Interesting People

Lately I've had the uneasy sense that I'm in danger of becoming a dullard.

When people I haven't seen for a while ask how I'm doing, I almost invariably answer, "Not much." Which isn't true. There's always plenty going on in my life. As there is in everyone else's.

Maybe too much has happened to distill into a single anecdote on the spot, so "not much" becomes the easiest way to move the conversation along.

Or maybe I've begun to assume that real life happens online, posted somewhere—on Facebook, Instagram, or whatever feed we've curated for one another. Note: I don't have Facebook or Instagram accounts.

I've been thinking about this since hearing Alain de Botton in conversation with Sam Harris. They were discussing self-reflection and, more broadly, the ways people lower their emotional barriers and come to know themselves.

At one point De Botton asks a deceptively simple question: Why are people boring?

His answer surprised me. Human beings, he argues, all lead immensely complex inner lives. Yet we've all met people around whom our own minds seem to go blank. We know we have things to say, but somehow nothing comes.

He suggests this has less to do with intelligence or experience than with self-exploration. A genuinely interesting person is someone who has spent time opening the doors of their own mind—not in an egotistical way, but with curiosity. Other people unconsciously sense that curiosity, and it invites their own. Conversation flourishes because both people are interested in making sense of experience rather than merely reporting it.

I've certainly experienced that. There are people who make you feel more articulate simply by listening. They ask how you are because they genuinely want to know. Their interest gives you permission to think out loud.

And then there are the opposite encounters. People ask the same question, but only as social lubrication. The exchange is transactional. According to De Botton, these are often people who haven't cultivated much curiosity about themselves either. They may travel widely, collect accomplishments, and accumulate experiences, but those experiences become content to upload rather than material to reflect upon. The outer life expands while the inner one remains largely unexplored.

When I answered "not much" the other day, I immediately regretted it. It felt dismissive, almost disrespectful.

Part of me suspected the other person wasn't really looking for an honest answer. Few people seem to be anymore.

But another part of me wondered whether I'd become complicit in exactly the habit De Botton was describing. Maybe "not much" wasn't simply an efficient reply. Maybe it was evidence that I hadn't done the work of turning experience into thought.

After all, something is always happening. The question is whether we've spent enough time with our own lives to know what it means.

Once we begin to think of ourselves principally as online personas, and experiences as 'content', it not only drains our real-life exchanges of vitality; it drains our own lives of meaning and interest—even to ourselves.