In my house, interesting prevailed over all. Each of my parents — an absentee father, a step-father, a mother — have PhDs. My brother was reading Sartre in middle school and holding forth with emphatic despair over the dinner table. Mind you, this was no Algonquin Round Table. It was the usual familial hell of discussions, fighting, and yelling — not about Trostky vs. Stalin but about whether the boys were laughing too hard. But amidst that all, the conversation was driven by an interesting article in the New Yorker, a clever take on something, a political insight (which, I see now, was all New York Times liberal drivel — which is to say, not insightful at all. But it passed as such).
As the youngest by several years, I usually just sat quiet. I liked sports. I loved the Yankees and I liked gym class. For this, I was mocked on a near nightly basis. My only memory of early accolades was one night when we had ordered Chinese take out. I suddenly offered to the room, "I know why they call it Mu Shu pork: it's all this mush with pork." They laughed and I was patted on the head for being clever. I was probably 6 at the time and even I knew that it wasn't so clever. But I learned that that's what this clan of babbling, educated beasts wanted. That's how I'd succeed here. That's how I'd survive: being clever.
Forty years later and a life of being clever, a life of being interesting, has nearly killed me. To be interesting is demanding! It consumes tremendous energy, exhausting one's personal reserves, as it demands not only parsing the word in ever-fresh ways but having to negotiatethe rhetorical circumstances, the terms of the social. To be relentlessly interesting means throwing social agreements to the wayside. Never would I nod along with the group — "Yeah, that W!" or "Oh, that Trump!". Instead, I'd offer an alternate take on it all, inevitably with a hostile, judgmental bite. To be interesting is constantly to be on stage, to be evacuated of oneself — and, usually, an asshole.
This is not to disparage the interesting per se. I want my books to be interesting, my art to be interesting, my films to be interesting. What do I mean by that? I want them to be surprising, to make me think in ways I didn't know possible, to have me see the world anew. I don't want to be spoon fed the same old drivel; rarely, if ever, do I want to be confirmed. On the contrary, I want to be sent afloat, unmoored, put in freefall.
I want all that in order to infuse me with life, to vitalize me, energize me, have me feel the tug of the universe, the spin of the cosmos, the air wooshing by, my few remaining hairs tussling, as I fly untethered from my bourgeois moor.
But to be interesting in the social — that is, to perform the interesting — is a drain as it constantly runs up against the grain of the social. By definition, it rubs the wrong way (even if said rubbing can be immensely pleasurable!). To constantly perform interesting means always being outside myself — thinking about what others think, how to disrupt it, shift it. It's a posture without poise; it leans too far forward (pace Lohren Green). And, alas, I've found myself flat on the floor, face front.
I've begun to summon a new ideal state. Rather than being the most interesting guy in the room (the more deluded I was — and am — the more the show gets amped up, perverse, ribald and the more exhausting it becomes) — so rather than being this jew clown, as I've dubbed that role, I want to be the most boring person in the room.
This is what I imagine: All these people sitting around a table and me, there, silent. I have no interest whatsoever in appealing to this crowd in any way — not because I don't care for them. Not because I don't love them. On the contrary, because I do love them. And because of this love, I can sit there utterly and completely content with no ambition or effort to be clever, smart, or provocative, no effort to be charming, sexy, good looking. That is, I offer nothing interesting per se — except myself.
Imagine this. Zero energy expenditure. Just sitting in the social without being evacuated in any sense, in any way, sitting utterly unto oneself. But not a solipsist, not closed off, not hunkered down. That would entail a reactive position and, as such, would demand an energy expenditure. It would still be a performance. No, what I am imagining is sitting silent, even if talking; sitting still, even if moving. Every gesture, every word, animated by the élan vital rather than by a sense of social duty, social anxiety, social ambition.
In recent days, I've become acutely aware of all the ways I — and I can say we as in all of us, for the most part — anticipate the social by distending, evacuating, and inflecting ourselves. Before meeting this or that friend, I adjust myself, I ramp myself up or down: I get in character.
And then I've begun to notice all the things I do to maintain this character rather than just drift along with the tides — the cocktails and such, kinds of comments on social media as well as in the social. Here's an obvious one: when people ask me what I do — that quintessential American query — ,I inevitably begin, "I used to teach. Now I do other things." Why? Because I hope that teaching will imply that I'm interesting. If I say I do brand strategy, well, to me that sounds less interesting. But the reality is: Who the hell cares? If I am putting any energy into whether people think I'm interesting or not, I am literally killing myself, emptying my reserves without any return.
So now I have a new will: a will not just to be boring but to be the most boring person in the world. Of course, I should probably qualify this. Because once freed from the teem and torrent of socio-existential obligations, once one is utterly and completely content with oneself without having to perform or judge, well, the boring vanishes. And is replaced with the perpetual surge and hum of life itself. Or at least that's the Nietzschean image of joy, the Taoist image of enlightenment, the Kierkegaardian image of faith. Nietzsche's ubermensch, the Buddha, the Knight of Faith: they are the most boring people in the room precisely because nothing is boring to them.
It's not easy to be boring. Distractions abound. The social whispers seductively, the promise of accolades, flirtation, even fellatio await. The cocktail bar is always locked and loaded, ready to take me somewhere that screams with excitement. To sit still and silent amidst all that, even while talking and moving, is at once the simplest and most difficult task of all.
So how would I answer that family refrain today: Would I choose the world of good people over the interesting? I'm not sure as good worries me. But I know this, at least, and it is a complete turnaround from when I was younger: today, without doubt, I'll take kind over clever.
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