I can’t imagine anything less interesting to me than something interesting.
After the last two-and-a-half years of pandemic and political insanity, the last thing I need is stimulation of any kind. I’d rather be pleasantly numbed. My mind-altering substance of choice is YouTube.
I think there are a lot of people who share my desire for a few precious, placid moments. One of my favorite YouTube channels is called, appropriately enough, The Boring Channel. If it was any more boring, it would be test patterns. But, and here’s the thing, it is irresistibly boring. You can’t stop watching it.
The host is a good-humored and kind-hearted lawn care expert. In each video, he shows up at a house with a massively overgrown lawn and proceeds to mow it. But that’s not all, not by any means. He also edges the walks.
Who could possibly watch an hour of something like that? Well, lots of us. Each video has thousands of views. One has 10 million!
So I sit and watch as a neglected-looking yard is returned to something close to its former glory. The host skips no step, even though he’s doing it for free. By the time he leaves, he’s taken the same care and shown the same attention to detail the White House lawn receives before the Easter Egg roll.
I wonder where he got the idea to do this? “I’m going to post videos of me cutting grass” does not seem to pop out as a particularly good idea, at least to me. Where are the superheroes? Explosions? Spoiled rich folks yelling at each other? Maybe he sensed that nowadays that kind of exciting is getting a little boring.
Still, every episode does have the “hero’s journey,” maybe the oldest plot ever. Hero shows up, battles the bad guys (grass, weeds, entropy) and restores balance to the universe (suburban block). It’s exactly like The Odyssey, had Odysseus traveled home from the Trojan War on a riding mower and then power washed the palace sidewalks.
I’m half inspired to start my own channel. I could film our Roomba on its route around the living room. This might be even more dull, and thus more popular, than lawn care. At the end, I would empty the filter compartment, so each video would have a satisfying conclusion. The comments section would be boring too, like, “Gee, look at all that dog hair. Labradoodle?” A comment like that could get dozens of likes, because the viewers will have found the boring they were looking for. Quality boring. Exceptional boring. Boring that never gets boring.
Or I could just sit on the couch and watch more YouTube. There is also a channel I like of a guy in the deep woods silently carving wooden spoons. It doesn’t get any better—that is, duller—than that.