> Personally I think that every single person on earth is both the dullest person you have ever met and the most interesting person on earth, it just depends on your perspective.

You are most certainly right, but I don’t think that this is in contradiction with how the Club works. Everyone is dull and interesting depending on the situation and the audience. The Club is for when you found or saw something interesting and important to you, but your audience disagree, does not notice, or does not care.

Nobody is fundamentally dull, but everybody is being dull at some point.

I don't know why this perspective bothers me so much, but it does. This idea that people are alternatively dull or interesting feels wrong to me, on a kind of visceral level. So far so that I'm having trouble marshaling my thoughts enough that I can tell you why. It's like there's an intuition gap so large I'm getting vertigo. Nothing here is intended to say that the way you feel about it is invalid, but I need to write out my own feelings in order to put my brain's feet back on solid ground.

It feels entirely backwards to me that there is some kind of dull/exciting switch that flips and a person becomes dull or exciting, depending on whether the observer finds the topic the person is speaking about interesting. The one at fault (such that there is any) for the lack of interest isn't usually the speaker, surely?

I have a friend who works in a field that most people absolutely find completely uninteresting (and, to be frank, I am also uninterested in the field in general), but when we sit and have a pint after work and have a chat, I can't help but be engaged because there is more to learn about everything, and while the technical minutiae of his trade is unexciting, the conversation is not. I know more about turbidity now than I ever expected or needed to, but I don't feel like it was time wasted.

Swap me out for an analog of your wife, and the guy flips from interesting to dull? That seems unfair, for some reason, not that fairness should really ever into it. Just because an interest isn't shared doesn't mean it should be derided as dull, right?

And, y'know, conversely, I know a dull guy. Like, I like to think I'm a good conversationalist. I can hold my own in a chat with basically anyone. But this guy. He sink-holes literally anything you try to say. One word answers. You can drag out the most maniacal story of the past few years of your life, a story that every single person you've ever talked to about it has been engaged and you get a good back and forth and a bit of patter, but this guy: "Oh, cool". And he's like that with everyone. Play word association, you say salt, I say pepper, you say this guy's name, I say dull. All of this seems really mean, but I'm pretty sure he's happy being that guy. I mean who knows what his actual inner thoughts about the matter might be, because you'll never get him to say anything worth listening to about it.

And this, I think, is probably the crux of why I'm so not on board with the way you see it. My friend and my boring friend are not the same, vis-a-vis in a dullness competition. They're not even in the same weight class.

Anyway. Perspectives. Weird, huh?