if I agree with the notion that people have become more boring. There always have been what the author calls 'social predators', try coming out as gay even as recently as two or three decades ago and you'd be hounded for it. Or even something banal as being atheist was controversial, still is even today in many places. But overall it seems like we've become more tolerant, not less of different ways of living. It's not even that long ago that it was normal to think that D&D, videogames and Marilyn Manson's music are the devil's work. When the author says we treat to many things as sacred now I don't really see it. People seem to have already forgotten what kind of silly social stigmas existed not that long ago.

renewiltord 4y ago

It's the same thing always. Groupies can't make art. So when the artists go somewhere else, the groupies think the art has died. It's why people in SF lament the loss of the city's culture, etc. They're the ones who never created. They're the groupies. It's why people think that everyone is boring. They're groupies and now they've surrounded themselves with groupies.

fistfucker3000 4y ago

This person sounds boring as fuck

FrontierPsych 4y ago

Yes. When you are in your 20s, you only can go out to your first sushi restaurant or first thai restaurant *one time.* You only can be a virgin once. The second time is pretty good, but if you go out to sushi 100 times, it's not too special, it is boring. By the time you hit 27 or 30, it's pretty much "been there, done that" on most everything. Sure, once in a while there's a new experience, but for me, it's usually only once a year, maybe twice on a good year. I've been to the Monteray Aquarium in Monteray, CA. As a matter-of-fact, I went to a special dinner where the company rented it out and had dinner there, and I sat in front of the biggest glass wall where sharks and sea turtles and stuff swam by the whole dinner. I read an article about a hotel room in Dubai or someplace like that, where the room had an aquarium from floor to ceiling and had some boring-ass fish in it. They rented it out for $10,000 per night because of this fish tank. I'm like, YAWN, I had dinner at the Monteray Aquarium. But why go to another aquarium again - I've seen one, the best one. Yeah, ok, I'd go to one, but let's be honest, it would be pretty anti-climatic. Boring, at least to me. Yes, the world does become boring.

Mikho 4y ago

For people who are themselves boring and forgot how to be curious or passionate to feel life, everyone and everything around is boring. Such people got used to being entertained by outside signals like TV, games, social etc. They often can't even be on their own in silence without any outside noise that would distract them from looking deeper inside themselves and be on their own with their own thoughts. Such "human vegetables" often blame others for their own inability to have a spark in life. They basically blame others for their own life choices while forgetting that nobody owes them anything and their life is a direct result of their own behavior.