The ambiguity of everyday experience: Between normality and boredom

Abstract

This paper asserts that the growing expansion of the micro realm of social activity calls for the exploration of everyday experience, seen as ranging from the most extraordinary to the most ordinary. The paper focuses on two constitutive features of the ordinary type of experience, namely, normality and boredom. It conceptualizes normality as an outcome of people’s potential to construct meaning of their ordinary experiences and boredom as a state signaling our inability to realize this desire. Both types of ordinary experience are in the core of everyday life and thus their consequences can be detrimental to the quality of social life. This paper’s discussion of normality and boredom includes both sociological and literary works where these two phenomena find their rich expression.