Randomness

I like this quote from Randall Munroe on xkcd:

"In retrospect, it's weird that as a kid I thought completely random outbursts made me seem interesting, given that from an information theory point of view, lexical white noise is just about the opposite of interesting by definition."

He makes a good point, if not for the fact that kids actually do find that kind of random outburst both interesting and hilarious. Within the kid subculture, on some level, the most random person wins.

As adults, we lose a lot of that, but not all. How many people avoid being organised or planning anything in advance, just because they value spontaneity over predictability? We all know that predictable and dependable are synonyms for boring, and nobody wants to be boring, so the person with the least organised life (the college dropout who stumbled into a million-dollar idea, or the hipster girl who changes hairstyles and jobs every few weeks) wins at being interesting. Everyone else who keeps society running, like the dependable electronics engineer, the honest cops and judges, gets shoved to the back as irrelevant when they are actually the fabric on which the "interesting" patterns are drawn.

That doesn't make random outbursts more interesting, though. They're just a less mature, more desperate version of the way a lot of adults live their whole lives.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm pretty much one of the boring ones.
PPS - Most of the time.