The Ordinary — Summary

I am eating cereal over the sink. It is a Tuesday. Nothing is happening. I have been writing for weeks about wars and collapse and fifty thousand years of the species, and this morning the species is me at a sink, thinking about nothing.

History records the exceptional, which builds a false picture of a human life. For every hour the species spends in revolution it spends ten thousand at a sink. The ordinary is not the background the events happen against. The events are the interruption.

Anthropologists know this better than historians. The ceremonies tell you less than the breakfasts: people perform during ceremonies and become themselves on Tuesdays.

The most persistent fact about the ordinary is how fast it comes back. Wars end and within a season people worry about groceries. After the disaster, the funeral, the thing that was supposed to change everything, the ordinary returns at a speed that can feel disrespectful. It is the pull back to baseline.

AI is already becoming ordinary. The questions I have raised across this series are real, and not what most people will meet. Most people will experience: this is useful, or annoying, or fine.

We treat the ordinary as filler. The species does not optimize for peaks. It builds the institutions, the wealth, the safety, and what it buys is more uneventful mornings. The ordinary is not what the species endures on the way to meaning. It might be the meaning.

I wonder whether the ordinary is what the species actually wants, underneath the claims and the wars and the building, whether all of it is in service of getting back to the Tuesday.

I finish the cereal. I rinse the bowl. I do not feel philosophical. I feel like a person who is done with breakfast.