Everyday people

There is a great difficulty in being a typical person, one of the crowd, or un-exceptional. The struggle is for validity, for self-esteem, and the basic belief in one's own worth. There is rightly much talk about representation in media, and how important it is for people to see those like themselves in popular formats. While this is especially important for marginalized and targeted groups, there is value in the great majority seeing themselves as well. Similarly, as much of the news is devoted to celebrity and wealth, there needs to be a move towards placing those exceptional individuals into a larger context. To begin with, any typical news story must be outside ordinary, everyday life; it is only when the dam fails or another tragedy that it receives attention. The news does not report the hundreds of people helping each other through tough times, the thousands who take time to volunteer, and the millions of interactions that go off without a hitch everyday. These unremarked events are so commonplace that they become invisible, yet they form the basis for society and civilization functioning at all. The mundane is what actually keep things going; the same is true of people: it is the mass of average, everyday persons who are more responsible for things going smoothly. Overall, the focus on outliers leads to a skewed outlook on the world as it makes those outliers seem more important. To have a more accurate view, we can recognize that most of the people (both currently and historically) are basically very alike in lifestyle. They do not hold fancy titles, earn elite recognition, or accomplish once-in-a-generation feats. The very word "exceptional" contains the clue that those celebrated are exceptions to the general rule. However, there is no concomitant recognition that there is no loss of worth or diminishment in humanity in being common (or, in the current vernacular, "basic"). This insidious reinforcement of the message that only the uncommon matter is ever-present and oppressive. While many assume the question is how to be noticed and become exceptional, that is approaching the problem from the wrong end. The answer has never been to change into some version of these unusual celebrities, but rather to be our self and have that be worth celebration. The issue is the expectation that those celebrities are the only ones deserving of our attention. Once we take away our attention (and money), the so-called "powerful" begin to lose that power, as it is based on the collected support of the mass of common folk. Rather than buying the latest in an endless line of "hot" celebrity schlock and fads, we would be better off supporting worthy causes we believe in and spending our time with people we care about. By taking our focus away from the trivial (celebrity) and placing it on the important (everyday people), we can begin that celebration of the truly meaningful: ourselves.