Only Boring People Get Bored & Other Lies We Tell Ourselves
the first essay I've written since college
Months ago, when the air in the city still hung heavy with hot humidity, I sat at a large dinner table curbside at a restaurant in the West Village sipping a margarita that was watered down from rapidly melting ice cubes. The “Mexican” food I picked at was extraordinarily bland, and I was unfortunately sober.
Sweat was pooling under my linen Reformation top (linked, it looks good with everything) while I endured a young woman talking about a failed dating foray. They had been on two dates, and he wasn’t texting her back, or something. Neither the raconteur nor my tablemates seemed engrossed in what she was saying. As she spoke, several bobble their heads in flimsy sympathy, no doubt their minds wandering to what inane thing they can say, about themselves, next.
God damn, I thought to myself, I am so bored.
Maybe that was mean, but it was the truth. Or at least, it sort of was. I’ve been thinking a lot about clarity of communication, specifically with my inner voice. I could dissect what I thought to myself that oppressive August evening in several different ways, but I want to focus on the feeling I misidentified: boredom.
Through therapy, analysis, and therapeutic education I have come to learn that misidentifying emotions can cause an inordinate amount of grief and wreak havoc on your self-image. With such a cycle, you start to convince yourself that you lack the character or resilience to react in a necessary and appropriate way to a variety of circumstances.
I recently decided to sit with and examine emotions that I have possibly misidentified. You can accuse me of intellectualizing my emotions, but this meditation has been profound and clarifying. For instance, I have come to understand that at that sweaty dinner party, I was more likely discontented rather than bored. And that means something significant.
Growing up I was often told that only boring people get bored. I’ve always found that proverb offensive, because obviously, I am a wildly interesting person (see: self-deprecating sarcasm). But what exactly does it mean to be bored? For the sake of this essay, I am going to pull out the good ‘ole Merriam Webster -- “Boredom” is simply defined as the state (feeling) of being restless through a lack of interest.
An example of pure boredom that easily comes to mind: when the train comes to a sudden stop mid-rout due to delay and I don’t have cell service. I look around at people playing Candy Crush and a wave of jealousy washes over me. I open and close apps on my phone. I tap my foot. I can’t wait to arrive at the next hole in the underground so that my emails will load again. I am restless, I am bored.
And then maybe, I start daydreaming a bit. Or I people watch. Or I smile at the toddler dressed like a princess sitting with her mother across from me.
A recent guest on Dan Harris’ 10% Happier Podcast spoke about the positive opportunity of boredom, and how it is critical to creativity and our ever-shrinking attention span. Interestingly, if you reread the textbook definition of boredom, you’ll realize there is no negative tone associated with the feeling. Rather, you lack something positive (interest). Thus, there is space for your mind to wander and potentially stumble upon a nugget of genius, or at least, goodness.
On the other hand, discontentment is defined as dissatisfaction with one's possessions, status, or situation. Discontentedness has a tone of negativity. Bringing it back to my original scene, I was unhappy with my $35 tacos, disappointed in my margarita, and genuinely miserable engaged in that conversation. I wasn’t bored, I was discontented.
Now that I have succinctly identified what I felt, I can understand more about what that means.
For the sake of comparative analysis, I thought about another time I was discontented. Oddly enough, something specific immediately came to mind. Sometime last spring I went to the Film Forum to see a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt starring Bridget Bardot. As a fan of Godard’s and Bardot’s I expected to be deeply satisfied with the film. I was wrong. It was really bad (in my humble opinion). So, I left the movie theater once I finished my banana bread, and spent the rest of the hour reading in the garden of St. Luke’s on Hudson Street.
I changed my circumstances and life once again became pleasurable (and what is living supposed to be if not pleasurable.) Discontentment invites one to actively change their circumstances from bad to good, enacting some positive change.
So, maybe all of this is to say that in the future I shouldn’t accept dinner invitations from people I don’t really want to hang around at restaurants I don’t really want to go to. Or maybe I should offer more stimulating conversation topics and bring a flask. I find this to be at once a profound and stupid conclusion with a universal nature.
Thus, I am not a boring person because I was dissatisfied by a circumstance, I was a discontented person at that moment in time. I know that I can change that as a human who is both resilient and malleable. I no longer look back at this scenario and feel that perhaps I am deeply uninteresting, but rather, with the knowledge that I have the power to choose situations, circumstances, and people who make me feel good, interested, and joyous, when appropriate.
And that is the beauty of introspection. Stop lying to yourself.