Bradley's Website

A child’s first steps…

A train wreck…

Hot air balloons…

Gary Busey’s face…

All very interesting.

But why are they interesting? What do these things do for me?
In fact, what is interesting? What does that word even mean?

I understand that it’s an expression to signify that a subject is slightly sticky when it comes to your attention, but I’ve come to realize that it conveys absolutely nothing about the reason for that stickiness nor the salience of the qualities that make it so. There must be a better way to describe things than by flattening them into a single, smooth adjective that can ostensibly be applied to everything from science fiction to an actor’s physiognomy. Wouldn’t you agree?

Indeed—after some thought (probably not enough), I have concluded that interesting is actually a doorway; a flair sent by my soul with the intention of drawing me in. Yet I have often let interesting be a dead end instead; a terminal to what might have been the beginning of a lovely Perhaps Adventure. And in this day and age, needlessly aborting a Perhaps Adventure is like strangling an animal on the endangered species list. You just don’t do it; especially if you hope to see more of them.

Opening The “Interesting” Door

The swiftest and surest way to preserve the efficacy of your Perhaps Adventure is to install a massive, high-quality censor right in between your brain and oral cavity.

By this, I mean to become hyper-sensitive to even the remote possibility that you are about to utter that word: i***resting. I recommend just eliminating it from your vocabulary entirely. Tear it out the dictionary. Banish it from your consciousness! Make those four nonsense syllables a refugee in the ether, floating through the void of your local airspace without an eardrum or cochlea to receive them.

And when you detect that you were close to saying that word, just stop and quickly interrogate yourself instead:

• How can I be more specific?
• What adjectives might describe this thing better?
• What images are being brought to mind?
• What associations or memories does this bring up?
• Are there any questions this provokes in me?
• How could I reasonably and honestly finish the sentence: “This is interesting because…“

Then see what falls out your mouth.

You may be surprised to discover the qualities, attributes, and treasures of self-knowledge that were hiding beneath that wet blanket of interesting. You may be surprised to see a pattern or theme emerge from your investigations. Above all, you may be surprised at your own capacity to surprise yourself—to fall headfirst into a well in the very backyard you thought you had played in a million times. Now you get to fall down, down, down into the depth of it. I hope you have fun on your Perhaps Adventure!

Or, you may realize that the thing which you were about to ordain as interesting is, in fact, not interesting at all. This, too, happens sometimes. Maybe you were in conversation with someone who had just vouchsafed a piece of trivial information and now you felt that it was your social duty to respond in a manner that is non-dismissive (you are correct about that). So you were going to respond:

“Hmm, that’s interesting.”

But it’s not. At least not to you—and that’s okay. If it can’t be made interesting, then it’s better to know now that this is not something you have a penchant for. Better to uncover a hole and realize that it is not a well, just an empty ditch, before you jump into it. Should you find yourself in this situation, consider the following bit of advice:

Avoid the temptation to simply banter on a specious level, especially the kind of interaction where you admire your own politeness and internally pat yourself on the back for how generous you are with your attentiveness. This is a social survival tactic and has saved many individuals in the swamps of networking conferences, but it only cheats both you and your interlocutor. I would know, I’m very good at it.

Instead, try to get creative. Find a way to ignite a spark in the conversation, typically from some faint but redeemable embers of the person’s passion for the subject. You then take that spark and fan it with your questions, fuel it with reciprocated excitement, and feed it with talk of possibility. The spark then turns into a fire in the person and you can marvel at it with real sincerity as opposed to swimming in the shallow end of supercilious conversation. To do this requires patience, tact, and making a game of the conversation, but you will have saved yourself from the perpetual cul-de-sac of interesting. Once again you are at the door to your Perhaps Adventure, with better chances of embarking than ever before.

Thanks for letting me get this off my chest,

Bradley

P.S.—Many of the same rules apply for the word “interesting” in writing as it does in speech. The one difference, however, is that you almost never have a real need to use the word. If it is interesting, then I am probably better off simply describing what is interesting rather than saying it is interesting. Interesting, in this sense, is like a standalone ‘0’ integer. It does nothing when included in the equation, so you might as well remove it.