One of the best pieces of advice/criticism I was told in elementary school, "Only boring people get bored."
Because being bored and be boring is the same exact thing, just said in different words. Is there any thing that is boring for every single human being on the planet? Of course no, this means boredom only exists in our minds. So if you say some one is boring - that has nothing to do with them, it only means your mind is bored. Make sure to understand this clearly and not be trapped by language expressiveness and social influence.
So it's a shallow and naive statement that ignores externalities either way.
I know which person I'd rather converse with, wealth doesn't really matter.
I did though. Otherwise what you're saying is that you've never known someone whose imagination and appetite for experiences was not constrained by their wealth. You've never know someone who had to endure boredom doing boring things in order to have a shot at doing the things that did interest them. That would be quite the luxurious and unencumbered circle to inhabit.
> Your assertion that 'wealth does matter' is as orthogonal to the original as 'wealth doesn't matter'
Re-removing the constraint from my example to make an orthogonal point has nothing to do with why I introduced it in the first place to disprove the original point - that's not really how the logic works.
> and there are plenty of examples in favour of each position
Yes and I only need one to disprove the original assertion. Thankfully I don't have only one - there are literally millions (billions?) of non-boring people who have been in that situation.
My example demonstrated the orthogonal nature of your argument and that it doesn't hold true in all circumstances, and according to your criteria of only needing one example to disprove an assertion, then yours has been dispelled as well.
I'll add that I also dislike the adage 'only boring people get bored'. However I think there is some truth to it, perhaps a more accurate phrasing would be 'people who are always bored are boring people '
I only need to introduce a specific example/constraint to disprove the original assertion: 1
My introduction of the example/constraint is directly relevant to disproving the original point. That is the whole point of introducing it, so it is absolutely not orthogonal.
If you then remove my constraint (1) and say: “but 4 and 16 can both be square numbers”: Sure you're not wrong, but that also has nothing to do with why I introduced my example in the first place, nor does it invalidate my example, and is thus completely orthogonal to proving/disproving the original point.
A person 'doing boring things' isn't necessarily a bored person. The experience of being bored is entirely subjective. One person staring at paint dry could be driven insane but another could be meditating upon the physical experience of the passage of time.
The saying 'bored people are boring people' isn't supposed to be taken literally. It is as logically fallible as any other quip in English, I think the difference with this one is that it is used in a more directly negative and judgmental way (and often perceived as such by the recipient).
No point imagining a wonderful summer vacation in Paris when you barely have $1000 in the bank for in case the car breaks down.
Or go outside and take a walk.
Or assuming you have a computer, go online and learn one of hundreds of subjects for free.
Or if you have paper and a pencil, doodle or write something.
I was 'trapped doing boring stuff' at school all the time growing up, especially in elementary school and junior high which were always way too easy for me, but I would pass the time away during class by either daydreaming, or doodling, or writing poems, or trying to invent a new language, or printing stories in tiny font and reading them, or brainstorming ideas for things to do later, or designing levels to new video games I thought I'd create someday, or drawing out the structure of a web site I wanted to make, and then later when I got a calculator you could code on, I was coding simple games on it.
What if I said the interesting person is the one that will tolerate being bored doing something boring, in order to be able to do the thing that satisfies their imagination and appetite for interesting experiences? Like you were forced to at school? Unfortunately many people are trapped being bored doing boring things as a means to an end for much longer than just childhood: That doesn't make them boring.
I could go even more extreme as an example and go back to the year I worked in a factory. I could have been bored out of my mind while sequencing and examining car parts, but instead I let myself daydream and think about things like crazy, and wrote down notes for various thoughts I had and things to do after work when I had a spare moment. In some ways I miss that, as my current job robs a good chunk of my mental energy for the day, also I was a lot more fit back then because I was constantly moving during my job (I don't miss the 90 degree heat with only an industrial fan to cool me off though, nor the fraction of the pay I was making then compared to now).
Sometimes people that are bored come across to me like my partner when she says there's nothing she feels like eating out, despite us living in an extremely restaurant rich area (we could go to almost 100 different restaurants and almost two dozen different types of regional cuisines in about a 15 minute drive). Although she's already decided she doesn't ever want to eat at like 20 of them, and there's still at least 50 she's never tried eating at once.
Meanwhile I once worked at a place that was far enough away from anything that you had to bring food from home for lunch, except on Fridays, when we'd pool money together to make a big delivery order of wings from a pub 15+ minutes away (lunch was a hard 30 minutes, and you'd get in big trouble if you were late, so no time to go get lunch). Same place as that factory, actually. Our current situation feels luxurious compared to that.
They are being overly picky about how they want to spend their time and attention, when there's so many options out there, even cheap or free activities (and even the non-cheap things can at least be saved towards, usually, barring some health reasons that prevent you from doing it in the first place...like it's probably a bad idea for me to go whitewater kayaking at my current fitness level, but if I really wanted to I could lose some weight and build up some muscle and maybe practice doing some kayaking on a calm pond first).
Bored is a normal and necessary experience. Jamming every waking moment with engagement is something I'll never agree with the world on
Boring people don't get bored. frustrated people get bored. Especially in an economy like this.
I had that in my head but I was always horrible with "how to enunciate in text" sorts of phrasing.