Recently read this post on Ferrett Steinmetz’s blog about how every piece of advice can, potentially, land in exactly the wrong ears. And that led me to think about what the wrong ears would be for some of my recent advice on making friends and socializing. And I realized who it was: loud, boring people.

There are two kinds of socially awkward people. The first are the ones who are too painfully shy to talk to anyone. The second are the ones who are so bad at reading social cues that they blunder around and say the wrong thing and talk too much and tend to bore people. These two types of people are, in my opinion, oftentimes more similar than they are different. Prolonged social anxiety often results in trouble with reading social cues. Either people are so inwardly-focused that they’re not paying attention to the signals others are giving out; or their anxiety is so out of control that they monitor every micro-expression and infer emotions that aren’t there.

In general, I have a soft spot in my heart for loud, boring people. For one thing, I sometimes am a loud, boring person. I like to think that I am, at the very least, able to eject from a conversation once I’ve started boring the other person, but boringness happens. If you’re going to interact with people, sometimes you are going to rub them the wrong way. I, personally, think it’s better to be loud and boring than it is to be shy and silent, because loud, boring people are at least having so many contacts with other people that they’re bound to get a few positive ones in there.

However, it’s obviously not optimal to be loud and boring. And loud boringness is something that a person should work on, if they suffer from it. Some people might think that the solution to being loud and boring is to become interesting, but I don’t know about that. I think the problem with loud and boring people is that they think they are interesting. Alot of boringness arises, paradoxically, from a desire to not be boring. A person is so afraid of being boring that they’ll always drag the conversation back to things they know they can talk about: their own experiences and their own interests and their own feelings.

And I think the solution to loud boringness is to stop trying so hard. Just relax. Allow people to talk about what they want. Quietness does not equal boringness. Allow the other person to talk. Allow the conversation to proceed down strange paths and touch upon things that you don’t care about. Try to sense what they want to talk about and do something engage with that. Dare to let things sputter out. The conversation might go stale, but at least they won’t come away with the impression that you are obnoxious.

Basically, my solution to loud boringness is not to be more interesting, it’s to be less loud.

However, because I used to be pretty shy and because I know so many shy people, most of my conversational advice is about how to be more loud. Which, if you’re a loud, boring person, is probably the last thing you need to hear.