Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary?

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. “There’s a lot of talk in society of ‘That’s amazing! That’s genius!’ ” the comedian Maria Bamford says. As a result, there’s no room left for “a two-star experience.” 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’s harp. It’s decent—which means that, when I listen to it, I can’t enjoy it. I think only of what I might improve.

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 “greatness thinking.” An obsession with being great begins “as a meaningful response to the fact that life is imperfect,” 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.

“Why does everything have to be so good?” Bamford asks. One answer is that philosophers have spent millennia arguing on behalf of excellence, and we’ve internalized their arguments. Aristotle, in his influential account, used a term, aretê, expressing the notion of maximized potential. A given thing’s aretê reflected its particular nature: a knife possessed aretê by cutting well. Since morality and rationality distinguished human beings from animals, a person achieved aretê 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 aretê, which could come only from developing your inner potential. Alpert, in his book “The Good-Enough Life,” quotes Aristotle urging us to “strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us.”

Aristotelian excellence is scalar. The better you are, the better you have to be. For an ordinary schoolkid on a baseball diamond, having aretê 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’s unreasonable. The problem is that Aristotle’s 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’t 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—that is, by defeating the base version of yourself. (“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman,” he wrote.) Like the existentialists, you might sense that there’s 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 “bad faith,” Jean-Paul Sartre suggested.)

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’s “Buddenbrooks,” a father tells his daughter that the members of a family are “links in a chain” of multigenerational achievement.) And then, of course, there’s social and economic competition—neoliberalism, late capitalism, creative destruction, whatever you want to call it. The sum of all this is a way of life, Alpert writes, “that takes our talents and turns them into a desire to win our spot at the top of competitive hierarchies.” This tendency is “at the heart of much that is wrong in our world.”