Only Boring People Get Bored

Charles Bukowski noted that "Only boring people get bored.” It entered popular consciousness when Betty Draper stole the line on Mad Men. It's worth considering the mechanism behind this. I think it reflects a flipped perspective; a misapprehension of cause and effect. A framing error. It's not that the world bores bored people. It's that they suppress the world’s interestingness. Bored people are like Kryptonite for interestingness. They don't innocently miss it, they proactively thwart it. Bored people drain the interestingness out of everything. Interesting people experience this all the time. They feel compelled to overcompensate in order to merely register. Escaping the inexorable singularity of a bored person is likely how it feels to be sucked dry by a vampire.