For every obscure shepherd kid who becomes a king and every little mustard seed that grows to immeasurable proportions, there are innumerable other small and hidden things that stay hidden and small. There is no reversal of status for them, no eventual success in the ordinary sense, no transformation from an object of derision into an object of admiration, no obvious revelation to be had in their stories. Most of the time, smallness and hiddenness is the whole story, beginning to end.

Small Things Count by J. Mary Luti

Maybe it’s okay to be unremarkable.

That’s not a message you’re likely to encounter often, but it’s worth considering. When I say that it’s okay to be unremarkable, I mean that being unremarkable isn’t the tragedy that we’re lead to believe it is. If we lived our entire lives without being famous, or rich, or powerful; if we never received another promotion, never had our hard work recognized; if we were ignored, or if people thought we were ugly or boring — well, the world would keep spinning all the same. Tens of billions of people have lived and died on this planet, and almost all of them have been basically unremarkable human beings. They weren’t famous or powerful. The didn’t earn a fortune and retire to a tropical paradise. They weren’t beautiful or brilliant. Most of them lived in poverty and ignorance. They suffered through war and hunger and disease. And, of course, every last one of them died.

It’s the same story for those of us who are alive today. Not the being-dead part, of course, but basically everything else. Our daydreams notwithstanding, most of us will never have adoring fans or fancy titles. We’re not going to play before sold-out crowds, or write best-selling novels. For most people, even very talented people, those exclusive honors are simply out of reach. Our unending desire to be better, better, better doesn’t listen to reason, though. It chisels away at our happiness and consumes our lives. Think about your billions of predecessors for a moment. Were they successful? Did they make it? I don’t know. Some did, I suppose, but not in any meaningful way. They’re still dead, and everyone who ever knew them is dead as well.

That’s not a tragedy, though. That’s just life. That’s how it goes. We’re born and we die, and all of the stuff in the middle is eventually washed away by time. We can fill that middle with just about anything, and whatever we end up getting is okay. If we make a tidy income and live comfortably, that’s okay. If we work a nine-to-five job for forty years, and if we retire into mediocrity, that’s alright, too. If we’re overweight and die from heart disease before we turn sixty, that’s fine. Nearly every aspect of our society says the exact opposite, though. It tells us that we should demand more. We should do better, work harder, aim higher. It tells us to never, ever settle. And by-and-large we don’t.

Would we actually be happier, though, if we had more money, more respect, more power? If we lived longer, if we could make ourselves more attractive, smarter? Maybe. Compared to most people, though — just by virtue of living in a developed nation during the 21st century — we already have many of those things. Are we satisfied, then? Most of us aren’t. And our innumerable hordes of unhappy superstars suggest that it wouldn’t matter how much money or fame we acquired; it could never be enough. I think we can be happy with what exactly what we have, though. It doesn’t matter whether we’re high-powered executives or fast-food employees. If we’re able to love ourselves a little, to forgive ourselves for the terrible crime of being an imperfect person, then I think we can find a reasonable amount of happiness in our lives. If we can stop hating ourselves for not living up to our media fantasies, we might be able to recognize the wonderful things that we’ve been missing in our own lives all along.

We have to let go of our pipe dreams to do that. We have to recognize that we’re not going to someday be rich and gorgeous and famous. And it’s not enough to just logically acknowledge this; we have to grasp it at a deeper level. We have to know that not only is it not going to happen, but it’s not important anyway. It wouldn’t provide a lasting happiness, so why are we wasting so much emotional energy on fantasy? When we dream of being someone else, we’re sending ourselves the message that there’s something wrong with who we really are. We’re saying, “The person I am is not good enough.”

If that’s true for us, though, then it’s true for everyone. None of us is good enough. And every one of those tens of billions of people who came before you and I is a failure, too. They weren’t though. They had jobs they didn’t like. They struggled to understand the world and their place in it. They lost people who they loved. Their lives really weren’t that different from our own. They weren’t failures for being unremarkable. And I don’t think that all the basically unremarkable people alive today — people like you and me — are failures either. I think we’re all okay, even if we don’t often realize it.