There’s Nothing Louder Than the Ordinary

so stop insisting there should be

The Resurrection: Reunion by Stanley Spencer, 1945

You start with the belief that you are extra-ordinary.

Is it such a surprise?

At four, you’re the center of the universe. At eleven, you’re the first to invent masturbation. At sixteen, no one has ever driven faster than you on the highway.

Soon, in college, you learn that no one can handle more drugs than you.

You must be stronger than the rest. It’s the only explanation.

Graduated, now you have a job. That’s not the special part. It’s your method. The master alchemist, biohacking narcotics into productivity at a rate hitherto unknown by man.

You tell yourself you’ll never descend those stairs into that church basement with the common degenerates. They lacked the innovative spirit required to dance with angels while walking down the street, still moving units and closing deals.

Once firmly established in that church basement, you scoff at Step 2, to surrender to a higher power. Because you are no simpleton in need of a spiritual crutch.

When talking to a heroin and meth head just released from the state pen, your chest swells with pride when he says, “Whoa, bro, your story’s gnarlier than mine ever was.” What a compliment, yet another testament to your exceptionalism!

Tomorrow, you discover pawning Dre Beats and lurking around ATMs (with nothing good in mind) is garden-variety church-basement behavior when you’re broke and in need of a fix.

But you never got caught.

Okay, you’re sober now. And while others are still fucking with halfway houses and custody battles, you’re back on your feet before anyone ever imagined. Isn’t that impressive?

A few weeks later, you realize you are working a bullshit job. Nothing special there. But only you can see the vein dystopia beneath the Silicon dream. In a microworld where people are clicks and clicks are money, only you remember that a third of the world lives without clean water.

You meet God ayahuasca only to discover that it’s You. Time to write an essay. People need to know about this—and who else could tell them?

You’re the bravest man in the world for leaving your tech job so you could write about leaving your tech job.

You realize, lots of people change their careers; it’s something people do. But, wait: yours is a transition of self! Not just what you do, but who are, where you going, and whom you are bringing with you (all beings, obviously).

Then, just maybe, you actually learn something. That thing you’ve been chasing, the extra-ordinariness, is horseshit.

What you’re seeking is liberation. The true freedom that cannot be found, only stumbled into after face-planting so many times outsides heaven’s gates, the doorkeeper, finally, has her last laugh and then pulls the damn thing open. Your trauma, the burden you shoulder, is (tragically) commonplace. And these are the endeavors, the means, the ends, of all humans—not just you. Finally, you are beginning to be special, because you are embracing the mundane, the worldly, the daily.

Speaking of the worldly, you thought you were living in the most fraught time in history. Then you read an actual history book or two. All empires fall and burn. All times know suffering. All cultures collapse. Oppression is an unending cycle and no day, period, or epoch has a unique claim on evil or crisis.

How many “storms of the century” can there really be?

The final plot twist reveals that such bonafide freedom is about as mystical as a toaster. It’s the most ordinary thing in the goddamned universe, a truth so simple you cannot believe the sages were right.

Consider the man on his deathbed, in his final moments. Does he ponder his athletic trophies? Is he revisiting his business accolades, how he amassed towers of paper currencies?

No.

Of course not.

He thinks of his wedding day. Driving his second wife to the hospital for the birth of his first child. The loss of his best friend to suicide. That time he met God in the forest. The monthly dinners with his best friends with his belly aching from too much laughter. When staring down his finitude, he only measures the weight of the moments that make an average day beautiful.  

That’s what stays with a man. That’s what makes a man—what he remembers and how he defines himself. His special identity is composed of all the little things he shares with everyone.

There’s nothing louder than the ordinary.