A Small Defence of Being Ordinary

At a dinner recently, someone went around the table asking what everyone was 'building.' Not what we did for work — what we were building, as though a job were only acceptable if it doubled as a monument. I said I didn't have an answer. The silence that followed was brief but pointed.

Somewhere along the way, being unremarkable started to feel like a diagnosis. You're expected to have a side project, a platform, a niche, a thing that makes you legible at a glance. Ordinary has become almost an accusation — as if living an average life were a failure of imagination rather than, often, a reasonable response to a good-enough life.

What ordinary actually costs

I want to be careful here, because there's a version of this argument that curdles into an excuse for not trying anything. That's not what I mean. I've watched people do extraordinary, difficult, focused things, and I admire it honestly. What I'm questioning is the background assumption that if you're not doing one of those things, something is wrong with you.

My grandmother raised four children, kept a garden that fed half the street, and was, by any modern measure, unremarkable — no company, no platform, no case study. I think about her more than I think about anyone I've read a profile of. Nobody remembers the year they were extraordinary. They remember the people who showed up.

There's a kind of quiet, sustained decency — showing up for the people around you, doing your work honestly, noticing things — that doesn't photograph well and doesn't need to. It isn't a consolation prize for people who couldn't manage something bigger. It's often the harder, longer discipline.

An ordinary life, examined closely, is made almost entirely of things that were not ordinary to the people who received them.

I don't have a side project. I have a job I do reasonably well, some people I try to be good to, and a habit of writing letters on Sundays that started because I wanted to, not because it was going anywhere. I'm no longer sure that needs defending, but I wrote this in case you needed permission too.