The Power of the Mundane

Sleep. Wake Up. Rinse Mouth. Brush Teeth. Wash Face. The increments of time between each task is recorded with care and kept in diary-like volumes when I want to acknowledge productivity. This proclivity for documentation oftentimes segued into wasted paper, crumbled, and the frayed binding of notebooks after I had torn out the pages of timelines. Our country’s founding fathers had kept such journals; I had come to learn in history class. Yet this mundaneness was decidedly antiquated, at least in the eyes of my college peers whose time was better spent jet setting across oceans on the weekly. Serendipity was in the nature of their coming and goings and a clean house, groomed body, and completed mentally stored checklists were involuntary and therefore not requiring of attention. My declarations for having to do laundry or purchase paper towels to clean, was a buzz kill and unintentionally sobered them up enough to roll their rose color-reflected eyes.

What explains the Tik Tok phenomenon of less-than-a-minute, minute-to-minute rundowns of a day’s cleaning, cooking, or cuddling? Its’ not just the ASMR visual and audible cues that spawn primordial neuronal activity spikes. Even videos with soundtracks in the background engage the viewer enough to follow these productive people. From Day in The Life, AM and PM routines, to viral concoctions of leftover food into something new – Emily Mariko’s salmon and rice bowl – mundaneness is in. Mundane tasks are the new athleisure wear popularized during the pandemic. They are necessities that have to get done regardless, and in a comfortably doable and accessible manner – at least in highlight reel videos that don’t show the minute-to-minute tedium.

Suddenly, scrubbing a refrigerator seems not only doable, but also effortless. The videos are white lies. These errands do get done and the doer does smile, but the annoying sing-song alarm from the refrigerator that goes off when the doors are kept open too long, are edited out. The catching of one’s breath and dripping sweat is not captured in the snapshots of alluring workout-wear spandex that hugs without strangling, or so we’re made to believe.

ASMR - Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response – gained popularity with every scuffle, shuffle, and scarfing down of any food prepared; These audible cues, combined with visual representations, ignites human centers of thought that associates edible fuel with pleasure and intimacy. These videos are a reflection of one’s self and performing these otherwise solo tasks suddenly seems community-wide. It’s not just the mundaneness of sight and sound that is trending. There is something to be said for the tactile mundane as well.

I attended a last rites service where everyone sat in silence aside from the echoing recitation of prayer when the host of the service came up to me- his face covered by mask as per pandemic regulations- when he placed a heavy flat palm right on top of the light silk scarf wound around my head. I felt the weight of his hand for a longer time than he actually had it lying there, on top of my head. The combination of a gesture of bestowing blessings with a palm, inside a house of worship, during the daytime so that daylight shown through floor-to-ceiling glass windows reflecting white light, and the gauzy ethereal-like fabric that I draped around my body, had all coalesced into a metaphysical feeling of purposeful positivity. Mundaneness, like in this example, is more popular due to its seemingly involuntary effortlessness – and almost millenial-like serendipity.

An involuntary function of a female’s healthy reproductive system is ovulation and menstruation. That she bleeds is of no personal persuasion, though it is dependent on the body receiving adequate fuel and rest. On Christmas Eve, for the first time in eight years, though was no mistaking that I was again having a period – my body is slowly but surely healing from years of duress put on it. It may seem mundane – a natural function of the reproductive system – however the mundaneness created celebratory angst in the heart of my parents and one of my best friends. I remember telling her earlier that day that someone else whose body went through similar mistreatment resulting in loss of period, upon having it returned, celebrated with red velvet cupcakes – symbolic in color.

Mundaneness can be tedious and scarring – like cleaning out a refrigerator or changing bed sheets – but it can also be a non-manmade, completely out of one’s control, happenstance – like menstruation. Mundaneness can be intentional and not tedious as well – the mundaneness of typing for example. The act of conveying language for another’s consumption is done with intent. Take the now outdated Blackberry that concluded its service the first week of January 2022, a decade after it first launched in 2012. The Blackberry exemplified tactical intent in its tactile keyboard that, like ASMR, created clicking sounds upon buttons being pressed down, alerting one of his/her intent actually manifesting.

Mundaneness actually produces exclusivity, including the rise of Blackberry as a premier mode of communication. There is also the exclusivity of certain fruit thanks to the mundaneness of preempting the fruit’s anatomy for consumption. Let’s take the sumo citrus fruit that has reigned supreme as one of the most decadent oranges the world has ever seen. The sumo orange is priced at a premium. In 2022, it is $4.99/pound. Considering the fact that one fruit, its thick skin that is peeled away accounting for most of its weight, can weigh in at about a pound, means that one can easily spend upwards of $15 for two pieces of citrus. However, the mundaneness of peeling away skin is so vital to our peace of mind that the easy-to-peel sumo is worth the prices, sometimes peeled in one shot resulting in a curlicue of skin. Not as astronomically priced are the equally mundane easy-to-peel mandarin citrus fruit. They are marketed as “cuties,” and “halos,” both positive connotative words to describe fruit. So important is the mundaneness of revealing an edible fruit from its exoskeleton that they are considered attractive and angelic.

Mundaneness usually connotes mediocrity or routine. Routine, however, is an increasingly attractive concept. In an age where anticipatory anxiety reigns supreme, knowing what is to come, while mundane, is also a welcome respite from reality. The concept of “binge watching” a series, not having to wait for one episode to come out weekly, underlines this idea of mundaneness in sitting hour after hour to satiate a desire for knowledge and wrangle a cliffhanger off a mountain in one fell swoop. Patience is not trendy here. Patience is the antithesis of being proactive – a quality that is perpetuated by routine. Take circadian rhythms – going to bed and waking up at the same time, day after day, promotes pinnacle performance. Your body knows what to expect. There is a homeostasis –mundaneness that us humans are primed for. It is this primal sensitivity to mundaneness that has risen in popularity.

Mundaneness is also primarily a solitary concept. Showering one’s back – that hard-to-reach crux between and just below the shoulder blades, for example, is mundane but not futile. According to Livestrong fitness coverage, reaching unto this space increases shoulder motility and mobility. It’s like eating – a primarily solitary concept, social setting aside – that is also a mundane task in its necessity. Still, one’s eating is increasingly utilized for purposes of mindfulness. My uncle had explained the idea of savoring; relishing a final moment of eating to stave off what he believes may be extraneous eating or past a time-lapsed fullness. He would make sure to engage with the last bite of food on his tongue and leave it housed in his mouth, activating the salivary glands before finally letting it be swallowed into oblivion as if to stave off hunger in the sheer appreciation of a moment cherished in time.

It is no wonder that Emily Mariko and other Tik Tokers cataloging their comings and goings, reactions, and sheer living out Pascal’s hierarchy of needs are so astonishingly attractive. We seek solace in others playing out what we are or should be doing on a grand scale. It feels nice to have your life play out as a film reel where there is an audience validating the importance of your sense of self. It’s that feeling of recognition for having done what is and isn’t effortless that gives one purpose. Mundaneness is not a lack of productivity and is instead the opposite. It gives us life.