What If You’re Boring?

Source: What If You’re Boring?, JT Chapman, 11:18, uploaded 2024-03-15, category Other / Unclear, playlist index 1105.

JT Chapman opens with the world at its most spectacular: deserts, ocean depths, exploration, records, new life, and the daily movement from despair to elation. Then the montage stops at an ordinary life. The person watching the video is probably sitting somewhere in the suburbs, measuring a routine against a stream of cities, adventures, accomplished people, and beautiful scenery.

The comparison problem

Chapman treats suburbia as a setting that makes boredom easy to feel. Houses, strip malls, invented historic centres, long car journeys, and paid activities form a routine with few public places to linger. He connects that routine to alienation: distance from other people, meaningful work, and a settled sense of self. The claim is broad and belongs to his social commentary. The video gives no housing, transport, or social research to test it.

The screen adds a second pressure. Films, television, and social media present life as a continuous adventure, although the people who make those images spend most of their time doing ordinary work. A perfect social-media day requires a tripod, discarded takes, late-night editing, and the pressure to upload again tomorrow. The actor admired by an audience may want a doughnut and a quiet afternoon indoors. The influencer sells an idealised version of life, then returns to the small work that keeps the account alive.

Chapman applies the same correction to his own work. He makes political videos about subjects that affect people’s lives, yet his daily life remains close to the one he had when he worked at Best Buy. He lives in the suburbs, drives everywhere, eats at familiar places, and has never visited Yellowstone, the pyramids, or Mount Everest. A job usually supplies food and continuity. It rarely turns a day into an event.

The missing 99 percent

The comparison becomes cruel when an ordinary day meets a selected event. A friend posts a holiday photograph, and the viewer remembers the friend’s bad job and sick parent. A self-help video offers a short lift through polished advice. At a Jiffy Lube, House Hunters International shows a young family moving abroad for a grand adventure. Each image makes the viewer compare the daily 99 percent of life with the small portion people choose to display because it will attract attention.

Chapman includes the work that follows the camera. An influencer removes the decorative pillows before a toddler can ruin the scene. An automotive journalist returns the keys to a Ferrari and spends five hours driving an ordinary Toyota. A family buying a house abroad has to find a translator and work through international tax law. Chapman writes his script from the edge of a guest bed after barricading himself in a room so that his seventeen-month-old daughter will not interrupt him. The glamorous image and the mundane labour belong to the same life.

That labour matters because the public image turns an economic filter into a measure of personal worth. Society gives attention to the exceptional slice because the exceptional slice sells. People then read their own routine as evidence of failure. Chapman says that success can take the form of a life that fits rather than a life that moves quickly, earns a great deal, or crosses the world. Pursuing the visible version of success can leave a person depressed and exhausted.

A quieter life with its own measure

Chapman once imagined that he wanted to travel the world. He discovers that he dislikes the process of getting anywhere enough to prefer one trip every few years and most of his time at home with his family. That arrangement may look mundane from the outside. It gives him the time to be present for his daughter and to make photographs and videos that she can see when she is older. The value sits in the relation, not in its usefulness as a television plot.

He also goes to bed around ten, sometimes earlier, and spends whole days in his pyjamas. These details are small, yet they carry the video’s change in scale. A life needs activities that excite its owner and activities that let the owner recover from work, difficulty, or a boring job. Online approval has trained people to seek validation for the whole flavour of their lives. Chapman asks for a more private measure: choose what matters, then let the rest remain ordinary.

He sees a modest change on YouTube. Younger creators increasingly put down a camera and talk about what they think, what they are living through, and what a normal life looks like for them. Highly produced work still has a place. Ordinary accounts give people another way to recognise themselves, since the viewer can see the part of life that the spectacle leaves out.

The ordinary person behind the interesting video

Chapman considers himself boring by the standards of twenty-first-century Western society. His videos can still interest people, and the contradiction is only apparent once the video has made a false connection between an interesting subject and an interesting life. He is usually a suburban man with a laptop, opinions, and a wish to eat less Chick-fil-A. The camera catches a concentrated part of his attention. The person who steps away from it carries the rest of his life with him.

That distinction gives the conclusion its force. A person can improve, travel, and seek rewarding experiences whilst keeping a life that remains recognisable and calm. Carefully assembled fantasies set an impossible standard because they remove the ordinary time in which people work, wait, recover, care for others, and repeat themselves. Chapman calls that ordinary condition boring. He also calls it healthy.

He ends by returning to the wider field of ordinary life. Each person’s small life joins other small lives: a camera operator records a landscape, a composer writes music that gives the landscape a feeling, a mother raises a child, and a driver lets another car merge in traffic. These examples remain his image of humanity rather than a theory of social value. Their point is that significance can emerge from the way ordinary actions meet. A person can take part in the shared experiment of being human through a life that never resembles a film.

Limits

This is a personal video essay built from observation, examples, and a deliberately broad account of online culture and suburban life. Chapman gives no studies for the claim that more than half of Americans live in suburbs, the description of suburban alienation, or the claim that nearly everyone feels their life is boring. Those statements belong to the video’s diagnosis. The examples of influencers, actors, automotive journalists, House Hunters International, Ian McKellen’s account of working on The Hobbit, and Chapman’s own family life carry the argument as reported scenes and personal testimony.

The video leaves the standard of a good life open. Travel, ambition, and intense experience remain available in its account. It asks what happens when a person treats those visible forms as the measure for every day. Its answer remains personal: a quieter life can be fulfilling when its owner chooses the measure and understands what the routine makes possible.