I’ve got big plans for my day off— Lord, I’m gonna set my life in order.

People get obsessed with the idea of organizing the events of their lives or the summary of their musings into a cohesive narrative—if they finally had the free time and the peaceful setting in which to do it, they would write “their book”.

Is the typical human life interesting, or not?

Obviously, some human lives are interesting. Look at celebrities, royals, explorers and spies. Surely their lives must be interesting. Does this mean that they experience less boredom? or none at all?

At least in the hands of a gifted storyteller, can’t even the most unremarkable life appear as quite interesting? For even the most limited life is colored with such an immense flood of sensory and psychic data, and even the simplest mind is an engine of unimaginable complexity. Haven’t some of the relatively recent novelists demonstrated to us experimentally that the most mundane humanity is fertile enough to yield an epic? Perhaps.