On being boring

I.

Eleven months ago, I started my PhD. It has been a good experience so far, I am learning a lot, I like my coworkers and I believe there is at least a small chance that my research is going to benefit someone at some point in the future. Besides the PhD, my life is also going quite well, I am working out a lot and still manage to spend some time with friends and family almost every week. Still, there is one aspect of my life that I am not content with, namely, that I have become boring.

II.

What does it feel like to be boring? It is not that I am bored, quite the opposite. Every day, I spend many hours thinking about complicated and sometimes important problems for which there are no solutions yet. I don't feel intellectually understimulated, quite the opposite. Still, often I feel that I have nothing to talk about. My research interests are not very palatable to the general public and, because I have dug myself in quite deeply in my academic niche, explaining it to someone in detail would require a week-long seminar and probably a few diagrams.

III.
How did this happen? Like most tragedies, it started with good intentions.
In the past, my main intellectual interests (besides my studies) were reading, Effective Altruism and going to interesting events. Sometimes I wrote about this in my blog afterwards. Then, the PhD started. You see, a PhD is a black hole. It will happily absorb every scrap of time and energy you're willing to feed it, and then some. And when you're faced with the choice between spending two hours on work that might lead to a publication (the academic equivalent of water in the desert) or writing a blog post about an obscure book that will likely only be read by some weird dudes in Berlin and maybe three bots, well... the choice seems obvious.

IV.

But this choice, repeated day after day, has consequences. Consequences that are harder to measure than publication counts, but no less real.
First, there's the social impact. I've become that person who, when asked about weekend plans, mumbles something vague because the honest answer is "I'll be sitting at my PC, trying to figure out which enchantments I have to shout to CUDA to make it start working with a new library."
Second, and perhaps more concerning, is the intellectual impact. Once upon a time, I grappled with the big questions of life. I debated ethics, pondered existence, wrested with the nature of consciousness. Now? Now, I debate the merits of different statistical methods and ponder whether I'll ever get the code I took from this random GitHub repository to work.

V.

What can I do about this? As with most of my problems, I believe this one can be solved by self-love and not being too hard on myself having a strict contract with myself and implementing a punitive system for non-compliance. So here are the rules for the next month (also added to My productivity plan for July to September).

Will this work? Who knows? But its a start. And if nothing else, it'll give me something to talk about at parties.