The joy of being average
Our obsession with optimizing our lives is making us deeply unhappy
friend of mine recently started working a four-day workweek. Her job didn’t implement it or anything — she just did it for herself. Her bosses don’t seem to notice, she gets her work done, and while said work may not be of the most stellar quality, it’s sufficient. Maybe she’ll catch the ambition bug again at some point, but for now it feels good to coast.
The coasting, she admitted, also feels a little weird. The laws of capitalism say we have to constantly be on the move — work hard, play hard, consume hard, rinse and repeat. We’re supposed to want to be the best, the smartest, the richest, and to hold those who have achieved such status in high regard. We seek to optimize at every turn, painstakingly crafting the perfect Instagrammable vacationand spending hours debating over paint colors that, if we’re honest, we can barely tell apart. Even the wealthy feel like they don’t have enough. Instead of a sprint to the finish, modern-day life is a sprint with no end, going until we get too tired and throw in the towel.
“This is very much a reflection of mature capitalism, accelerated capitalism, whereby we’ve internalized the machine as being part of our own identity,” said Thomas Curran, a professor of psychology at the London School of Economics who wrote the book “The Perfection Trap.”
It used to be that external forces, such as bosses and politicians, were prodding us into action, encouraging us to work more, buy more, strive for more. Now we’re just doing it all on our own.
“It’s not somebody else cracking the whip on us, but rather we are cracking the whip on ourselves,” Curran said. “We are both the tyrant and the victim in the relationship, because we fully internalized the need to work more, consume more, as just part and parcel of a normal personality and identity.”
But here’s a thought: What if everyone just relaxed, and instead of focusing on the best we can be, we just tried to be good enough? In an age where you’re supposed to optimize everything, maybe it’s fine to just be … fine. Your vacation, your clothes, your house, your kids, your retirement can be OK, even if none are perfect.
I’m not suggesting we aspire to mediocrity; I’m saying we should aspire to medium.
Not everyone in the world is dominated by the maximizing mindset, but even people who lean toward the chiller side of things still feel compelled to aim for more and better in at least some part of their lives. Why are we like this?
There’s a mixture of nature and nurture in play, said Avram Alpert, a scholar and writing lecturer who wrote “The Good-Enough Life,” in an email. Most people want to be recognized as meaningful members of their communities, but our cultural values dictate what counts as meaningful. “In societies around the world where wealth, power, and social status are so highly valued, we feel incredible pressure to gain them,” he said.
This cultural pressure is reinforced by our economic system, Alpert said, which is organized in such a way that people aren’t wrong to think they need to work endlessly to be able to pay for housing, childcare, healthcare, retirement, etc. “You really do need to work hard and earn a lot (or inherit a lot) to live in decent material conditions in these contexts,” he said.
This underlying social and economic pressure is made worse by the choice overload American consumers are constantly facing. Having too many options can make people feel bad and lead to frustration, regret, and dissatisfaction.
Barry Schwartz, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Swarthmore College who’s written several books on psychology and the economy, offered the example of shopping for jeans. Decades ago, consumers had just a couple of options and grabbed whatever was on the shelf, and that was that. Now there are hundreds of designs, and which one someone buys says more than “I would like to wear pants today.” It says everything from “I am cool” to “I don’t care how hot it is” to “I care about the environment” to “I am a millennial desperately trying to keep up with the times.”
“Whether you like it or not, you are no longer just buying jeans, you are making a statement about your identity, and I think this is true almost across the board,” said Schwartz, who has researched choice overload with Nathan Cheek at Purdue. “When there are lots of options, people think that the choice they make is a statement about who they are, and when they think this, they are more inclined to seek out the best.”
Social media exacerbates the problem because so much of our lives are public. We’re constantly comparing ourselves to others and seeing what else is out there. “Keeping up with the Joneses” in the year 2024 doesn’t just mean your next-door neighbors — it means a universe of Instagram influencers and YouTube hustlers and friends from high school whose lives seem curated to perfection.
This fixation on choosing the best can show up in big areas, like picking where to live, but also in small ones, like deciding where to eat. You’ve probably had the experience of looking up endless Yelp reviews to find the perfect restaurant only to get there, have a mediocre experience, and wonder whether any of the 15 other restaurants you looked at or passed on the way would have been better. Or maybe you realize that just choosing the first place you saw would have saved you time and been a whole lot easier.
“There’s a time investment, and time is a fixed quantity, and there are many other things you could be spending your time doing rather than looking for the best restaurant,” Schwartz said.
The collective hamster wheel many of us find ourselves on isn’t entirely awful. It’s understandable to want your children to be set up for success and to want to feel well compensated in your career. But the major beneficiary of America’s propensity to strive is the machine itself rather than the individuals in it.
“It’s good for the economy. It’s very efficient,” Curran said. “Less good for ourselves because we’re constantly in a state of neurosis about how we’re doing, how hard we’re working.”
Working to climb the social ladder and achieve the best can cultivate creativity and innovation. That’s why athletes are constantly breaking records, medical and technological innovations are emerging all the time, and Taylor Swift is killing it on “The Eras Tour.” But there are plenty of downsides.
“This rush to the top also creates wildly unequal societies — not only in the sense of wealthy owners of technology companies but also in terms of social recognition,” Alpert said. “If Taylor Swift is ubiquitous, there is less room for other performers to gain notice. We begin to live in a world of those who made it and those who missed out, and there is no necessary link between virtue and making it.”
A maximizing mindset can make us act in less-than-ideal ways. A 2017 paper suggests it activates our sense of scarcity and kicks off a competitive orientation where people want to advance their well-being and welfare, which, in turn, increases their likelihood of engaging in immoral behaviors for their benefit. That doesn’t mean committing a felony; it means maybe cheating on a test or seeking out some shortcut to get to the front of the line.
“You can think about those people that always have to get into the best university, that always have to get into the best job — are they more likely to round up on their résumés to describe what they’ve done in the past?” said Kelly Goldsmith, a marketing professor at Vanderbilt University who focuses on consumer psychology and who was an author of the paper. “It makes you very likely to act in your own best interest.”
The rat race also makes us feel worse. A 2023 survey on work in America from the American Psychological Association found that 77% of workers reported experiencing work-related stress over the past month. Even when we get the thing we thought we wanted, the excitement doesn’t last long — the hedonic treadmill says our level of happiness reverts to baseline pretty quickly. The whole thing is exhausting.
As the old saying goes, money doesn’t equal happiness (though I have a hard time believing it doesn’t help). As Jamie Ducharme pointed out in Time, research started in 1922 that tracked 1,500 people across several decades found that while people who described themselves as more ambitious achieved more lucrative careers, they weren’t much happier and healthier than those who set more modest goals
“As we’ve seen with anxiety, with depression, when you set that bar really high, it’s almost like you’re always fighting to just get to what we call the reference point,” Goldsmith said. “You’re always fighting to just get to that high level. And from there, all you can do is go down.”
If living medium and scaling back expectations were easy, more people would do it. People are right to believe they’ve got to scramble to save for retirement or enroll their kids in a miserable number of extracurriculars so they have a shot at an Ivy League. Lower-income people and racial and ethnic minorities especially feel as if society demands they go above and beyond. Entertaining the thought of scaling back happens from a privileged position. And we don’t want people to just completely drop out of society — having no goals or ambitions isn’t great for anyone’s financial or emotional health. Still, a lot of us could benefit from loosening up some more, or at least trying to, even if it’s tough.
Alpert said the goal shouldn’t be to ignore our strengths but instead to stop thinking about them in terms of getting to the top of the pyramid. “Focusing on profit and power negates our talents because it makes so few of them matter,” he said. “A good-enough life is about letting all of our talents — for compassion and care and creativity — flourish.”
It’s important to recognize the cultural messaging about achieving more and to reflect on where that shows up in our lives and whether it’s — to use some therapy-speak — serving us. Sacrificing nights and weekends isn’t necessarily going to make you more successful or satisfied. Imperfection is unavoidable. Even Beyoncé has some bad days.
Schwartz suggested practicing settling. You don’t need to survey everyone in the city you’re visiting to figure out which museum to hit up or spend 10 minutes in the grocery aisle agonizing over which dish soap is the best bang for your buck. It may be uncomfortable, but it also just isn’t that deep.
“Nobody on earth needs the best with every decision,” Schwartz said. “We’ve all had experience settling for good enough. We know how to do it.”
There are areas where perfectionism and maximizing are fine if you want to engage in them — it’s not the end of the world if you spend a Sunday finishing a work project or fall down a YouTube rabbit hole on squeezing the most out of your credit-card rewards. But there are areas where they can do real damage. If you’re so obsessed with having a perfect wedding or buying the biggest house on the block that you go into debt, that’s a problem.
Overall, however, it might be nice to take some comfort in embracing the mid, to borrow a term from Gen Z. That perfectly choreographed vacation to Greece can be improvised, and everyone will survive. Maybe it doesn’t even have to show up on Instagram.
“Most of us are average — like 70% of us are going to be within a standard deviation of the mean,” Curran said. “There’s a hell of a lot of people who are really going to be normal or average, ordinary. And as much as we celebrate and lionize the outliers, I think there is something quite comforting about recognizing actually we’re where most people are, and that’s OK.”
