{"id":151,"date":"2026-05-22T11:10:54","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T11:10:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=151"},"modified":"2026-05-22T11:10:54","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T11:10:54","slug":"why-is-it-so-hard-to-be-ordinary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=151","title":{"rendered":"Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You\u2019re reading Open Questions<\/strong>, Joshua Rothman\u2019s weekly column exploring what it means to be human.<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

My son\u2019s Little League season started not long ago. A few games in, a sign appeared, mounted to a chain-link fence at the ballpark. Under the heading \u201cPlease Remember,\u201d it offered a five-point list:<\/p>\n

Read more How Good Is This World Cup Squad, Really?<\/a><\/p>\n

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  1. These are KIDS.<\/li>\n
  2. This is a GAME.<\/li>\n
  3. Coaches are VOLUNTEERS.<\/li>\n
  4. Umpires are HUMAN.<\/li>\n
  5. No scholarships will be handed out today.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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    The sign concluded, \u201cThank you\u201d\u2014without, I noticed, a chipper exclamation point. Grownups at the games I\u2019d attended had been uniformly decorous, but youth sports, as everyone knows, can be out of control\u2014expensive, time-consuming, and marred by parental derangement. I could guess why the league had put up the sign.<\/p>\n

    The heavy vibes of Little League have many causes. They\u2019re often rooted, though, in a single question: How serious are youth sports supposed to be? Professional athletes have to pursue excellence; they\u2019re paid to take sports seriously. But kids aren\u2019t professionals\u2014many aren\u2019t even amateurs, since they play not for love of the game but because their parents sign them up. On my son\u2019s team, ambitious young athletes determined to excel share the dugout with reluctant participants and kids who just want to throw a ball around with their friends. For every player who breaks down crying when he strikes out, there\u2019s someone who has fun no matter what. Recently, after a bad defeat, my happy-go-lucky son, Peter, ambled over to another player, who was stone-faced with frustration and shame. \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong?\u201d Peter asked. \u201cWe lost!\u201d the other boy exclaimed, his voice ragged. Peter looked at me, surprised, and said, \u201cWe did?\u201d<\/p>\n

    What\u2019s true for Little League holds for the rest of life. In some contexts, at some times, we strive for excellence, pushing ourselves. Elsewhere, we shrug, accepting our own ordinariness or mediocrity. The excellent and the ordinary coexist, but have an uneasy relationship. With phrases like \u201cyou win some, you lose some,\u201d we acknowledge how, on an ordinary day, in an ordinary life, events cluster around a medium level of quality; in theory, we could be happy in the range between not-so-bad and pretty-good. Yet, for many people, it becomes difficult to find satisfaction in what\u2019s regular. The excellent starts to shame the ordinary, leaving it worse off. We want to play winning seasons, not average ones. Having dunked once, we\u2019d like to keep doing it. We\u2019d prefer \u201cgreat\u201d weekends and vacations. On the largest scales, we oscillate between wanting to lead extraordinary lives and embracing the \u201cmerely\u201d ordinary.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    Society as a whole is shaped by the relentless pursuit of excellence in every domain. Cars and houses get bigger and bigger. Grades inflate forever. Kids join travel teams, spending hours driving to competitions with other mini-athletes, and parents become super-parents, spending more hours with their children than in previous generations. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of talk in society of \u2018That\u2019s amazing! That\u2019s genius!\u2019\u00a0\u201d the comedian Maria Bamford says. As a result, there\u2019s no room left for \u201ca two-star experience.\u201d Against the backdrop of constant progress, ordinariness feels like backsliding. Recently, for fun, I made an album of drifty music, based on recordings of my mother-in-law\u2019s harp. It\u2019s decent\u2014which means that, when I listen to it, I can\u2019t enjoy it. I think only of what I might improve.<\/p>\n

    Without improvement, we get nowhere; without excellence, we wallow. And yet many of us might be trapped in loops of what the philosopher Avram Alpert calls \u201cgreatness thinking.\u201d An obsession with being great begins \u201cas a meaningful response to the fact that life is imperfect,\u201d Alpert writes. But it easily spirals out of control, for the obvious reason that, simply as a matter of statistics, the extraordinary is rare. Veering between striving and settling, a person caught in the greatness trap struggles to admire the best without making everything else seem worse.<\/p>\n

    \u201cWhy does everything have to be so good<\/em>?\u201d Bamford asks. One answer is that philosophers have spent millennia arguing on behalf of excellence, and we\u2019ve internalized their arguments. Aristotle, in his influential account, used a term, aret\u00ea<\/em>, expressing the notion of maximized potential. A given thing\u2019s aret\u00ea<\/em> reflected its particular nature: a knife possessed aret\u00ea<\/em> by cutting well. Since morality and rationality distinguished human beings from animals, a person achieved aret\u00ea<\/em> by being as moral and rational as she could be. It was bracing to see excellence as defined by nature, not society. Your good looks and possessions might earn you admiration, but not aret\u00ea<\/em>, which could come only from developing your inner potential. Alpert, in his book \u201cThe Good-Enough Life,\u201d quotes Aristotle urging us to \u201cstrain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Aristotelian excellence is scalar. The better you are, the better you have to be. For an ordinary schoolkid on a baseball diamond, having aret\u00ea<\/em> might amount to paying attention, being a team player, and trying hard. For a gifted athlete, it might mean training, imagination, and discipline. None of that\u2019s unreasonable. The problem is that Aristotle\u2019s is only one of many convincing arguments for the pursuit of excellence. You might also agree with Immanuel Kant, who believed that we have something like a duty to be as great as possible. (Wouldn\u2019t society fail if we stopped upholding high standards?) You might think, with Friedrich Nietzsche, that an important part of being a person is achieving great things by overcoming your limitations\u2014that is, by defeating the base version of yourself. (\u201cMan is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman,\u201d he wrote.) Like the existentialists, you might sense that there\u2019s something inherently bad about undertaking any activity halfheartedly, since going through the motions amounts to not taking responsibility for your own life. (It was living in \u201cbad faith,\u201d Jean-Paul Sartre suggested.)<\/p>\n

    These arguments, and others, can combine to outweigh the competing intuition that ordinary life is valuable and meaningful. They are joined by the inevitable psychological and familial pressures. (In Thomas Mann\u2019s \u201cBuddenbrooks,\u201d a father tells his daughter that the members of a family are \u201clinks in a chain\u201d of multigenerational achievement.) And then, of course, there\u2019s social and economic competition\u2014neoliberalism, late capitalism, creative destruction, whatever you want to call it. The sum of all this is a way of life, Alpert writes, \u201cthat takes our talents and turns them into a desire to win our spot at the top of competitive hierarchies.\u201d This tendency is \u201cat the heart of much that is wrong in our world.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Read more Singing the Knicks\u2019 Praises, with a Dash of Metal<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    Alpert\u2019s book imagines a reconfigured reality in which the desire to be exceptional, or \u201cgreat,\u201d has been replaced with the aim of being \u201cgood enough.\u201d A good-enough life, in Alpert\u2019s view, is characterized by \u201cdecency and sufficiency.\u201d It incorporates the idea of limitation\u2014both in the sense that we\u2019re all limited, and in the sense that others\u2019 limitations are opportunities for mutual aid and connection. You might wonder if society could actually be reoriented in this way\u2014and if the outcomes of the change would be desirable. Can people be motivated by an idea like good-enoughness? Won\u2019t they cease to do exceptional work if being exceptional is no longer the goal? If a good-enough society seems unrealistic, Alpert argues, that might only be because we\u2019ve deluded ourselves into thinking that the pursuit of greatness is in our self-interest: \u201cUltimately, what is unrealistic is not the hope that we might live in a world that is good-enough for all, but rather the belief that we can keep surviving in our greatness culture, with all the hatred, inequality, and destruction that tear us apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

    \u201cI\u2019m good enough, I\u2019m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me,\u201d Stuart Smalley, the self-help guru played by Al Franken on \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d used to say. Smalley stood in for those writers who suggest embracing good-enoughness on a purely personal level, as a strategy for happiness and success. Yet those kinds of changes\u2014adopting, say, \u201cthe subtle art of not giving a fuck,\u201d as advised by the writer Mark Manson\u2014are of limited value, Alpert thinks, both because they are often greatness thinking in disguise (they are secretly designed to get us to the top) and because they are \u201ctoo incompatible with social pressures.\u201d The ideology of greatness is deeply ingrained, he suggests, and hard to set aside. Contemplating global poverty, for instance, many people find it natural to worry about the problem of \u201clost Einsteins\u201d\u2014the many geniuses who never get to develop their talents. In doing so, Alpert writes, they embrace a theory of trickle-down greatness, according to which everyone benefits when the very best people are empowered. Alpert doesn\u2019t want to diminish the value of genius, but the broader reality, he argues, is that \u201cthere are almost always many more talented and qualified people for a job than the number of available positions.\u201d The systems we have in place fail at \u201charnessing the abilities of 7.7 billion good-enough human beings.\u201d Why not turn the whole arrangement on its head?<\/p>\n

    \u201cThe Good-Enough Life\u201d contains all sorts of ideas about how we might dislodge greatness from our minds, our relationships, and civilization at large. (Being a good-enough friend\u2014without worrying about whether you\u2019re \u201cbest friends with the best person,\u201d or experiencing \u201cthe best possible kind of best-friend relationship\u201d\u2014might open you up to more kinds of connections.) In general, Alpert follows Donald W. Winnicott, the psychoanalyst who proposed the notion of the \u201cgood-enough mother,\u201d in seeing ordinariness as \u201cboth relaxing and difficult.\u201d In some ways, it might be easier to go all-out, aiming for a level of individual greatness that you\u2019ll probably never achieve, and harder to think of yourself as an ordinary person among many other ordinary people. Bamford jokes that no one admires \u201cthe energy that it takes to not improve.\u201d She\u2019s talking about a deli she goes to, which is \u201chot, dusty, dark\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. invariably unfriendly, and only sometimes open.\u201d But being ordinary in a responsible way is different. It does take energy to turn from furthering your own aims to figuring out how your efforts might dovetail with everyone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    Is there a positive case for being ordinary\u2014a reason to actively pursue ordinariness, regardless of whether being great is overrated? It can be hard to discern partly because, in art and literature, ordinary life is so infrequently represented. The problem is likely that it\u2019s boring. In Leo Tolstoy\u2019s novel \u201cAnna Karenina,\u201d it\u2019s fascinating to read about Anna\u2019s messed-up life, and less fun to watch as Levin, the novel\u2019s other protagonist, assembles the components of his happy but mundane existence. (Work, wife, kids, prayer.) It\u2019s almost as though Tolstoy combined the two stories in order to make Levin\u2019s interesting. Most storytellers don\u2019t go to the trouble; the result is that although we live ordinary life, we rarely see it.<\/p>\n

    Broadly speaking, two types of narrative do focus on the ordinary: comedy and literary realism. In \u201cSeinfeld,\u201d we see regular people hanging out, eating, shopping, and talking about nothing; we delight in the show\u2019s atmosphere of heightened triviality, in which coincidences and small observations are magnified into drama. In \u201cMadame Bovary\u201d or \u201cUlysses,\u201d by contrast, we zoom in on the often shabby details of everyday life: Charles Bovary\u2019s ugly hat, or the way Leopold Bloom\u2019s stomach feels after a big breakfast. Both kinds of narrative succeed in showing us the everyday, unremarkable, and ordinary. But they also twist it into something different. Maybe, to an extent, the built-in dynamics of narrative pull us toward \u201cgreatness thinking\u201d: it\u2019s hard to tell a story unless you have a hero who\u2019s brought low.<\/p>\n

    Both inside and outside of fiction, many forces actively obscure the virtues, and even the content, of ordinary life. In \u201cBoyhood,\u201d the third volume of \u201cMy Struggle,\u201d Karl Ove Knausgaard reflects on how, when he remembers his early years, he thinks mainly of his father\u2014a moody, difficult, often scary man\u2014and has fewer memories of his mother. \u201cAll the things mothers do for their sons, she did for us,\u201d he writes. \u201cIf there was someone there, at the bottom of the well that is my childhood, it was her.\u201d Domestic labor is always undervalued; a mother\u2019s care has been overshadowed by the histrionics of an overbearing dad. And yet Knausgaard\u2019s impulse, now that he\u2019s a father himself, is to keep his own role submerged. \u201cIf there is anyone I am happy to be taken for granted by, it is them,\u201d he writes of his children. \u201cShould they have completely forgotten I was there when they turn forty themselves, I will thank them.\u201d It\u2019s almost as though he wants to protect ordinariness by keeping it ordinary.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    When ordinariness is elevated, does it risk becoming extraordinary, and thereby losing its essential character? Here, there\u2019s a paradox. If we value only the \u201cbest\u201d experiences, then we might find ourselves looking askance at ordinary life. But, if we want to properly cherish the ordinary, we must do so without making it into something it isn\u2019t\u2014that is, into something extraordinary. (That would be greatness thinking.) To ground yourself in the ordinary, you might have to accept that life is made out of stuff you\u2019ll forget. You may have to resolve the tension between ideas like \u201cvalue\u201d and \u201cordinary.\u201d We ask ourselves questions like \u201cIs this all there is?\u201d and \u201cIs this all I am?\u201d The answer might be \u201cyes.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

    Read more Updated Birdsong Mnemonics for Donald Trump\u2019s America<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    It\u2019s what most of us are, most of the time. Shouldn\u2019t it be enough? Joshua Rothman on the pursuit of excellence and the trap of \u201cgreatness thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":150,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-questions"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary? - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=151\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary? - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It\u2019s what most of us are, most of the time. 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