Intellectual rigidity is making you boring as fuck
I’m going to say something that sounds rude, but it’s honestly a public service announcement.
I’m going to say something that sounds rude, but it’s honestly a public service announcement.
A lot of people believe they’re “principled” when they’re actually just rigid. And the rigidity is making them boring as fuck.
And I don’t mean boring in the harmless way, like “prefers routine” or “goes to bed early” boring. I mean boring in the spiritually stale way, where talking to them feels like interacting with a pull-string doll from the 90s. You can talk to them for ten minutes and realize you already know what they’re going to say about almost everything. You already know what they think before they even open their mouth. You can predict their reactions like weather.
They call it conviction, or clarity, or say they’re “standing for something.”
But the harsh truth is, most of the time, it’s just a mind that has stopped evolving.
It’s hard to describe how quickly this drains the life out of someone, but you know it when you feel it. The vibe changes because the conversation stops being a shared space where ideas can move around, and it turns into a test where you either agree correctly or get punished socially for being in the wrong camp.
At a certain point, you’re not having a conversation with someone’s curiosity. You’re watching someone protect a worldview they’ve built their entire identity around.
That’s the part most people don’t want to admit: when beliefs become identity, a challenge to the belief feels like a challenge to the self. That’s when a normal discussion starts feeling like a personal threat.
It’s also why rigid people react so intensely to small things. If you casually acknowledge a tradeoff, they hear disloyalty. If you say you’re undecided, they hear weakness. If you refuse to pick a side instantly, they assume you’re hiding something. They don’t treat uncertainty as a normal stage of thinking, they treat it as a character flaw.
The irony, though, is that rigidity isn’t always caused by stupidity. It’s often caused by fear.
Fear of being wrong, because being wrong feels humiliating. Fear of being socially punished, because the internet has turned disagreement into exile. Fear of losing status, because certainty reads as competence even when it’s totally fake. A lot of people would rather be confidently wrong than thoughtfully uncertain, because uncertainty doesn’t get applause. It gets suspicion.
So they pick a team, memorize the team language, and lock it the fuck in. They start living inside their positions like they’re trying to keep warm.
Don’t get me wrong, I get why it happens. The world is loud and chaotic, and information now comes in like a fire hose. It’s comforting to grab a simple framework and use it to interpret everything.
But narrative control isn’t the same as contact with reality.
If you want a real test, watch how someone reacts when something doesn’t fit their worldview. Flexible people get interested. Rigid people get angry. They don’t say “huh, that’s weird.” They say “that can’t be true!” or “that doesn’t matter” or “you’re missing the point”—which is usually code for “I don’t like what this implies.”
Then comes the part that makes them absolutely unbearable: they start talking like a spokesperson for a cause instead of a person with a mind. Everything turns into messaging. Every sentence is an argument. Even their humor gets worse—because humor requires agility, the ability to notice contradictions without having to fix them—and rigidity replaces play with policing. When you meet someone like this, you’re not encountering a living mind, you’re meeting a script wearing a meat suit. There’s no tension, no surprise, no risk. And without risk, there is no style.
You can feel it even in the most apolitical conversation. You make a small joke and they treat it like a legal document, or you say something mildly nuanced and they start scanning for which side you’re on.
At that point, talking to them becomes work.
Rigid people don’t notice that everyone around them starts doing a kind of quiet self-editing. Conversations become guarded, nobody brings up anything messy, everyone talks in safe language, and the whole room gets flatter. Rigid people assume the flattening is proof they’re commanding respect.
Most of the time, it’s proof that people don’t trust them with reality.
So what does the opposite look like?
The most interesting people I know aren’t wishy-washy. They actually tend to have strong opinions, they don’t hedge constantly, and they’re not afraid to say what they think. The difference is that their identity isn’t glued to a single set of conclusions.
They can talk through something without turning it into a debate performance. They can hear an argument they disagree with and still extract something useful from it. They can admit they’re not sure without acting like they’ve been publicly humiliated.
They don’t treat disagreement as evidence of evil. They’ll say someone is wrong, but they don’t need to convert “wrong” into “bad person”—and that alone makes them about a thousand times more pleasant to be around. It also makes them smarter, because when you stop moralizing everything, you can finally start seeing the actual mechanics of what’s happening.
Unfortunately, flexible thinking isn’t a personality trait. It’s a practice. And it has texture.
It looks like pausing before you respond. Not to perform thoughtfulness, but because you’re actually checking whether your first reaction is accurate or just familiar.
It looks like being able to say “I think I’m wrong about this” mid-conversation, without drama, without making it a confession or a crisis. Just a simple course correction.
It looks like noticing when you’re pattern-matching someone into a category instead of actually hearing what they’re saying. Or catching yourself mid-assumption and asking a question instead.
It looks like letting an idea sit for a few days before deciding what you think about it, because not everything needs a verdict in real time.
It looks like being curious about why someone believes something stupid instead of just dismissing them, because you know that understanding the machinery of bad ideas is more useful than performing outrage at them.
It looks like having a few opinions you hold loosely on purpose because you know those areas are still developing and you don’t want to calcify too early.
And maybe most importantly, it looks like being able to laugh at yourself without it threatening your sense of who you are. The flexible mind has enough internal stability that it can absorb a hit, notice an error, update the model, and keep moving—without the whole system going into defense mode!
This isn’t about being moderate or soft or agreeable. It’s about staying in contact with reality instead of defending a story about reality.
The rigid mind asks: How do I protect what I already believe?
The flexible mind asks: What am I not seeing?
One of those questions keeps you safe. The other keeps you alive, and often lets you surprise yourself. And if you can’t surprise yourself, you certainly can’t surprise anyone else (AKA: boring as fuck!
Rigidity feels powerful in the moment because it gives you certainty, or some kind of “role.” It gives you a script.
But it also makes your mind smaller. It makes you less funny. It makes you harder to be around. It shrinks your life down to the size of your conclusions.
If your opinions haven’t changed in a decade, chances are, you aren’t principled—you’re embalmed.
And yes, it makes you boring as fuck. Because the best conversations happen when two people can actually think out loud together, without trying to win, or perform, or treating every topic like it’s some kind of trial.
The world doesn’t need more people who are sure.
It needs more people who can think.
PS: If you enjoyed this piece, I recommend “You’re not stuck, you’re just afraid to change” or “If no one’s told you, you’re allowed to be many things” next.
super ironic how the rigidity is meant to come off as earnest but it reads as anything *but* earnest as you mention here. part of being earnest is asking “dumb” questions and being willing to look unsure. we are human and cannot have everything down to a rehearsed identity or aesthetic. to be messy and not know is incredibly human. thanks for this!