Why is ‘boring’ content still going viral?

Last week, I came across a TikTok of a user preparing her taxes. As you might expect, it was a pretty boring video, and yet, I couldn’t look away. The TikTok, uploaded by American influencer Kaeli Mae, quickly went viral, clocking 4.2 million views (and counting), and close to a million likes.

The video begins with Mae preparing an iced coffee in a pristine kitchen, where seemingly everything is white. She moves to her home office (also all white), and takes out a beige calculator, pastel pens, and notebooks from her impeccably organised drawers. She gathers her receipts and neatly records each transaction in a leather-bound diary.

All of Mae’s videos adhere to this soft, muted palette, centring on simple daily tasks like refilling her ice cube trays, packing her bag for work, or cleaning her car. In her pristine world of beige and pastels, even the simplest of tasks take on a new dimension. Everything – including doing one’s taxes – is styled to the max.

Content like this abounds on social media today, and it’s not all new. Last year saw the rise in popularity of “day in my life videos”, where even the most mundane chores were turned into content.

Professor Crystal Abidin, an expert in influencer and social media cultures at Curtin University, attributes this to the pandemic. Since travel was no longer a possibility, “content from every genre needed to pivot to being in the home”. Abidin says that lockdown saw “the expansion of the capacity to make content at home, trickling down to the general populace when zooming and working at home became mainstream”.

She says this democratisation of content creation reached its peak when companies like Kmart and Target started advertising furniture to upgrade your home office, zoom backgrounds, and ring lights, all at affordable prices. “This mindset of needing to put your best face forward was a response to having to bring your camera into the house,” says Abidin.

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This genre of content has deeper roots than the pandemic, dating back to the proliferation of lifestyle vlogs on YouTube that emerged in the 2010s, says Abidin. So what’s changed, more than a decade on? Now, she says, virtually every minor step of the day has been made beautiful, from health and fitness, to cleaning, and now, taxes, and prepared for public consumption. “The pandemic has almost completely erased work/life balance. It’s become normal to bring the public into your house, whether that be through work or otherwise.”

Unlike other viral videos in this genre, the tax TikTok “is very mundane and more tedious”, she says. “All the other videos are about elevating the everyday experience, no matter how small, and used to be more simple,” she says. Think: easy chores like making a cup of tea or loading the dishwasher.