A Boring Archetype
Over the last year I met a few incredibly boring people who all reminded me very strongly of each other. This got me thinking: taxonomically, what defines this particular boring archetype? In some sense the answer is just "not reading the room" – my definition of boring is "someone who talks at me, at length, without listening to me, and indifferent to my disinterest." But what are the more specific components?
Drone-y delivery. The delivery is important because it must never be clear to the listener when a story is going to end, and the listener must never really be situated in the story: they should be unsure moment-to-moment where in the arc of the story they are. This generates a kind of internal frustration beyond the pain of listening to someone monologue in general. The effect is achievable through a "classically boring" monotone, but it's also possible through a kind of Scandinavian-style lilt where you're just constantly uncertain where you are in a sentence or paragraph.
Quoted Speech. I'm not sure why this is such a commonality, but these people always insert extensive quoted speech into what they're saying, in a way that I rarely hear from anybody else. E.g. "So then Jo says, I think it's time to go to the bus, and I say, Yes you're probably right, and she says But we're not going to make it unless we run, and I said You are so right Jo, it's five minutes away and we're six minutes away from it."
I guess the meta-reason this is boring is because they could easily have synthesized this information ("So then we ran for the bus"), and the exact words someone used are rarely interesting unless they're really excellent words, so using this much quoted speech is normally an embodiment of "enjoying the sound of one's own voice + not really caring about the listener's experience," hence boring. But it's still striking to me that extensive reported speech is so prevalent in the boring community and rare outside it (though it's possible that interesting people are doing it too, but I fail to notice that because it makes sense in context and is interesting).
Fractal stories. This one I will really struggle to render, but I think it might be key. Every one of these people has a super-human ability to nest stories inside other stories, "My cousin Larry used to live near Tucson – his daughter went to school with Amanda Grayson, who was really quite short, she could barely reach over the counter at the grocery store, she used to have to shout up from behind the counter it's me, Amanda, is anyone there?, and..."
As I said, it's incredibly hard to render this pattern accurately but I think it might be the most important part of this unique archetype. I have met other boring people who are boring in other ways, but to me this archetype is DEFINED by the incredible ability to contain infinite stories within each of their stories. None of the stories have satisfying or interesting conclusions, and as a listener you're constantly in a state of uncertainty and anxiety since you're constantly in the middle of a series of open loops (which of course is compounded by patented Drone-y Delivery). The speaker flows through an infinite list of opened parentheses, occasionally closing some of them but always leaving more still open, giving their speech a remarkable texture and (of course) making it entirely uncompilable for the listener.
I think the difficulty of rendering this speaking style shows what a talent this is: like being a talk radio host, people think "I could do that!" but you cannot, it takes a kind of genius/and or extensive practice.
NOTE WELL: I am extremely worried that publishing this might put the exact wrong idea in the exact wrong people's heads, i.e. I worry that some not-boring people will read this and think I'm talking about them because e.g. they occasionally tell nested stories, or occasionally quote someone else's speech.
The main things I want to say to this are 1) if you're worried it's probably not about you, because the people who do this don't seem to have any concern at all about whether other people are interested in what they're saying, and 2) it's impossible to be boring in this way if you take up 1/n of the conversational space in an n person conversation.
I had a dear friend once who thought of himself as boring, and I was like "...clearly you're not?" Basically, from the inside he felt like he rarely had anything interesting to say, but then if he didn't have interesting things to say he didn't say them, so from outside he seemed a bit quiet, but never boring.
Meanwhile the most boring people I know consistently take up a disproportionate share of talking-space, they do not stop talking when other people try to talk, and for reasons quite beyond me seem to think everyone wants to hear them talking all the time – I assume their conceptualization of this is somehow completely orthogonal, they think they're the life of the party or something, that if they didn't tell their marvelous stories then everyone else would get bored. Essentially, being boring is a power move and that is actually one of the reasons I hate it. Point being: if you listen to other people and let them talk a roughly equal amount as you do, this post is not about you.