I want to make a case for ordinariness, by which I mean the kind of life that does not leave a large historical footprint, that is not distinguished by exceptional achievement or unusual suffering or the kind of narrative arc that makes for compelling memoir. The life that is simply lived, as most lives are, in the middle of things — neither at the summit nor in the abyss, doing its best with the available materials, largely invisible to history and almost entirely invisible to itself.
This is not a consolation prize argument. I am not suggesting that ordinariness is the best you can hope for and you might as well make peace with it. I am suggesting that we have consistently and seriously undervalued it, and that this undervaluation has caused a specific kind of unhappiness that is almost entirely self-inflicted.
The culture we inhabit — and I mean specifically the contemporary Western culture of self-actualisation and narrative identity — insists that a life is only fully lived if it has been made extraordinary in some deliberate and preferably legible way. You must have done something. You must have become something. You must have a story that contains a turning point, a crisis resolved, a transformation achieved. The ordinary life — the life of steady work, modest ambitions, recurring pleasures, and unremarkable endurance — does not appear in this framework at all, except as a cautionary example of what happens if you don't try hard enough.
This is, I think, both empirically false and morally pernicious.
Empirically false because the extraordinary lives — the ones deemed worth narrating, worth studying, worth aspiring to — are extraordinary precisely by being unusual. They are exceptions, by definition. A world in which everyone lived an exceptional life would simply be a world that had redefined ordinary. The summit is only a summit because most people are not on it. The people on it are not better at living. They are differently situated, and the difference is partly choice and partly luck and partly the specific alchemy of circumstance and character that nobody has yet adequately mapped.
Morally pernicious because the insistence on the extraordinary produces, in the people who cannot or will not achieve it, a chronic low-grade dissatisfaction that poisons the actual pleasures available to them. If you are certain that your life should be remarkable and it is not, then the good things in it — the adequate work, the genuine friendships, the reliable small pleasures — register not as what they are but as consolations. As less than. As evidence of a failure whose nature you can't quite name.
The things worth having in a life are almost never the exceptional things. They are the recurring ones: the quality of the relationships you maintain, the honesty with which you inhabit your days, the capacity for attention that allows you to be present to the world as it actually is rather than the world as you think it should be. These qualities are available to the ordinary life in exactly the same proportions as to the extraordinary one. In fact, I would argue, they are more available, because they are not competing for space with the large project of being remarkable.
I am describing, I know, what it can sound like from outside: a justification for underachievement, a rationalisation of a smaller life. I don't believe this, and I want to say plainly why. The life I am describing is not smaller. It requires, if anything, more sustained attention and more genuine courage than the life of public achievement, because it cannot be sustained by external validation. It has to be its own justification. Every day.
There is a specific peace available to the person who has given up on being extraordinary. It is not the peace of resignation — the flat acceptance of having failed at the important project. It is the peace of having correctly identified the important project, and understood that it was never the one advertised. The important project is the daily one: to be present, to be kind, to do good work in the quiet and the ordinary, to love the people available to be loved.
This is enough. It is, in fact, quite a lot.I want to close with something more concrete. The case for ordinariness is not only a philosophical one. It has practical consequences for how you spend your time and attention.
If you believe that the point is to be extraordinary, you spend your time and attention on the project of becoming extraordinary. You invest in the distinctive, the notable, the resumé-building, the story-generating. You filter your experience through the question of what it is producing — what achievement it is contributing to, what narrative it is advancing.
If you believe that the point is to live well, you spend your time and attention on the texture of living. The quality of the work you do each day, regardless of whether anyone is watching. The depth of the relationships you maintain, rather than their number or prestige. The practice of attention, which is available in ordinary life at its full intensity.
I have spent time in both orientations. The second is better. This is my honest report from the field, offered without drama, which is, I think, exactly the right tone for a case on behalf of the ordinary life.