Commentary

Missing The Mundane

I realize something: I miss the mundane.

Somewhere along the line, mundanity got a bad rap. It became a synonym for boring. But it actually means worldly. It refers to the things you experience when you’re out in the world.

And I miss that -- a lot.

There is a lot of stuff that happens when we’re living our lives that we don’t give enough credit to: Petting a dog being taken for a walk. A little flirting with another human we find attractive. Doing some people-watching while we eat our bagel in a mall’s food court. Random situational humor that plays itself out on the sidewalk in front of us. Discovering that the person cutting your hair is also a Monty Python fan. Snippets of conversation -- either ones we’re participating in, or ones we overhear while we wait for the bus. Running into an old acquaintance. Even being able to smile at a stranger and have them smile back at you.

The mundane is built of all those hundreds of little, inconsequential social exchanges that happen daily in a normal world that we ordinarily wouldn’t give a second thought to.

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And sometimes, serendipitously, we luck upon the holy grail of mundanity -- that random “thing” that makes our day.

These are the things we live for. And now, almost all of these things have been stripped from our lives.

I didn’t realize I missed them because I never assigned any importance to them. If I did a signal-to-noise ratio analysis of my life, all these things would fall in the latter category. Most of the time, I wasn’t even fully aware that they were occurring. But I now realize when you add them all up, they’re actually a big part of what I’m missing the most. And I’ve realized that because I’ve been forced to subtract them -- one by one -- from my life.

I have found that the mundane isn’t boring. It’s the opposite -- the seasoning that adds a little flavor to my day-to-day existence.

For the past 10 months, I thought the problem was that I was missing the big things: travel, visiting loved ones, big social gatherings. And I do miss those things. But those things are the tentpoles – the infrequent, yet consequential things that we tend to hang our happiness on. We failed to realize that in between those tentpoles, there is also the fabric of everyday life that has also been eliminated.

It’s not just that we don’t have them. It’s also that we’ve tried to substitute other things for them. And those other things may be making it worse. Things like social media and way too much time spent looking at the news. Bingeing on Netflix. Forcing ourselves into awkward online Zoom encounters just because it seems like the thing to do. A suddenly developed desire to learn Portuguese, or how to bake sourdough bread.

It’s not that all these things are bad. It’s just that they’re different from what we used to consider normal -- and by doing them, it reinforces the gap that lies between then and now. They add to that gnawing discontent we have with our new forced coping mechanisms.

The mundane has always leavened our lives. But now, we’ve swapped the living of our lives for being entertained -- and whether it’s the news or the new show we’re bingeing, entertainment has to be overplayed. It is nothing but peaks and valleys, with no middle ground. When we actually do the living, rather than the watching, we spend the vast majority of our time in that middle ground -- the mundane, which is our emotional reprieve.

I’ve also noticed my social muscles have atrophied over the past several months due to lack of exercise. It’s been ages since I’ve had to make small talk. Every encounter now -- as infrequent as they are -- seems awkward. Either I’m overeager, like a puppy that’s been left alone in a house all day, or I’m just not in any mood to palaver.  

Finally, it’s these everyday mundane encounters that used to give me anecdotal evidence that not all people were awful. Every day I used to see examples of small kindnesses, unexpected generosity and just plain common courtesy. Yes, there were also counterpoints to all of these, but it almost always netted out to the good. It used to reaffirm my faith in people on a daily basis.

With that source of reaffirmation gone, I have to rely on the news and social media. And -- given what those two things are -- I know I will only see the extremes of human nature. It’s my “angel and asshole” theory : That we all lie on a bell curve somewhere between the two, and our current situation will push us from the center closer to those two extremes. You also know that the news and social media are going to be biased towards the “asshole” end of the spectrum.

There’s a lot to be said for the mundane -- and I have. So I’ll just wrap up with my hope that my life -- and yours -- will become a little more mundane in the not-too-distant future.

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