Upon a box containing some fancy collagen supplement stuff, it said: “Life is too short for hard-to-swallow pills and boring powders.” Ain’t that the truth? How many times have I contemplated swallowing a paracetamol tablet, or wearily stirred some Andrews liver salts into water, and wailed in desperation that life is just too damn short for such chores? Never, obviously.
In a similar vein, do you have an electric vehicle charger at home? Are you, you know, a bit bored with it? I mean, why wouldn’t you be? Worry not. Help is at hand. A company specialising in more exciting chargers – colour and finish combinations to choose from!” – invites you to “say goodbye to boring chargers”. Picture the scene: the whole family, dog and all, gathered together on the drive to bid farewell to the old charger. It charged very nicely but was just too darned boring. The man from Fancy Chargers Ltd has just fitted an exciting new one and he’s taking the boring old one away. You wave it off on its final journey, to landfill probably. Emotional.
Most of me despairs at the sheer fatuousness. On the other hand, you’ve got to grudgingly admire the ingenuity or shameless cheek of taking a commoditised product and trying to sell it as an object of desire. Hunter Boots (originally the North British Rubber Company) had been going for well over a century before its wellies suddenly became fashion essentials. Joseph Joseph has pulled off something similar with kitchenware. Respect, I suppose. No harm done.
But in other ways, the abhorrence of the boring is at the root of a whole lot of bad stuff. From before the South Sea bubble of the early 18th century, the catnip of big investment returns has driven us wild with desire and into many a financial crisis. If only we stuck to boring investments in boring companies promising boringly modest but steady returns. But no – just too boring. I was talking to a former banker about the 2008 financial crisis. “Hands up,” he said. “It was us driving the car when it crashed, but there were plenty of people in the back seat egging us on to go faster and faster.”
The older I get, the more I think the secret of happiness is the ability to embrace the boring, lay claim to the mundane and rejoice in repetition. In affairs of the heart and the wallet, in relationships and family life, and the workplace too, we’d enjoy more lasting success if we stopped being bored by the boring, stopped seeking what we tell ourselves is the next exciting thing. After all, everything gets boring in the end if you let it.
I once went to a mass on a Monday night in a massive church on the Bury New Road in Manchester. There were but six of us in attendance, plus the priest who gave a short but brilliant sermon. Afterwards, modestly fielding my compliments, he told me he had been ordained almost exactly 40 years to the day. “I treat every mass as if it is my first or my last,” he said. Yes, I thought, that’s the secret. On the bus home, for some reason Mick Jagger came to mind. I’m not a massive Stones fan but I thought of how many thousand times he’d performed Satisfaction or Sympathy for the Devil. And each time, he does it as though it’s the first or last time.
I thought of all the radio and television programmes I’ve grumped my way through, having dared to have got a bit bored with it all. And how many times I’ve lamented the drudgery of changing nappies, combing out nits, watching the Tweenies over and again, driving the kids around and so on. I so wish that I’d been more Mick, or more priest, and treated everything like it was the first or the last time I was doing it.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
