Essays

by Scribes Stories · 6 min read · 4 views

On Being Ordinary Somewhere around my thirty fifth birthday, I found myself doing an uncomfortable kind of arithmetic that I suspect many people quietly perform around similar ages, tallying up the gap between the extraordinary life I had vaguely assumed, in my twenties, I would eventually lead, and the considerably more ordinary life I actually appeared to be living. No dramatic career triumphs. No headline achievements. A perfectly decent job, a perfectly decent home, a life that would, described honestly to a stranger, sound entirely unremarkable in almost every particular. I want to spend some time examining why this realization felt, at the time, considerably more devastating than it probably should have, and what I have since come to understand about the peculiar cultural machinery that convinces so many otherwise contented people that an ordinary life represents some kind of quiet failure requiring explanation or apology. The machinery, I think, begins early and operates continuously, largely through the specific kinds of stories our culture chooses to tell and retell. We are saturated, from childhood onward, with narratives about exceptional people doing exceptional things, the founder who built an empire from nothing, the artist whose singular vision reshaped an entire field, the athlete whose extraordinary talent set them permanently apart from ordinary competitors. These stories are genuinely inspiring, and I don't want to argue they shouldn't be told. But I think we rarely pause to notice how thoroughly they skew our sense of what a normal, worthwhile life is actually supposed to look like, simply through sheer repetition and cultural prominence. Consider the actual math involved. For every founder whose empire succeeds spectacularly, there are thousands whose ventures quietly fail or simply plateau at modest, unremarkable scale. For every artist whose singular vision reshapes their field, there are countless considerably more talented artists whose work never receives comparable recognition, for reasons having as much to do with timing and circumstance as with any genuine difference in underlying ability. The extraordinary outcomes we celebrate so consistently represent, almost by definition, statistical outliers rather than realistic targets, and yet our cultural storytelling treats them, implicitly, as the standard against which ordinary lives should measure themselves and typically find themselves lacking. I began, sometime after that uncomfortable thirty fifth birthday arithmetic, paying closer attention to the actual texture of what I had been dismissing as merely ordinary, and found, somewhat to my own surprise, considerably more worth examining than my earlier dismissive framing had allowed. My perfectly decent job, examined more honestly, involved work that genuinely helped people navigate difficult financial decisions, work I was, by any reasonable measure, quite skilled at, work that occasionally produced the kind of genuine gratitude from clients that no headline achievement could have manufactured more authentically. My perfectly decent home housed a marriage that, whatever its lack of dramatic narrative arc, had produced years of genuine daily companionship, thousands of small unremarkable moments of actual connection that, added together, constituted something I struggled to properly categorize as merely ordinary once I actually sat with the accumulated weight of it. This is not, I want to be clear, an argument that ambition is misguided, or that everyone should simply lower their expectations and settle contentedly into whatever mediocrity happens to be convenient. Some people genuinely do want, and genuinely should pursue, considerably more exceptional outcomes than an ordinary life typically provides, and I don't want to suggest that pursuing genuine excellence or genuine ambition represents some kind of error in judgment. What I am arguing is considerably more specific. I am arguing that the particular shame many people feel about an ordinary life, myself very much included until relatively recently, often has less to do with any genuine deficiency in that actual life and considerably more to do with measuring it against a statistically unrepresentative sample of exceptional outcomes that our culture happens to find most narratively compelling. This is a bit like feeling personally inadequate for not being seven feet tall, having spent your entire childhood watching nothing but professional basketball. The comparison set itself is the problem, not the actual, perfectly reasonable height you happen to be. I have found it genuinely useful, in the years since that difficult birthday, to deliberately seek out considerably more representative comparison sets than the exceptional outlier stories our culture defaults to celebrating. I began paying attention to my own grandparents' lives, considerably more thoroughly than I had during their own lifetimes, and found, examining them honestly, lives that would have sounded, described to a stranger, entirely unremarkable by any conventional measure. My grandfather worked the same modest factory job for thirty one years. My grandmother raised four children and maintained a household that never once made headlines or produced any measurable public achievement. And yet, examined closely, their lives contained an enormous accumulated weight of genuine meaning that no headline achievement could have properly captured. My grandfather's thirty one years at that factory produced, among other things, four successfully raised children, a marriage that lasted fifty three years, and a reputation among his coworkers, which I only fully learned about at his funeral, as the person everyone specifically sought out when they needed genuine, patient help solving a difficult problem. My grandmother's household management produced, invisibly and unglamorously, the actual foundation from which all four of her children eventually built their own considerably varied, considerably ordinary, and considerably meaningful adult lives. None of this qualified as extraordinary by our culture's typical measures. All of it, examined honestly, constituted something I have come to believe is considerably more valuable than most exceptional achievement stories properly account for, precisely because it represents the actual texture of how most meaningful human lives are genuinely constructed, one unremarkable day at a time, rather than through the dramatic singular achievements our cultural storytelling so consistently and so disproportionately celebrates. I still occasionally catch myself doing that uncomfortable arithmetic, measuring my own perfectly ordinary life against some vague, exceptional standard I absorbed without ever quite consciously choosing to. But I have gotten considerably better, with practice, at catching the comparison and consciously replacing it with a more honest, more representative measure. Not whether my life resembles the rare, statistically unrepresentative exceptional stories our culture prefers to tell, but whether my life resembles, in its actual accumulated texture of daily meaning and daily connection, the considerably more common, considerably more representative lives of people I have genuinely admired, people whose ordinary days, examined closely enough, turn out to contain considerably more worth celebrating than their unremarkable surface description would ever properly suggest. I don't know whether I'll ever accomplish anything that would qualify, by our culture's typical standards, as genuinely extraordinary. I have made a kind of peace with that uncertainty that I did not possess at thirty five, a peace built not on lowered ambition exactly, but on a more honest accounting of what actually constitutes a life worth living, considerably closer to my grandparents' unremarkable, deeply meaningful example than to whatever statistically rare, culturally amplified exceptional story I once, without quite realizing it, had adopted as my only acceptable measure of a genuinely worthwhile existence.