In Defense of Being Normal

Derek Thompson’s article, Workism Is Making Americans Miserable got me thinking a lot about work. It wasn’t just work in today’s market. I was thinking about work throughout history. There is a narrative that blinds our perspectives. That narrative is “progress.” Years ago, as a college student, one of my professors distinguished a part of this narrative by pointing to the “technology as savior myth.” 

It has become more obvious now that modern tech conglomerates view their role throughout the world as one of shaping it. We view the impact we have on the world as more inherently valuable than the world itself. It has led to a disconnect upon which many people in these industries have begun to look down on those who just “don’t get it.” It’s scary to think that there are things (most things, in fact) that money, code, and research cannot address.

Walker Percy’s debut novel, “The Moviegoer,” is an existential nightmare of a novel. In it, Binx Bolling, a successful businessman contemplates his soulful restlessness when compared with the apparent contentment of his fellow Americans: 

Truthfully, it is the fear of exposing my own ignorance which constrains me from mentioning the object of my search. For, to begin with, I cannot even answer this, the simplest and most basic of all questions: Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them?

The idea of nuance is what troubles me the most about this novel. I don’t know where I am on the playing field. Perhaps that is why hustle culture has taken over. Maybe it is why dreams are the highest of goals and we should adhere to every Zuckerberg screaming from a giant F, “Change the world!”

The truth is you’re not going to. It’s not because you won’t hustle enough or because you don’t push harder than everyone else. It isn’t because you didn’t try hard enough or weren’t smart enough. It’s because every few seconds a person dies and two more are born. It’s because I cannot even list 50 famous people from the 1800s. It’s because time goes on and makes everyone ordinary.

Photo by David Brooks on Unsplash

As for us, we literally scrape across the surface of the Earth to be remembered as its healer. But our planet carries no scars. Eventually, it heals, and everything returns to its rot. That rot, in return, gives life. There is a strange beauty in how moss and vegetation overtake an abandoned building. In a way, it’s more beautiful than what was natural and what is made by man are separately. Even for all our techonology, we have yet to (no shall we ) find a replacement for a tree.

It could be that one of the scariest parts of modern existence is to realize that we will be forgotten. As much as Facebook and Google like to claim immortality, every video we upload to YouTube and every photo we post to Instagram will disappear one day. 

This might bring about a despair, though it shouldn’t. Each of us has a level of influence that goes well beyond what we are able to accumulate and grow. Purpose does not have a net worth. Each person has an extraordinary capacity to do good to the immediate community. It’s fine to ignore the rumblings of those who would call us to something “greater.”

A good friend of mine (let’s call him Jim) and I were talking about how I was planning to start a family soon with my wife. We got to talking about a mutual friend we had(let’s call im Max), always busy, sometimes working 16-hour days. He enjoys his work as well. But he’s often leaving get-togethers to talk on the phone about business. Jim told me that he could have advanced much further in his career by now been making more money and have more vacation time, but it would require working longer hours. He was recently tonsured a subdeacon in our little Orthodox parish. He is the scout leader for his daughter’s troop and his son’s troop. They have the time to go on vacation and make constant visits to his wife’s siblings and their 12 kids. It’s not a Bill and Miranda Gate’s foundation kind of life. Does that mean his impact is any less? I suppose it depends on the tools used for measurement.

A small trend that I noticed last year was how teenagers around the world were starting to opt out of social media. It reminded that for all the good that these companies do, it’s funded by core products that are purposefully addictive and that are documented to make us less happy. Modern life comes at a price it doesn’t have to.

I miss the days of small solutions when an idea was not measured by its scalability. It may be a conversation worth starting, whether or not a solution is worth its time if it only helps at smaller scales. Is there a certain amount of cynicism at ideas that are only for a handful of families, a neighborhood, or a small town?

Wendell Berry was spot on in his book “Life is A Miracle:” 

‘You can be anything you want to be.’ Every student is given to understand that he or she is being prepared for ‘leadership.’ All of this is a lie. Original discovery is not everything. You don’t, for instance, have to be an original discoverer to be a good science teacher. A high professional salary is not everything. You can’t be anything you want to be; nobody can. Everybody can’t be a leader; not everybody even wants to be. And these lies are not innocent. They lead to disappointment. They lead good young people to think that if they have an ordinary job, if they work with their hands, if they are farmers or housewives or mechanics or carpenters, they are no good.”

 If there are people who find meaning in working long hours, great. I’m happy people can find ways to properly scale businesses and devote time to create value, even at the cost of a personal life. Most of us hate it. Not everyone wants to be a CEO or an executive in a Fortune 500 company. We need to know that it’s okay to want to be an average person with an average life. This unbelievable pressure to be extraordinary is making Americans miserable. It’s okay to be normal.

“I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it’s being ruined is hard.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow