Why Being Ordinary Just Isn’t Good Enough Anymore

What do you do?

That’s likely the first question you get asked when meeting someone. Sometimes even before you get asked your name.

“What do you do? Ohh, interesting–I’m sorry, what’s your name? I’m Gary Shitbag, by the way.”

And depending on how you answer that question, you’ll either be tagged a POI (person of interest) by fellow partygoers, or you’ll be forced to pretend-sip your cocktail alone near the back door the rest of the night.

What this suggests, of course, is that most people at parties–and elsewhere–are superficial asswipes like Gary Shitbag, holding up imaginary scorecards in their head based on your answer to the $25,000 question.

What do you do?

They then use the answer to this one, solitary question to draw a broad and universal conclusion about who you are and how much you matter.

And yet, by that definition, pretty much all of us are superficial asswipes. (After all, who wants to talk to someone who’s “really lookin’ to get into real estate” when there’s a music video director or Bitcoin trader in the very same room?)

Let’s face it, nobody wants to have anything to do with ‘ordinary’ anymore.

The term itself has come to mean something unfortunate, even profane. We don’t want ordinary jobs,  certainly don’t want ordinary friends, and heaven forbid should we be found to lead ordinary lives.

In today’s progress-obsessed, round-the-clock self improvement culture, anything short of headline-making greatness is viewed as failure.

Why Does Money Matter SO Much?

Answering this question actually helps us to answer the more important one underlying it–What is it about money that makes people glorify those who have it? It’s two things, really. The two things adults crave more than anything else in the world–respect and love.

In the absence of either one, money becomes the closest proxy, especially in Western society. It’s not the money itself, then, that we covet. Instead, it’s money as a gateway to receiving the love and respect that we all yearn for.

In effect, it’s Maslow’s pyramid, inverted and with a downward moving escalator.

Now, just because we often confuse money with love and respect, don’t go thinking that every micro-penised douche in a neon green Lambo is, in fact, a micro-penised douche in a neon green Lambo (who secretly longs for a hug). People are much too complex to be reduced in that way. Sure, money can be a proxy for love and respect. But let’s be honest, some dudes in neon Lambos might just be dudes that like neon Lambos. Period.

But let’s scratch a level deeper than that. If money matters so much to people because we crave love, honor, and respect–interestingly, the three virtues professed in wedding vows–how has money come to represent those three things?

You Can Be Anything You Want

One of the reasons us Westerners use money as a surrogate for deeper, more meaningful human virtues is because we’ve been led to believe that we deserve it all.

America itself was founded on the idea that any man can come here and, with a little luck and a lot of pluck, achieve whatever he damn well wants. This is an inspiring message…and a dangerous one.

We hear it echoed in self-help literature:

• You Can Do Anything!
• You Can Be Anything!!
• Proclaim Your Greatness!!!

Because think about it: If you really–I mean really–believe in a world where you can do anything–anything–and you’ve only done something–a fraction, say, of what you set out to–imagine how fucken crushed you’d feel.

It’s almost as if, by dialing up the expectations for greatness, we’ve simultaneously opened up new vistas for humiliation. American society has, in effect, turned the casino inside out.

Why cash out for a few grand when the jackpot reads $500,000? Minus the casino analogy, why settle for job stability, monogamy and medical benefits when you can be Kylie, Kendall or Kim?

Things like overtime shifts and savings accounts, once viewed as exercises in self-sacrifice and foresight, are now the telltale trappings of a chump—one who lacked the vision and the balls of a Musk or a Zuckerberg.

Being ordinary in America has become a public humiliation.

Welcome to a world in which average has become the new awful.

In Defense of Average

In pursuit of this dubious “greatness”, American progress junkies are required to overlook some pretty inconvenient mathematics. Namely, that there is a 99% chance they will not wind up as part of the extraordinary 1%. Put another way, most of us are mathematically destined to be ordinary.

The question then becomes: why is that so hard for us to accept?

In almost every imaginable way, America’s modern version of ‘ordinary’ is pretty fucking extraordinary. Materially, we are better off every measurable way than at any time in human history. With few exceptions, most of us have a place to live, nutritious food, running hot water for a nightly bath, a relatively safe neighborhood, state of the art entertainment devices, modern comforts that only our generation has known, oh, and the finest mood stabilizing, anxiety-reducing meds that modern science has to offer, to help us deal with it all.

And yet, as the standard of living has risen, the standard of what it means to have lived a worthwhile life has moved impossibly higher. What once were considered honorable professions—things like teacher, accountant, counselor, even lawyer or doctor—are now reserved for those that “didn’t make it.”

In trying to build a society for winners, we’ve ended up with a society of losers.

A Society of Losers

Quick, what country ranks first in terms of happiness of its citizens? (Psst: It’s not us.)

For the fourth year running, Finland ranks as the happiest country in the world. Which means that in terms of self-reported general satisfaction, Finnish citizens cannot be beat.

Meanwhile, America–you know, the country widely regarded as the envy of the free world; the wealthiest and most admired nation on God’s green earth—yeah, that America: we trail lowly Finland by, oh, 18 spots to land at #19.

How did Finland do it? How did a country whose biggest export is cheap, shitty vodka (Finlandia) and whose most influential national figure is Mika Häkkinen (exactly) wind up topping arguably the most significant Top 10 list one can conceive of—ranking human happiness? Especially when you consider it had to beat out such formidable players as America (with its namesake dream), Australia (no worries, mate), China (free education, anyone?), Canada (free healthcare, anyone?)  and Jamaica with its perfect beaches and general distaste for daytime sobriety.

How, you ask? Well, in short, the Finns built a society for losers. Yep…losers.

See, Finland understood what Americans refuse to accept: most of us, despite our best efforts, are going to wind up losers. (Depressing, I know.)

With this in mind, the Finns built their society around…well, around their loser population. You could say they built a winning society for losers. They built the train system for losers; the medical care system for losers; the school system for losers; job training programs for losers; even the kindergartens for future losers.

As a result, Finland has accidentally built the happiest society on our planet. Certainly happier than America, who by contrast has built its society around—you guessed it—winners!

Let’s see, we reserve higher education for winners; we develop the world’s leading technology for winners; we write 95% of the world’s *winning mentality* self-help books, aimed at—who else?–winners; and our sports, business and entertainment culture all center on three things: win-win-win!

Of course, when I write that Finland created a society for losers, I don’t mean it literally. See, unlike here in the States, belonging to the 1% in Finland doesn’t make you great—it makes you lucky.

Therefore, belonging to Finland’s 99% doesn’t make you a loser, it simply makes you…well, it doesn’t make you anything. That’s the point–Finland doesn’t brand its ordinary citizens as failures. That, sadly, is a uniquely American distinction.

Here, you’re not either extraordinary or ordinary; you’re either extraordinary…or you’re irrelevant.

What About Ambition?

Imagine you’re playing Roulette. Now imagine, just for fun, you decide to place a bet on green 00, knowing that, statistically speaking,  you have a 97% chance of losing.

Next, you grip the hand of your partner as you both excitedly watch the tiny ball toy with your emotions until, eventually, it settles into its slot and you lose–as expected.

If an ordinary life is indeed a good life, and we’re all—99% of us—fated to being ordinary, then let’s not torture ourselves for walking out of the casino with our pockets empty.

Blaming ourselves for not being extraordinary, is equivalent to ingesting poison, making it impossible to experience any trace of happiness, regardless of the achievement.

Look, don’t get me wrong: I’m all for ambition and optimism. But Americans are not in any danger of being unambitious or lacking in positivity. On the contrary, if we’re known for anything in this fucked-up, great land of ours, it’s our arrogant exceptionalism and unbridled capitalism. No, the real danger is that our young people will grow up feeling so inadequate with respect to the expectations placed before them that, rather than face it, they may choose to swallow a bullet instead.

Too dramatic, you think? It’s not. We are experiencing an unprecedented mental health epidemic in this country, largely worsened by the expectation that our lives will be extraordinary, when in reality they are much more likely to be ordinary. A mismatch that causes us to view good lives as subpar, and great lives as merely acceptable.

Behind all of this “claim your greatness” bullshit, beneath all the positive affirmations and self-help homilies on refusing mediocrity, is the false notion that success is somehow a meritocracy. That those who get to the top earned their way there and those who are at the bottom deserve to be there.

This thought is poison. However, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise; after all, everything from our founding documents (“the pursuit of happiness’) to our progress-obsessed hustle culture (“you’ll sleep when you’re dead”) seems to reinforce it.

Out of the Ordinary

These days, we don’t need more reminders from Tony Robbins to Get Up And GO!, anymore than we need to be shouted down by the douche-panel of dickheads on The Shark Tank to Take Action On Your Dreams!

We already know that intuitively—it’s in our DNA to express our potential and self-actualize. In fact, nowadays it’s all we know, inundated as we are through podcasts, self-help books, and TED talks with messages of non stop positivity and productivity at any cost.

At this point, the message is making us sick; at this point, we need to hear a different message:

It’s ok.

It’s ok to be lost. It’s ok to give up sometimes. It’s ok to fuck up…and it’s ok, occasionally, to be a fuck-up. It’s ok to be confused about your place in the universe or be paralyzed at the notion that there is one at all. It’s ok if most of your goals go unmet. It’s ok that you don’t give a shit about global warming. It’s ok that you’re an asshole. It’s ok that you don’t feel worthy or happy and don’t have a clue what either even means. It’s ok that you’re not ok.

It’s ok to be ordinary.

In fact, it better be. If not, then we’ll continue beating Finland–and the rest of the world–in the only two areas we rank highest, year in and year out: depression and drug abuse, with suicide not far behind.