Were We Always This Boring?
Or did the inclination to share every detail of our lives on the internet make us so?
Note: My sincerest apologies for the lag in newsletters lately. I’ve been traveling to and throughout Ohio for pre-holiday family visits, and I also recently got sick, which has been SUPER FUN. I’m catching up on things now. As I write and post furiously in the next few days, I wanted to take a moment to thank you for being a subscriber. Your readership means everything to me!
Here’s a thing I’ve noticed recently: Our collective ability to tell an interesting story has been declining at a troubling rate. In the past couple of months, I’ve been subjected to multiple detailed descriptions of recipes I will never make, winding retellings of events that fail to answer the question I initially asked, and tales that seem to come out of left field without warning and little to tie them to the prevailing discussion.
It’s a conversational jungle out there, friends! Much like asking better questions and giving better compliments, we’ve got to do, well, better. We’re all boring each other. It’s untenable. Now, I know I sound pretty judgmental, and you’re probably wondering who died and made me the storytelling police, but it’s really more of a self-appointed title, and I actually have a ton of qualifying experience. Allow me to explain.
Have I ever told a boring anecdote? Of course. Probably a lot of them over the years. But I’ve also spent an inordinate amount of time improving my storytelling skills. One of the things you probably don’t know about me is that I’ve written approximately 857 million articles about farming, most of which focus on agricultural robotics and other autonomous farming technologies.
This is important to note for a number of reasons. One is that nearly every one of these stories focuses on describing a technology that is trying to help alleviate a common pain point within the farming industry, of which there are essentially five: labor shortages, increasing costs (from labor, chemical inputs, regulations, etc.), sustainability/environmental issues, decreasing profit margins and the impending doom that is an overpopulated planet without sufficient food. Because agricultural robotics and their agtech brethren all seek to solve the same five issues, making each story unique is a serious challenge.
Another challenge in trying to maintain reader interest in these stories is that varying word choice can feel impossible. There aren’t a lot of synonyms for the word “technology.” You can sometimes use “innovation” or “solution.” You might even be able to get away with being vaguer or more specific by using “system,” “software,” “hardware,” “chip,” “LIDAR” or “processor.” But being able to write a story that won’t feel monotonous requires copy that flows. Using the word “technology” over and over again isn’t going to get the job done.
All this is to say that I’ve had to get creative in how I tell stories, which is why I am qualified to be the self-appointed storytelling police, and although writing interesting stories is very different from telling them to your friends, family, loved ones and complete strangers, I will, nevertheless, shamelessly share my advice for how not to bore everyone in your immediate vicinity with verbal nonsense.
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