The Right to Be Boring

Against the Tyranny of “Interesting”

The cult of the fascinating has emptied public life of stamina. We praise the novel, the provocative, the personal brand with its radiant veneer, while the quiet virtues that hold families, schools, shops, and cities together have been assigned to the custodial closet. Boredom has been anathematized as a moral failure rather than a momentary condition of being alive among other people.

The calendar is sacrificed to the feed.

The feed is animated by novelty that is curious about nothing.

The result is a culture that confuses charisma with character and spectacle with stewardship. The restoration begins with a dissertation in praise of the ordinary: punctuality, thrift, and maintenance as civic arts.

Matthew Crawford reminds us that reality resists our fantasies, especially in the shop where material limits speak back to the hand. Joseph Pieper reminds us that leisure is not consumption but contemplative receptivity, the ground of culture and the ceremony of gratitude. The old diaries of tradespeople, with their laconic entries about weather, repairs, and neighborly obligations, read like an antidote to our informational glare. They show a human life that is durable precisely because it is uninteresting to any algorithm.

The fixation on being interesting is a steroid for vanity. It breeds restlessness, not excellence, and it hollows work into performance. To be always interesting is to be permanently available for judgment by strangers who will never torque your bolts, translate your patient’s chart, or reset your breaker box at midnight.

The useful person does not audition for the crowd. The useful person knows where the shutoff valve is and shows up with a wrench on time. Competence outlasts charisma because competence is a promise kept across days and years. A dull reliability is not a concession to mediocrity. It is the very grammar of the common good.