There are videos that will never be as popular as those of successful youtubers. They are high school volleyball games, congratulatory messages, chatting Asian teenagers and other things of no interest to anyone. Join me on a new foray into sites that serve no purpose but to waste time.

Astronaut.io, created by Andrew Wong and James Thompson, shows us YouTube videos less than a week old, with titles matching the original file name and zero views. We watch a segment of a few seconds and then move on to a new video.

The idea is to look at these archived moments in the largest video repository on the Web as if we were astronauts visiting another planet, but it is ours. We get in touch with the little moments of the human species as if for the first time. I saw a bit of everything: theater rehearsals, a kid learning to skateboard while his father encouraged him, a woman reading a children’s story, religious services, weekend sportsmen and factory workers.

We are either strolling in Manhattan through the camera view of a Japanese tourist, or we are guests at a wedding in China or part of a group of people chatting on tiny plastic chairs by the river.

The succession of small events that do not want to be relevant is what gives this trip its charm and helps us realize that reality, without the glamorous filters of social networks, is something mundane. Everywhere life goes on, made of the trivial things that make the huge whole that is Humanity. They may be boring, repetitive, they may not cause envy, but they are real life, just as it is in all the glory of its banality.

Your experience will be different from mine, but the essentials still are the same. The video I liked best was of a woman dressed in black, red scarf on her head, singing in front of a white wall: “Together we can do more, why be apart”. You do not have to be an astronaut to understand that.