People Are Boring

I wouldn't really call myself a people person, but I do find people as a whole utterly fascinating. I don't particularly enjoy being in a crowd, but I love watching one. Even though it goes against standard socializing protocol, and I probably look like a massive weirdo doing it, I'm fairly content with leaning against a far away wall at a party by myself. All the conversations, laughter, and even the awkwardness at a standard get-together is so much better than television. There's also significantly less crying... at least publicly.

Then again, I tend to frequent places full of interesting people. I don't have to talk to everyone at a DIY Punk or Metal show to know they're far from boring. Boring people would never even consider going to a stranger's house to watch relatively unknown bands play their hearts out. Boring people like to mow their lawn entirely too often, and only ever go to the same two restaurants. When you're boring, you like to party by drinking watered-down beer, and watching cover bands. I'm getting bored just thinking about these people.

If Heaven, and Hell actually exist, there has to be some sort of overlap of the two places. Just imagine an eternity of organizing figurines based on the Dewey Decimal System to a soundtrack of “Smooth Jazz” played on a tenor saxophone. Someone out there thinks that sounds great. You or I might find waiting in line to fill out forms a torturous task, but to some, that's all gravy on their flavorless, lumpy, mashed potato existence. To some people, life is a buffet of unsalted crackers, and they wouldn't have it any other way. Bring on the rice cakes, and forget the toppings because they don't need them!

Pop culture, and mainstream media in general, breeds boring people. We have contests to see who sings someone else's song the best, and why go out to dance with your significant other when you can just watch D-list celebrities do it instead! Take the “laugh track” on your average American sitcom for example, it's sole purpose is to inform viewers of when to laugh. God forbid you ever actually have to think about something; just go ahead, and turn that brain of yours off. Boring people don't have much use for their brains apart from making purchases, and even then, the television tells them what to buy.

I imagine it's a lot easier to just be a Vanilla person, and assimilate to the Vanilla world. Go along with the crowd, and talk about the weather. The highlight of your year being the four-day weekend you take to go to the beach, and sit in your hotel room watching television. “Hey, we don't have this channel at home!” exclaims the boring person, in between sips of non-alcoholic piña colada. Maybe they take a night to really “cut loose”, and go watch a band wearing Hawaiian shirts burn through Jimmy Buffet's greatest hits.

“You should have heard me singing along to 'Margaritaville'! Gosh, we sure got crazy!” says the boring person upon returning to work. Perhaps they will really “go nuts” the next time they have time off, and paint their house a brighter shade of yellow. The neighborhood planning committee doesn't approve of anything brighter than “canary”, but gosh darn it, they're still a rebel! They want to believe, but even they know they're boring. It's not entirely their fault; they've been broken, and reprogrammed to fit in so well they're almost part of the scenery.

We keep saying that life is short, but how many of us actually live this way? We abuse our bodies with junk food, and lose sleep every night. We force ourselves awake to rush out to jobs we hate in order to barely pay our bills. Most of us aren't living for ourselves, or even our families, we're living how we've been told to live. Living for the weekend, a time when we sit around the house trying to find something to watch that we haven't already. We're too beat down by the previous week to do anything else. Wasting away until it's time to return to our thankless jobs, and do it all over again. It's a boring life, regardless of how interesting you may be on an individual level.

We say we want change, but changing ourselves is too hard, so we just stay stuck in these ruts. We do virtually the exact same thing every day until the day we're on our way out of here, wondering what the hell happened. I can't tell you how to not be boring, and increasingly lifeless; that's for you to figure out. What I can tell you is that you don't have any time to waste. Look around at all the death, and despair in this world, and tell me changing yourself for the better is hard. What's really hard is going through this life watching the same things happen over, and over without any positive end in sight. This isn't a safe, boring world, so why are so many content to be safe, and boring?

Anything other than safe seems frightening, but what really frightens me is all these people content to sit around, and accept it all. To me, it doesn't get much more boring than giving in; that's far worse than any cover band at any suburbanite music fest in downtown anywhere. I feel like there are people in control who want to cheat me out of my life. They want me to waste away doing repetitive tasks for a low wage while they go do whatever they want with the money I earned for them. That's not living, that's just existing.

Existence is boring, but life is full of excitement. Don't be boring, and settle for the norm; go live, laugh in the face of fear, and be the most interesting version of you possible. In fact, defy possibility, and be even better than you imagined. Those people who tell you all the ways that it can go wrong are the boring ones. The beaten-down, broken, and painfully dull populace. While it's true that forging your own path in this life is full of hardship, and setbacks, I promise you it's a hell of a lot more interesting than following the predetermined path.