I'll not be overly impertinent but if you're a bore and a wealthy man, you're still a bore aren't you. Is this a damning indictment? Everything boils down to your conversation doesn't it. Your words. Words are your biggest shortcoming surely? And none of you seem to be working at the problem.
Do you women find a man frankly dull after you've lived with him for a number of years? You might stay with him (increasingly you don't I see) but it's for a number of pragmatic feminine reasons rather than for his entertaining company isn't it. And for your part do you men, being honest now, also find your woman deeply dull company but perhaps stay for pragmatic masculine reasons?
Dull words trotting confidently from a dull mind, perhaps a mind absorbed only in dealing with functional problems, or (the lucky ones) a mind that does in fact 'achieve'? There's nothing wrong with achievements of course. Far from it. But it is not enough surely? You cannot shine with achievements when the others want to be entertained by you: all you can do is tell all about them. And that stuff is boring isn't it.
I'm not missing something here am I? Most conversation is functional talk isn't it? "Did you manage to . . .? When shall we . . .? Oh that's a nice . . ." I'm sure it is nice, whatever it is, but doesn't most conversation consist of you dull people, who don't actually seem dull until it's thought about, exchanging information, making arrangements, controlling children and all the rest of it? And though a little functional talk is obviously essential, surely you need to be under no illusions about functional talk - it is the worthless tat that sooner or later is going to bore those you might wish to keep? And the trouble is - you people who do leave, are (usually) so terribly polite aren't you. You don't want to blurt out that something perceived as being 'part of who you are' (in fact it's not - it's learned) is, well, not good enough. You rarely fess up. But isn't boredom always in the mix?
Help me tease this out. Surely you must do one of two things? You need to either entertain others; or you need to interest them don't you?
A number of you can genuinely entertain others. Your words are minutes-long holidays in the week aren't they. Having an interesting mind, however, is much much rarer. Not least because of the way you conflate an interesting mind with the interesting facts that the mind speaks. Put more concretely - you who learn esoteric facts and simply pass them on in conversation upon the right cues, do not have an interesting mind do you, although it could appear to be so at first glance.
Can I use the Games at the Roman amphitheatre to illustrate things? If you're a bore you might (you usually don't of course) tell me interesting facts - how, perhaps, the gladiators believed that sunlight toughened-up muscles; or that the youngest gladiators were usually 17 years old. But of course those facts don't reveal an interesting mind. They merely indicate a collector don't they. If you've an interesting mind you might take me by the conversational hand and lead me down a way that I would never usually discover, not even in the riveting book of facts. You might get me to wonder what on earth happened after the Romans left. Eight centuries on, what would an abandoned amphitheatre in a half-deserted town in a corner of Cisalpine Gaul mean to the illiterate farming folk who now inhabited the country? What did they imagine it had been for?
Interesting facts and interesting minds - two separate things then. That leaves us with what you who can entertain might say about the Roman Games. Well if you are the old cartoonist from Punch magazine, I already know what you would say don't I. You would tell me of the little boy who came home from the Games and beamed up at his mum and told her all about them: "And yes, and there was lots of fights, and lots of blood, and there was one poor tiger who hadn't got a Christian."
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