So, there’s a business of being an ‘ordinary person,’ and that business includes attending the world, yourself, others, objects so as to see how it is that it’s a usual scene. And when offering what transpired, you present it in its usual ‘nothing much’ fashion, with whatever variants of banal characterizations you might happen to use, i.e., there’s no particular difference between saying “It was nothing much” and “It was outta sight.” That is to say, we’ve all heard the usual characterizations of ‘our Protestant society’ or ‘our Puritan background,’ which involve that ordinary people/Americans/Europeans are built in such a way that they are constrained from doing lots of experiences that they might do, were they not repressed. And we think of the kinds of repressions that people have that are sociologically based, i.e., the Puritan ethic involves spending most of your time working, holding off pleasure, etc., which we think of as definitively what it means to be a usual person in Western civilization. Though that’s manifestly important, it misses an essential part of the thing, which is: Were you to have illegitimate experiences, the characteristic of being an ‘ordinary person’ is that, having the illegitimate experiences that you shouldn’t have, they come off in just the usual way that they come off for anybody doing such an illegitimate experience. When you have an affair, take drugs, commit a crime, etc.  you find that it’s been the usual experience that others who’ve done it have had. Reports of the most seemingly outrageous experiences, for which you figure you’d be at a loss for words, or would have available extraordinary details of what happened, turn out to present them in a fashion that has them come off as utterly unexceptional. So we could perfectly well remove the Puritan constraints—as people report they’re being removed—and our utter usualness, the ordinary cast of mind, would nonetheless be there to preserve the way we go about doing ‘being ordinary.’

My guess is that we could now take that point with us, and, watching ourselves live in the world—or watching somebody else if that’s more pleasant—we could see them working at finding how to make things ordinary. And presumably it would be from such a sort of perceived awareness of, e.g., the ease with which—after practice—you see only the most usual characteristics of the people passing (that’s a married couple and that’s a black guy and that’s an old lady) or what a sunset looks like or what an afternoon with your girlfriend or boyfriend consists of, that you can begin to appreciate that there’s some immensely powerful kind of mechanism operating in handling your perceptions and thoughts, other than the known and immensely powerful things like the chemistry of vision, etc. Those sorts of things would not explain how it is that, e.g., you can come home day after day and, asked what happened, report without concealing, that nothing happened. And were you concealing something, if it were reported, it would turn out to be nothing much. And, as it happens with you, so it happens with those you know. And further, that ventures outside of being ordinary have unknown virtues and unknown costs, i.e., if you come home and report what the grass looked like along the freeway, that there were four noticeable shades of green some of which just appeared yesterday because of the rain, then there may well be some tightening up on the part of your recipient. And if you were to do it routinely, then people might figure that there’s something odd about you; that you’re pretentious. You might find them jealous of you; you might lose friends. That is to say, you want to ask what are the costs, and if people have checked out the costs of venturing even slightly into making their life an epic.

—Lectures on Conversation, “Doing ‘being ordinary,’” Harvey Sacks

via Bobulate