The Everyday
📍Mumbai, India (Issue 188)
I just watched a man open his bookshop and prepare for another day he will forget. Tomorrow, will he remember what happened on Friday, 24th May? Just barely. And when next week has come around? Not at all.
I'll also forget soon. After all, what happened in my life last Friday? It's tangible only as a dream is, lost to the torrent of unrecorded history.
Life is awash with days like Friday, 24th May.
People like to explain what they think, but don’t say how they arrived at thinking it. This is especially true of writers because words are an excellent tool for saying nothing. We discuss the concept, not the experience.
I am thinking about this because Cydney Hayes recently wrote:
My least favorite opening sentence that I see all the time (and have myself used versions of in my weakest pieces) is: "I've been thinking about CONCEPT a lot recently." I read that at the outset of some piece, and I'm nowhere. I have nothing to grab onto except CONCEPT. CONCEPT is almost always intangible, so present it to me in a vacuum and it's like serving me heat for dinner.
My hands shook slightly under the weight of that paragraph. I felt seen. I am grimly responsible for the same platitude (browse my back catalogue).
It begs the question, why do people not relate their fascinating insights to their lived experiences?
Just by stalling for a moment, one hundred sweet insights are within reach, each profound and supporting how we think and feel. Yet most of these ordinary moments, when first encountered, seem monotonous and not worth further investigation. Look at the steam rolling off that cup of English Breakfast tea; doesn't it remind us of our grandfather's eternal spirit? Over there is a fork in the peanut butter tub; does it not rather prompt us of the quote, 'perfect is the enemy of progress', forks being better utensil’s than fingers, but worse than a spoon? —why wait for a spoon. Even waiting for my Airbnb host to get out of the shower reinforces that I'm in no hurry to go anywhere; there is only this moment, the eternal now... oh! I’d like to carry on forever.
We stop ourselves from investigating because we feel our experience unimportant. We don't attach our feelings to our experiences because deep down — in our hollow sense of self — we suspect that others will find our experience boring.
Boring! Well, certainly 'normal' has become, through no fault of our own, considered 'boring'. And I agree, who wants to be boring? Worse still, who wants to share details of their dull day? The insecure, me included, fear explaining, 'So, thanks for reading, I caught the bus and got rained on a bit but not much and then was two minutes late for work, but nobody noticed, so it was fine'. Investigated appropriately, this is GOLD, a rich vein of content. But this is far too ordinary for most. Who, we mull, will care about my tedious life? (Poisoned thoughts like this stop us from writing).
Well, it's not tedious if looked at from the correct angle. We already know that nobody's life is Insta-worthy, as we would traditionally consider Insta-worthiness — we just don’t talk about it.
The cruel duplicity of Instagram. When we look at socials, where are those grim, wet October mornings when the only thing extra-special is the putrid smell of slops from J D Wetherspoon's next door? This rich content is self-censored from Instagram; hence, the 'normal' parts of life, the boring bits, disappear. The abnormal and filtered seems commonplace. Ultimately, our lives seem uneventful when we compare them to the highlights of other people’s lives, so we don't share the tiny details. We then leave a vacuum by not uploading the trivial and inconsequential. Into this vacuum, pure Insta-evil pours, selfie-stick out of shot, stomach sucked in, filters applied. The feed is filled with those sharing only the absurd, extraordinary, and eccentric; wild events that are all, somehow, unique.
Can’t everything be unique? Of course not. Instagram is the home of this kind of rot. It's telling that the platform on which it's easiest to apply filters to our lives — so as to appear more 'renegade' and 'retro' — has won. The collective normalisation of the extraordinary soon deteriorates into disingenuity.
Where do we normies go?
In 2024, it's now our responsibility, for our sanity and that of the crowd, to learn to feast on ordinary moments, to revel in those who drive just a bit worse than average, to celebrate when there’s nowhere to park at the supermarket or when there’s a not an especially long queue for the ATM. Please share your parking ticket and your monthly haircut. We must fight off the perverse absence of the typical on social media. Take a picture of your bins if it's bin day. Brushed your teeth? Tweet about it.
Although social media leads us to believe others live non-ordinary lives, far different from our own, everyone survives as drab human animals. The first stage in recovery is to admit we all over-eat, have intercourse too infrequently, sleep not as well as we'd like, spend beyond our means, get made redundant more quickly than we hope, get angry about things that don't matter, forget things which do matter. On average, we are common and embedded in the day-to-day routine of the five-day week, drifting slowly towards retirement.
And that's pretty special! It's amazing, really, and worth writing about. You could write a library about the faults you inherited from your parents, an encyclopaedia about your trivial sleeping routines, or a thesis on the discomfort you feel when you arrive at a party.
It's all noteworthy. The over-passes and the sewers and the backdoors of life carry copious meaning; all are rich with monotonous content! Nothing, absolutely nothing, is more beautiful than a forgetful day unfolding — an overcast, stock morning, just like all others.1
Now, you might say, 'Hector, it's easy to say when you're on holiday! It's raining non-stop in England.' I agree, but I'd like to add that we can often appreciate life's little moments only by getting some distance. I'm reminded of the astronaut James Lovell, who, after looking back at Earth from the ISS, said, "I began to think that, you know, in reality, we often say that I hope to go to heaven when we die. In reality, we go to heaven when we're born."
So beautifully written Hector and gave me much to appreciate in my ordinary day.
With love,
Shenaz