That's a Pretty Small Pea Pod

Have you ever had a conversation with someone where you couldn't muster the smallest bit of interest in what they were saying? Most likely, yes. A sad-but-true fact of life is that not everybody is interesting, and that not everyone has something worthwhile to contribute to the world. Some people are just plain boring. Being boring can be like a disease; you can be born boring, you can become boring, or you can even cure yourself of being boring. In The Circle, Mae has caught the boring disease, and Mercer gives her the diagnosis: “Mae, do you realize how incredibly boring you’ve become?” (263).

Whether or not Mercer is correct in calling Mae "boring" (263) depends on one's personal definition of the word. Personally, I believe a boring person is someone who has nothing interesting or worthwhile to contribute to their individual world or to the world at large. I also believe that  no one is inherently boring, but that people can choose to act, live, or interact in a way that is uninteresting or non-productive. 

If I juxtapose Mae with my definition of boring, I see two peas in a pod. 

To Mercer, and to me, Mae is boring because she does not contribute anything of significance or of interest to the world; her entire life has become interpersonal interaction with strangers. If all of one's life is purely interactive, and all of one's experiences are purely interactive, it follows that one never has active experiences. I personally believe that Mae was boring from the start, but at least she had some interesting things going for her, something unique to contribute due to the active parts of her life. She is now just another Circler experiencing a perfunctory existence.

When Mercer tells Mae that her existence is now boring, she gets very angry at him. The reason why Mae gets so angry is because she knows he's right. As Mae becomes more integrated into life at the Circle, as she adds more screens to her day, more followers, more zings, more everything, she knows that something is not right. She feels "a tiny tear in what seemed to be black cloth, and through this tiny tear she heard the screams of millions of invisible souls" (197). Mercer even alludes to this when speaking to her about how she's become boring; he says "'Every time I see you, there’s a hundred other people in the room. You’re always looking at me through a hundred other people’s eyes'" (132). Both acknowledge that the constant feeling of being surrounded by millions is negative. Mae knows that this 'tear' can be attributed to her time at the Circle and the uncertainty of not knowing everything all of the time. 

Her acknowledgement of the tear proves that she is cognizant of the negative effects of her lifestyle and acknowledges that her life now, a virtual life, is different from her life before the Circle, a real life. 

Before the plot of The Circle picks up its pace and Mae begins to become fully integrated, before she finally chooses to completely ignore the tear in her and the words of her loved ones, she makes one final trip out into the bay. This event is significant because she recognizes the uncertainty all around her and finds wonder in it, supposing that "It was enough to be aware of the million permutations possible around her, and take comfort in knowing she would not, and really could not, know much at all" (272). This is in stark contrast to a Circle mantra, "ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN" (68). In this contradiction Mae proves that she knows the difference between a real and a virtual life.

And there definitely is a difference between real and virtual life. The wonder of real life is that unknowns are acknowledged and explored. A virtual life denies that uncertainty exists and tries its damnedest to convince its denizens that this is the truth.

I do not believe that today's social media culture is a proponent of this denial of uncertainty to the extent that The Circle's is. Most of our interactions over social media are predated by 'real' interaction; the only people who have 'significant' interactions with masses of strangers are celebrities. There is certainly an interesting parallel between transparent Circlers and the celebrities in our culture, but that's a different idea for a different post.