things i find boring

My headphones are in a really dire situation. They’re wireless and so when I lost one of the pairs a few months ago I tried to manage with just the right piece. I’m constantly scared that taking the subway everyday, with its loud noises, is going to render me deaf eventually, so I really value the noise canceling; riding the subway with just the right headphone was a game of angling the right side of my head towards the sounds. Since then, the situation has deteriorated further and my remaining headphone piece is now broken, which makes my subway daily commutes completely headphoneless. This is quite boring, to say the least. No more podcasts, no more music, no more isolating myself in a bubble of noise canceling. I’m usually an avid people watcher — at least in public situations where that’s not awkward — but that’s not something you can do on a subway. If you happen to make awkward eye contact with someone its not like you just walk past each other, you’re going to have to sit right across from them for a decent while.

I feel like my writing is pretty boring. Rather, to be specific, my writing is boring to those who don’t get excited by the same sorts of econ questions or coding projects as I do which I’ve discovered — now that I have left CMU — is a far smaller population than I previously thought. I’ve done this blog more so for myself, and as an outlet to put some of the econ thoughts in my head on paper so I don’t particularly care if what I write is the most engaging thing on the planet or not but the other day but the other day a friend (and fellow blog reader), showed me another blog post that captured me so much even though it had nothing to do with anything that I’m usually interested with. I’ve also been reading a handful of other economists’ blogs and I’ve come to the conclusion that even beyond being a good, economist I want to also be a good communicator. So now I am inspired to focus on not only what I am saying but also how I am saying it.

That being said, there is no way I could close off a post without talking about something econ-related. Something that is so pervasive of an issue in macro economics is solving macro models where the state space (the matrix of basic information about the world that the model has to keep track of) is large. In short, it’s quite difficult to build interestingly nuanced models because we are always limited by this fact. I personally find this to be such a boring issue; it’s not an issue of writing a better defined model or one of finding some new mechanism but just that there are too many things to keep track of. The research into finding ways to solve these large dimensional state space systems does seem interesting but the problem itself seems so blunt and dull.

Regardless, I actually strongly believe that regularly being bored for bouts of time throughout the week really draws out one’s creativity. I’m not anti-technology, but I do believe that the creative part of people’s minds is something that is less exercised nowadays given the trend of constant stimulus and content aimed at short attention spans. That being said, I don’t think that sitting in one place and mindlessly staring into the sky is exercising this creative muscle (there is a different time and place for meditative practice), but to properly exercise, one has to actively put themselves in a scenario with little stimulus and start imagining what they want. The reason why I started this blog was because I wanted a place to formalize all those random subway thoughts that come to mind when I’m sitting there bored out of my mind. One distinction that I did want to make before I close is the difference between being bored and doing something that is boring. Although doing something boring may indeed be important, I don’t think this is actively beneficial for flexing those creativity muscles.

This post was a little bit different from the others I’ve done so far just thematically. I’ve never thought of myself as a writer per se and still don’t, but I think it is a skill that I want to actively work on going into the future, so you may see many different types of posts to come.