There’s an element to broadcasting that is performative. No one goes on air and says: “I’m a bit fed up today.” Over the years I have presented shows when all manner of chaos and pain was going on in my personal life. But if you had been listening in, you never would have noticed. Hopefully.
It is integral to the job that I present myself as being in a reasonably good mood, and the more I’ve done it, the more pavlovian that has become. I go into the studio and my life outside, the Me outside, is put on pause. That’s not to say I’m acting or being insincere. The on-air Me is what I’m like: it’s just not what I’m like all the time. We are all slightly different people in different situations. I talk for a living, yet I like to get up early in the morning because I relish those couple of hours of silence before the rest of the world wakes up. If I’m with friends, I tend not to be the one who dominates the conversation. I prefer to listen.
So when I meet people for the first time, I can occasionally catch something move behind their eyes: a realisation that I’m not what they were expecting. For most people that’s fine, but there have been a few over the years who found it difficult to contain their disappointment that I wasn’t the Mad Crack person they wanted me to be. Not quite boring (I like to think) but perhaps boring-adjacent. You see their gaze drift off to other parts of the room; you almost hear the cogs in their brain moving as they try to devise a way out of the conversation, so they can go and tell someone that they met that guy off the radio. Really boring.
What constitutes “boring” is wildly subjective. You may find someone who talks about golf or origami for two hours to be fascinating or mind-numbing. Yet we’ve all been there. At a wedding you’re stuck beside some droning automaton while at the other tables you can see people laughing until they cry, or their heads bent in gossipy exchanges. You yearn to be there.
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The only source of diversion was a machine where the participants could give themselves an electric shock. Eighteen of them went for the electric shock
Of course, the automaton is a human being with an interior life just like anyone else. Of course, you should be patient and kind; and, if you put in enough effort, you might make a surprising connection. But the effort required is excruciating and mostly ends up confirming your first impression. They are hideously boring.
When a child announces that they are bored, the correct parental response is to do nothing - children have to learn how to combat the feeling by learning to entertain themselves. Boredom can be a spur to creativity. Parents love telling their kids this, along with a when-I-was-your-age story about how they enjoyed weeks of magical fun with just a carrot and roll of Sellotape.
This may be a tad hypocritical. A study carried out in 2014 put 42 grown-up people in a room for just 15 minutes, where they were required to do nothing. No reading material, no phones. The only source of diversion was a machine where the participants could give themselves an electric shock. Eighteen of them went for the electric shock. Similar studies after that came up with similar results.
This is probably something to do with the way our brains our wired. Its why solitary confinement is a form of punishment. But it’s also true that we live in the most over-stimulated age in human history. Gadgets, TVs and phones all conspire to drown out the sound of our own minds, minds that might – gasp – be a little boring. It’s not just that guy at the wedding. It’s you too.
But what’s wrong with embracing our inner dullard? It might make us more rounded, more compassionate people. But in private, obviously. Don’t do it when I’m around.