I would rather be miserable and remarkable than content and forgettable. This equation has governed most of my career decisions, relationship choices, and life strategies: suffering with distinction feels more valuable than happiness without recognition. I have chosen dramatic dysfunction over quiet satisfaction, impressive struggle over modest success, because ordinary happiness felt like a kind of failure.
We live in a culture that has made ordinary a dirty word, as if being normal were a moral deficiency rather than a mathematical inevitability. By definition, most of us must be ordinary—that’s what makes the extraordinary extraordinary. But we’ve been sold the myth that everyone can be special, unique, exceptional, leaving millions of people feeling like personal failures for being statistically normal.
The extraordinary trap convinces us that our worth is measured by our difference from others rather than our contribution to others, by our uniqueness rather than our usefulness, by how much we stand out rather than how well we fit in. We pursue distinction over fulfillment, significance over satisfaction, being remembered over being content.
But observe what actually makes people happy: ordinary pleasures, everyday connections, simple routines, modest achievements, quiet love. The extraordinary moments are peaks in a landscape of ordinary moments, and the peaks only matter because of the valleys and plains that surround them.
The people I know who seem most content aren’t the most remarkable—they’re the ones who’ve made peace with being unremarkable. They find joy in small things, meaning in daily tasks, satisfaction in helping others rather than impressing them. They’ve discovered that a good ordinary life is better than a miserable extraordinary one.
Maybe the real extraordinariness is learning to love an ordinary life, finding magic in the mundane, creating meaning from the materials of everyday existence. Maybe the most radical thing we can do in a culture obsessed with being special is to embrace being normal, to find our worth in our humanity rather than our uniqueness.
Tonight I practice the revolutionary act of being ordinary—finding satisfaction in simple pleasures, meaning in modest contributions, worth in being human rather than exceptional.