We are currently suffering through an epidemic of romanticized tedium.
Every time a creator points a lens at a grocery run, a dry-cleaning pickup, or a slow walk to the subway and labels it cinema, an audience of terminally online sycophants claps for the emperor's new clothes. Noah Blau built a viral footprint doing exactly this. He films errands. He frames the mundane as high art. The internet eats it up because people love the aesthetic of meaning without the burden of actually making something happen.
Let us dispense with the polite fiction right now.
Filming an errand is not observational mastery. It is a surrender of narrative ambition disguised as authenticity. It is what happens when creators run out of things to say but still demand your attention.
The Lazy Consensus of the Mundane
The core argument for micro-documentaries about routine tasks rests on a tired premise: that society ignores the poetry in everyday life. We are told that by slowing down and watching someone buy milk, we reconnect with our humanity.
This is romanticized noise.
I have spent over a decade in production rooms, watching budgets burn and projects stall because creators confuse the subject with the substance. Capturing a mundane activity does not automatically imbue it with gravity. Most of the time, it just means you pointed a camera at a boring thing and hit record.
When Noah Blau points his lens at an ordinary trip to the laundromat, critics rush to call it a meditation on modern urban isolation. Nonsense. It is simply a lack of narrative friction. Drama requires a vector. It requires a protagonist colliding with an obstacle, a choice made under pressure, a consequence paid. A grocery cart with a stuck wheel is not an obstacle; it is an annoyance. Building an entire visual language around minor inconveniences teaches audiences to accept narrative starvation as a delicacy.
The Mechanics of False Depth
Let us define what actual observational filmmaking is, because the internet has completely lost the plot.
True observational cinema, pioneered by documentarians like Frederick Wiseman, does not fetishize the mundane for its own sake. Wiseman spends weeks inside institutions like welfare offices, psychiatric hospitals, and meatpacking plants. The errands and routines he captures are systemic gears turning, revealing structural power dynamics, human cruelty, and bureaucratic absurdity. The routine is a window into a larger machinery.
When an internet creator films their own afternoon trip to buy oat milk, there is no system at stake. There is no institutional friction. There is only self-indulgence masquerading as reflection.
Imagine a scenario where a filmmaker points a camera at a blank wall for two hours. Some segment of the art world will inevitably declare it a brilliant critique of sensory overload in the digital age. But calling a blank wall a critique does not make it art. It makes it a blank wall.
The danger here is not that people enjoy quiet videos. The danger is that we are lowering the bar for narrative creation so aggressively that basic biological functions and low-stakes chores are now considered high-concept storytelling.
The Downside of My Argument
I will grant you this: the execution of these projects requires technical competence.
Blau understands color grading, aspect ratios, and spatial audio. The visual texture of these videos is often pristine. Grainy 16mm looks, warm analog light leaks, and soft lo-fi ambient tracks do a massive amount of heavy lifting. If you strip away the aesthetic polish and watch the raw sequence of events, you are left with a man walking down a sidewalk.
My contrarian stance has a glaring blind spot, and I own it: audiences are exhausted.
We live in an age of sensory overload, algorithmic screaming, and hyper-monetized attention traps. A video of someone quietly folding laundry offers a genuine neurological sanctuary from the noise. It drops cortisol levels. People do not watch these clips for the plot; they watch them as a digital weighted blanket.
If your goal is to function as a human sedative, fine. Succeed wildly. But do not confuse a sedative with cinema. Do not dress up naptime as a cultural revolution.
The Economics of Emptiness
Why do creators lean into this style? The answer is brutally simple: economics and safety.
Real narrative filmmaking is terrifyingly expensive and prone to public failure. If you write a complex script, build a character arc, and cast actors, you can fail completely. The dialogue can land flat. The emotional beats can ring hollow. You put your actual artistic capability on the line.
Filming an errand carries zero creative risk.
If the lighting is moody and the protagonist looks mildly melancholic while waiting for a bus, the audience fills in the blanks. They project their own profound internal monologues onto a completely blank canvas. The creator does not have to do the heavy lifting of writing a compelling arc because the viewer does the emotional labor for them.
It is the ultimate cheat code for artistic validation. You give the audience nothing, and they thank you for the space to feel something.
Stop Filming the Routine
If you want to make work that matters, stop retreating into the safety of the mundane.
Embrace the mess of actual conflict. Write characters who make terrible choices. Build worlds that require more than an afternoon walk with a vintage camcorder to capture. Stop telling audiences that a trip to the post office is an existential pilgrimage.
The world is loud, chaotic, and terrifyingly complex. Hiding inside a convenience store aisle with a prime lens is not an act of courage.
It is just running away.
Put the camera down and write a story.
