Being Ordinary
Congratulations, you are not special (thank God)
The thing they never tell you about the unremarkable is that it keeps twitching on the slab long after the glamorous corpses have settled into their marble coffins. Ordinary life does not die cleanly. It does not get a funeral with good lighting and a string quartet and people saying he lived fully in that tone which really means he was a nuisance to everyone around him but we have elected, now that he cannot answer back, to rename it intensity.
No.
Ordinary life just goes on. It gets up Tuesday. Loses its keys Wednesday. Thursday it is standing in the kitchen eating cereal over the sink with the peculiar stoop of a man who has, for the time being, forgotten that chairs are a thing. The extraordinary gets eulogised. The ordinary turns up again. Unasked for. Like a relative who never learnt to read a room and, at this late date, is not about to start.
I woke this morning late, clammy, cross-eyed with sleep-crust, certain that I had done nothing, would do nothing, and that the gentle grey mid-week sky above my window was applauding me for it. A single pigeon sat on the sill, chuffing stale bread fumes and looking like a municipal statue no council ever bothered to commission. It stared in, disapproving. I stared back. Our gazes met in mid-air like badly joined wire, gave off one brief crackle, then fizzled. Which is to say nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. That is what it means to be ordinary. The world presses in on you with its huge soft thumb, and instead of screaming you shrug, wipe the grease off your cheek, and think about toast. Or not even toast. Perhaps just the idea of toast.
You were promised main-character lighting. You got fluorescent tubes in a break room and a name tag that peels at one corner. Somewhere between the graduation speech and the utility bill, the script changed. The Hero’s Journey became the Hero’s Commute. There and back again, except Gandalf never showed up, and the ring was just your keyring, and you lost it twice, and when you found it at last it was under a receipt for toilet cleaner and a petrified lime wedge. All those years, all those posters and songs and tender manipulations, and for what. To deliver you into the custody of the ordinary, which had been waiting the whole time with a patient smile and a stack of unopened envelopes. It had your number from the start.
Here is the more secret scandal, the one nobody writes in gold leaf or bolts above the temple door. Almost every grand account of being alive assumes that something has gone terribly wrong, or terribly right. It knows what to do with revelation, with despair, with ecstasy, with the black electric feeling that your life has tilted off its hinges. It has names for rapture and ruin. It has choruses for the abyss. But it goes a little blank before the far commoner condition of simply being alright. Not happy. Not desolate. Not pursued by heaven or hunted by dread. Just alright. Just Tuesday. Just the slightly too warm office and the slightly too cold coffee and the spreadsheet that has been open on your screen for so long it has stopped being a task and become part of the room, a digital panel of wall.
And you are standing there with a stale biscuit in one hand, wondering if you left the gas on, and feeling, with some embarrassment, that this flat and middling hour may in fact be most of life. Most of it. Not the trailer. Not the waiting room. The thing itself.
The existentialists, bless them, were catastrophists. They needed the cliff edge. The firing squad. The plague city. The condemned man. They needed all the props kicked away so the soul could make some theatrical little leap. Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness in cafés. This ought to have embarrassed him more than it did. There he was, not hanging from a meat hook in a dungeon, not staring down the barrel of metaphysical annihilation, but in a café. In a chair. Presumably with a hot drink. Presumably with someone nearby buttering bread or dropping a spoon or asking for the bill. And from this perfectly ordinary situation he excavated a philosophy of absolute freedom and total responsibility that has been making people feel guilty about lunch ever since. The irony is so fat you could serve it with mustard. The café was already enough. The chair was already enough. He was bathing in ordinariness and kept insisting he had discovered the abyss. Perhaps the abyss was only the gap between the cup and saucer. Perhaps the abyss was the waiter ignoring him. Perhaps the abyss was Tuesday again.
It was, obviously, already late afternoon by the time I finished deciding whether to put socks on. I chose no, then yes, then no again, and in the act of that dithering somewhere dropped an hour down a crack in the floorboards, which squeaked smugly as if to remind me of the gravity of lost minutes. My phone announced that the president of some place had coughed at a podium, that a volcano in an underwater trench had hiccupped, that four hundred people I do not love were in Ibiza bobbing in the audiovisual ooze of a DJ’s Instagram Live, and still none of that dented the true eventlessness of my own day. The algorithms, bless them, tried to sell me a personality in three or four squirts of targeted video. They insisted I should desire artisanal desk lamps or pre-curated vintage T-shirts that said things like SEXY LOSER in sun-faded Helvetica. But the sheer clunk of my ordinariness was heavier than their hunger. The ads bounced off, tinkled away like cheap beads. There are days so plain even capitalism cannot seduce them. Days that refuse enhancement. Days with the stubborn dignity of unbuttered bread. Dry bread. Bread with nothing to prove.
This is the condition they do not quite have a word for, which is suspicious, because we now have a word for everything and then another twelve for the same thing with slightly different vibes. We have doomscrolling and situationship and limerence and attachment wound and main character energy and parasociality and approximately fourteen terms for shades of anxiety, but no exact word for the texture of a Wednesday that has not gone badly or well but has simply gone, like water down a drain, and left no ring. German probably has something. German always does. German has a word for every atmospheric inconvenience of consciousness. But I do not speak German and neither, I suspect, does Wednesday. Wednesday is monolingual. Wednesday communicates only in receipts and bus timetables and the hum of a fridge that has finally become audible because the rest of your life has, for one split second, shut up. And even that shuts up soon enough.
What I know is this. The unremarkable day is not a failed remarkable day. It is not a botched version of something else. It is its own category, with its own gravity and specific weight. It presses differently. The remarkable day is a stone dropped in water. Rings spread out. Everything reorganises around the impact. The ordinary day is the water itself. It is the medium through which all other days move, without which the stone would have nowhere to fall, and we persist in treating it as absence rather than substance. We have built a whole little emotional economy on resenting the water for not being stones. Which is childish really.
Consider what actually happens on an ordinary day, if you slow down enough to take inventory. You wake. The ceiling is the same ceiling it was yesterday, which is a miracle so routine you have stopped seeing it. Your body, that faithful and slowly mutinying republic, has kept its systems running through the night without your supervision. The lungs have breathed. The heart has knocked its small red knock. The liver has processed the wine you poured into it as a problem and returned it, by dawn, as a headache or a pardon. You have been kept alive by organs you cannot name in a body you did not design. This happens every day. You call it nothing. You go to the bathroom and expel, in various embarrassing forms, the evidence that life continues. You brush your teeth with a little froth at the corners of your mouth like a rabid saint. You look into the mirror and receive, once again, the baffling news that you are still yourself. Still this one. Still lumbered with the same face.
Then there is coffee. Water which fell from clouds that formed over an ocean you have never seen, filtered through rock that remembers being seabed, shoved through pipes laid by men now dead under a city that was once marsh or oakwood or some earlier mistake, and now it boils at your command. At your command. A small domestic miracle, and yet because it happens before nine you treat it as clerical rather than divine. The bean was grown thousands of miles away by hands you will never shake. Milk from a creature with horizontal pupils. Sugar from a field. Ceramic from burnt earth. Fire from invisible current in the wall. You drink this standing by a window in socks you spent an hour deciding about and call the whole thing unremarkable. We are such ungrateful little bastards. We really are.
The trouble is not ordinariness itself. Ordinariness is fine. Ordinariness is the whole game. The trouble is our catastrophic relation to it. We have been trained to experience the unremarkable as a wound. We carry our plainness like a diagnosis. We log on and discover that everyone else is apparently living at a slightly higher resolution and come away from the comparison feeling like drafts of ourselves, rough sketches someone forgot to finish. Everyone else seems to be eating under pendant lighting in Lisbon or healing in linen or launching things. They have podcasts. They have side hustles and boundaries and capsule wardrobes and occasional candids of themselves reading Joan Didion in baths with brass taps. And you have a spoon in your mouth and one shoe on and an unread email from the dentist. There is no contest. The images have already won. But they have won only because you agreed to compare your lived life to a sequence of edited surfaces. You entered your warm animal confusion against their brochure. That was your first mistake.
