Going Dull

Being interesting is a burden. Is there relief in choosing to be bland?

- Katy Schneider

OVER THE SUMMER, EVERYONE I know went to Greece. From Greece, everyone I know posted one picture: octopus suspended on a clothesline, hanging against the Aegean Sea. The picture was a picture of an octopus (suspended on a clothesline, hanging against the Aegean Sea), but it was also a subtle message that the person behind the camera was (1) traveling, (2) traveling to Greece, the summer-vacation spot of 2024, and not Puglia, the summer-vacation spot of 2023, and (3) not taking a selfie, but (4) you know, not just taking a picture of the Aegean Sea, which would be basic, unlike this one, which (5) managed a sort of high-low effect, given the octopus was dead and clipped to a clothesline. It would have been the perfect picture of an interesting summer, except everyone else was taking it too, stuck replicating one another in an effort to be perfectly interesting.

In the fall, I stumbled upon what seemed a sort of antidote to the images I'd been watching come out of Europe (the octopus, yes, but also several videos of infirm stray cats mewling around a foot, planted on a whitewashed Cycladic street): the Dull Men's Club, which I first spotted on Facebook. Some scrolling revealed that the group was exactly as the name would lead you to believe. It was a club for Dull Men to gather and wantonly discuss the unsexy details of their lives; to share photos of lentil soup and mowed lawns and to report mundane observations such as, "Having recently purchased a new kettle and fully read the instructions manual, I am starting to wonder if I'll get much use out of it." In the page's "About" section, I found some governing rules.

The group was not for those who wanted to discuss ambitions, it was not a place for those afflicted with "more-itis," and it was not a place to discuss trends. Members were to be referred to as dullsters, not dullards-they're boring, not stupid. It had 1.3 million members.