Nothing Really Happens on This Subreddit. It’s a Total Hit.

You know the drill: curated Instagram feeds, strategic highlights reels, bios with every talent (see: amateur refrigerator stacker) listed out in excruciating detail. On the internet, your morning cup of Joe is rebranded as Dalgona coffee, and the time you once stood in the pit at an Arctic Monkeys concert becomes the time you hung out with Alex Turner “all day bro, he even invited me over for Christmas.” 

There is, however, one place on the internet where nobody’s trying to be more interesting than they actually are. On a little corner of Reddit lies r/LifeOfNorman, where 77.3k users collaborate to write the most boring stories possible. The duller and vanilla-er, the better. 

Each story on the subreddit centres around a central character: Norman, with no last name. Norman is a corporate-job-holding, eponymous cat-owning, divorced middle ager—someone you’d debate giving up your seat to on a bus and eventually decide against it. Norman misses his kids, fumbles with technology, secretly has a crush on his coworker, and is living out a little bit of all our lives at once. Norman is, as subreddit moderator u/paperstarships describes him, “the world’s most unremarkable man”.

These details remain more or less constant, but the rest of the events that make up his life are fluid. In each short story, Norman lives out something new. “I think it’s important to keep the limits to how to write Norman as broad as possible,” explains Cameron Crane, who goes by u/MattressCrane and also acts as moderator for the subreddit. And the subreddit has upheld the idea; how Norman looks, where he works, and the finer details of his life have always remained ambiguous. 

Norman never is; Norman always might be. 

This contributes to the allure of the character. What makes him so accessible is being able to stretch the idea of Norman to fit a theme, and imagine how he would react to a situation that he could be thrown in. Norman is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story waiting to happen (no, really, that exists). 

And how are the stories created? “People just have to write what they know,” Crane says. “(They) ask themselves what mundane event they’ve lived through in their life.”

The formula works. Each story is less eventful than the next; while some are titled to reflect this — “Norman flips his pillow over”, “Norman notices Lisa’s curled hair ”—some have overblown headings but turn out to be wonderfully mundane.

In one story titled “Norman gets asked for sex”, it’s revealed that he’s just filled in a form asking for his biological sex at the doctor’s office. A day in the Life of Norman is as exciting as watching paint dry, and that’s what makes these stories so addictive. 

Crane, who’d initially started out as a moderator, went on to compile these stories into a Book Of Norman, chronicling what he describes as “a year in Norman’s life, that shows how nothing much as happened at all.” 100 percent of the proceeds, as Crane posts on the forum, are donated to various cat shelters. 

So why are people so drawn to the normalcy of Norman? The 2021 world bombards us everyday with the bright, new and shiny—new movies to watch, new destinations to explore, new icons in the limelight. Social and political climates around the world are constantly topsy-turvying, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic has left constancy in woefully short supply. Things are moving fast. So fast that a character like Norman —who still debates with himself for a story’s worth of time on which ply of toilet paper to treat himself with— comes as blissful relief. With him, it is okay to breathe and take a moment, to swap Cabo for Costco and stay home tonight. 

“I am SO Norman,” a user comments at the end of a recent story.

And Norman is, at the heart of it, an essentially relatable character. He embodies the parts of us that are realest and are least often discussed. He gets sleepy at work, he worries about having left the stove on, he watches reruns of CSI with his cat on weekends. “He’s a fundamentally good guy,” Crane opines. “I think a level of love is given to Norman because he’s sincere.” He is. Norman, in one story, debates googling a crossword clue, worried about the morality of it. 

The character is, however, not as generic and one-note as he comes off on first glance. He finds himself overwhelmed frequently in social situations, and tends to shy away from interactions that might put him out of his comfort zone. Norman frequently has trouble expressing himself, and treads on eggshells as not to offend. In one chuckle-worthy story, he pockets a parking note he’d written to another driver in a rare burst of emotion, showing it only to his cat. 

A quiet, persistent vein of loneliness runs through Norman’s life; a feeling he rarely expresses, but which seeps into his days. His son, Norman Jr., rarely calls, once even missing his dad’s birthday. His coworkers rarely acknowledge him, and Norman’s only real companion is, for all intents and purposes, his cat. In one particularly heart-wrenching story, we’re taken into a younger Norman’s life with his family, where he teaches his son arithmetic and smiles and holds close a wife who is obviously cheating on him. Norman, on several occasions, feels so little human comfort that a smile from a stranger or a piece of chocolate warrants a special mention.

“Norman doesn’t have the easiest time in life,” surmises a contributor who asked not to be identified. “And he still finds so much happiness in the tiniest things. It’s reassuring.”

And at the end of the day, that’s what the idea of Norman boils down to.

Like a bowl of soup or reruns of your favourite TV series, the Life of Norman is a community that embraces you with open arms and lets you know —in the ordinary and the unremarkable, in the tales of a man who celebrates putting extra cheese on his pasta—that things will be alright. 

And will the stories keep on coming? Crane believes they will. “I think I’m always a little amazed by that,” Crane says. “This character that on paper is the dullest bowl of yogurt you could describe, but ends up having endless stories and ideas, pretty consistently too, eight years later.” And as long as there are trips to the supermarket and crossword puzzles with baffling clues, there will be Norman, living —rejoicing—in the ordinary.

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