5 Things You Love to Discuss That Nobody Else Cares About

Everyone is beautiful and special and amazing, and all of our stories are unique and inspiring and we all have a lot to offer one another.

But seriously, shut the hell up about the following topics.

In Your Mind

You just had a dream and it rocked your world. It shook you so much that you wrote it down as soon as you woke up, because you had to remember this one. You think about how real it was, and how it felt like years had gone by within the dream when it was only minutes. You look back on some symbols and key phrases from the dream and wonder what they meant, and how you can apply dream lessons to real life. You know, on some level, that dreams are meaningless, but still you think, This dream wasn't like other dreams; this was important.

In Everyone Else's Mind

No it wasn't.

There is no greater gap than the one between how fascinating dreams are to the dreamer and how fascinating they are to literally anyone else in the world. Dennis from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia probably put it best: "Listening to people's dreams ... is like flipping through a stack of photographs; if I'm not in any of them and nobody is having sex, I just don't care."

It's just impossible to get excited about someone else's dream. Unfortunately, having an interesting dream makes it impossible for the dreamer to talk about anything else, so they have to tell you all about it, beat for pointless beat. They want you to be just as moved, they want you to question what it all means like they do, but the second that it's not your dream that's being discussed, you completely lose the ability to consider dreams as anything but meaningless bullshit. How is someone supposed to get excited about a made up story that happened to someone else while they slept and will have no impact on the real world in any way?

When it's your dream, of course it means something and serves as gateway into your unconscious mind, but your coworker's dream? That's just the brain's way of trying to explain the random firing of neurons that occurs while a person sleeps, it's pointless and in no way weighs on the real world.

Unless, you know, people were boning. Then, sure, I've got five minutes to hear about this.

In Your Mind

You might forget the name of the attending nurse who was present at your first child's birth, and maybe you don't recall what color pants you were wearing the day you proposed to your wife -- but you will never remember anything with as much clarity as you have reserved for that one game of poker where you almost won big. It doesn't matter if it was in the final round of the World Poker Showdown, or in the basement of your buddy's house; in your mind, the stakes are exactly the same in both scenarios. In every "Amazing Hand of Poker" story, two things are invariably true: You played your hand like a skilled, well-trained poker mercenary, and your opponent stumbled into a golden hand because he's a stupid, lucky shithead. You remember exactly every card that was dealt, you remember what was going through your head and you remember the clever, little bluffs you pulled. It was an incredibly tense hand, and the way you tell the story makes it sound like something out of a movie, and you'll carry it with you forever.

In Everyone Else's Mind

Please stop carrying it with you forever.

If you play poker, you undoubtedly have "that hand," the ultimate hand of poker where you almost won huge (where "huge" is relative to the game being played), the details of which you remember with such unbelievable clarity that you can tell someone exactly how the hand played out right down to the suit of each card that was dealt. Also, if you play poker, you lack the self-awareness to realize that no one gives a shit about your poker story.

The biggest problem is that no one can just say, "I was close to winning this one big pot, but then I ended up losing." They have to tell you this incredibly detailed and embellished epic story, even though the conclusion ("I did not win") is exactly the same in either case. And once you get one poker player going, every single player in your circle has to chime in with their own version of the "I was playing poker and an event that in retrospect isn't all that interesting and is in fact fairly commonplace occurred" poker story.

In Your Mind

You cannot believe how amazingly, outstandingly, black-outingly drunk you got last night. You don't know if there's a way to measure drunkenness on a global/historical scale, but you seriously wonder if maybe you set a record. You drank more than you ever have in the past, probably more than anyone has, and you woke up in a strange place with a bunch of scrapes and bruises, and maybe even a tattoo. That's got to be at least as impressive as being really good at a sport, right?

In Everyone Else's Mind

Nope.

There's a thin line here, because drunk people do hilarious things. Some of the best anecdotes of all time have started with "So my buddy bet that I couldn't drink a fishbowl full of whiskey, and also one goldfish ..." and end with "... one count of public urination and what might end up being either attempted murder or an additional count of public urination, depending on how cool the jury is." Alcohol makes people do terrible, wonderful, awful, amazing things. The only problem is that drunk people rarely remember the hilarious parts. When they tell you about their latest crazy night out, they might have some details confused, they could be forgetting where they went and maybe they don't remember exactly how they got home, but there is one thing for which their memory will be impossibly sharp: what specifically they drank and when they drank it. They will tell you every shot they downed, every beer they chugged, every leftover cocktail they stole off someone else's table -- everything ... except all of the interesting parts of a drunken night out.

And that's why the drunk story is so boring. The teller is so bent on making sure you, as the listener, are impressed by their supernatural ability to pound back an inconceivable amount of liquor, that they forget to focus on anything other than what they had and how much might still be slushing around in their system.

Also, they went out drinking and had an awesome time without you? Fucked up, man. That's like showing off pictures of your Disneyland trip to the children you left with the babysitter. Oh, hey, speaking of children ...