The value of mundane

Saturday the 26th of September, sunny, strong breeze and high tide (no beach). Having your main subject completely covered by water certainly limits what you can photograph. Left with a concrete sea wall and a few seagulls, there was an element of me then and now that feels and felt a little frustrated. I drove for an hour and there is simply nothing to see.

This is of course the point of this project and this post highlights the purpose or intention of this. How do we still find beauty and interest in something that is so familiar to us, and becomes potentially boring and repetitive? How do we understand that not every event has to be an event, and how can we live with the mundane?

After spending the usual one hour at the beach, I had taken about 70% fewer pictures than normal and sat on the sea defence contemplating, the emotion of not having anything super exciting committed to film. Then it dawned on me, that clearly and as time goes on, there is going to be less interest and excitement in coming to this single spot, and like our lives, it is not always going to be exciting and new. Sometimes it is just going to be a little dull.

That is of course how we are conditioned not to live in the 21st century. "Always on" "always excited" consistently "achieving" always "surpassing the last activity". I had a conversation with my American Sales colleagues at a recent event in Spain. "You just don't spend enough money on events Pete, you need to live as we do, every event has to be bigger, better more exciting than the last one". This was said as we sat in the garden of their $ 800-a-night hotel, and they sipped a glass of wine from a $500 bottle they had just purchased on expenses.

Social media, news apps, and a world where we live for the next alert sounding on our phones are creating a culture of excitement and turning us into dopamine junkies. We need now to see our politicians fight on a TV debate or be voyeurs of climate change events. ripping through a far-off part of the world, or in recent months the war in the Ukraine and the energy crisis. Why do the leaders of our countries have now got to have TV debates where each one ramps us from the last, more akin to a Cage Fighting pay per view box office experience than a discussion on what the people of our country need.

We need everything to be more catastrophic than the last time, and we are addicted to this way of living.

We have forgotten about the beauty of mundaneness, and the charm of not much going on. If we find ourselves in a place where we are not planning our next big holiday, or major purchase, or gossiping about the recent marital breakdown of our friends relationship we get irritable, and that is because we now need to manufacture the dopamine, adrenaline rush we have come to expect for the modern "always on" world.

We as a species cannot go on like this, and we are now beginning to see the result of living in this way is burning us out. Both individually, as a culture and as a planet.

So here is my point.......Let's see reversal of economic growth as a good thing, and a great thing for our planet. Let's see the news as dull addition that ruins the evening entertainment schedule, let's turn ourselves off, let's find the value in the mundane.