I’m fed up with the world. War and misery everywhere, everyone wants more and more, and the climate was already about to explode.
Entrez the boring man. The boring man does not participate in this. That’s because the boring man hardly participates in anything. He is averse to trends and things that you have to be part of. He prefers to take a nap or do his hobby. Such as collecting stickers or watching grass grow, but it can also be wilder, such as following brown tourist signs or decorating holes in the road with rubber ducks.
The dull man is not ashamed of his dullness. In fact, 1.3 million boring men have gathered in two exploding Dull Men’s Clubs on Facebook, some of them women. A proposal from the men to call it ‘Dull Person’s Club’ was rejected by the women at both clubs – it’s something to be a boring man.
Eating pudding, posting wittily
Just a post: “Yesterday the wife and I had dinner at the local pub with some kids. There was a robot attendant. We briefly discussed how everything is changing. I had the burger with fries and pudding. I ate all of my pudding, and some of everyone else’s pudding too.” Whether the boring man is really boring remains to be seen. In any case, he does his or her best on Facebook to be as original and witty as possible: cutting the loose pizza piece from the image on the box only to discover (“My suspicion was correct!”) that it does not fit in with the rest of the the pizza photo, a post about a “very boring line”, but at the super fast one bullet train in Kawasaki, or a photo where the female spider is missing due to ‘camera shyness’, but “otherwise a nice couple, apparently web designers.” The largest club now has around a million members and fourteen moderators who strictly moderate the daily tsunami of posts: the content must be original, questions cannot be Googled and, last but not least, every poll must have the answer option “Africa, by Toto” to have. The tone is always polite and conversational – a digital shelter from the hate on the internet.
Digital haven
Behind the oldest club – a quarter of a million members – is the American Grover Click, alias of the retired lawyer Lee ‘Loophole’ Carlson. He lived in New York in the 1980s, and founded the Dull Men’s Club as a refuge that had no need for the hip, active clubs and glamor of New York. “My friends and I preferred to do things like sit on park benches or call around to see if the weather forecast had come true. We don’t know ‘more-itis: we drive Ford instead of Caddillac and prefer to fly Economy: we think the food is better there.” Click’s club is broader than Facebook. There are local clubs and events, and on the ‘old school’ website you will find ‘safe excitement’, such as the virtual barf bag museum, the Dull Person of the Year election and you can order a boredom certificate or the annual calendar with ‘quirky passions’. Like (really) watching paint dry, collecting cycling jerseys or knitting hats for mailboxes. For Click, the hobby is the cornerstone of the boring man: “happiness is the byproduct of being absorbed in your hobby, away from misery and politics.” Interesting detail: In the 1960s, Click once attended classes with Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived a concentration camp and developed a method for finding the meaning of life under all circumstances. Alan Cambre, founder of the younger club, believes, like Click, that the growing popularity of the boring man can be explained by the increasing misery in the world. Both younger and older members (‘dullsters’) need a friendly, boring refuge. World domination of the boring man, with his lack of wanting more and more, could in principle save us and the climate too. But the club is not a movement, according to the site. “We are boring,” said Click: “And we will keep it that way.”