The joy of being average
Bongi D D M Radipati | Tuesday June 3, 2025 10:22
The answer lies in being average. Average, by the definition of most dictionaries, is the quotient obtained by dividing the sum total of a set of figures by the number of figures. This is its definition for the purposes of mathematical sciences. For other purposes and for everything else, average means typical or normal. In all instances, average is a median, a mean. But sufficiently dramatised, average has its delights worthy of our enjoyment.
Take yourself, or if you mind that, take somebody you know well enough. Maybe like some of us, many of us really, you, he, or she are average. In practical terms, it means that you belong somewhere. In the ledger of humanity, your value and their value is equal and shared. Like everybody, you, him, and her, have superpower in something, meaning that you are as good as the next person in something: in domestic affairs, in your profession, in academics, in athletics, in fostering relationships, in politics, in volunteering, in serving others, in artistic pursuits, etc. But you are not proficient in many other things. So, overall, you are average and that is something to be comfortable and joyous about. Because in a true and responsive nation, the measure of its progress is not in regular elections or how good the economy is performing. Rather it is in how it respects this human similarity and difference and allows it to animate its belief that every individual, every ability, every path, holds equal worth.
As an average person, unlike all other people, you alone are the only one who has two shots at life. You can go higher than wherever you are right now by climbing the ladder of achievement or accomplishment in whatever you have some proficiency in. You can, inversely, also go lower than your current position if you descend the ladder of achievement or accomplishment in your proficiency. Each movement, your choice really, is a challenge of grit for an upward movement or indolence for a downward movement. This will happen against the awareness that one’s joy in their averageness is often bound up with its opposite, disappointment in not living up to one’s capabilities.
The essence of averageness is that no individual can share its centre yet fail to be bound by its precepts of striving and optimism. This is because these precepts direct us toward the good in ourselves and others. Its intrinsic directness leads us to pursue a good life. Then we are able to make this implicit awareness of ourselves explicit through our own practice of leading a meaningful life. This view of averageness commits us to hold certain claims about ourselves: always belonging yet always seeking the best; and the willingness to take the long crucible road to a good life. In short, holding onto ambition.
At times I think that joy itself at how life is, has become extremely bounded in our materialistic, consumerist, and self-seeking world. At that point, I often wonder if we all do not need to look a bit more at ourselves and experience more self-awareness. If we were to do this, we would realise that there is joy to be had in our individuality, our insufficiency, and our lack of exceptionality here and there.
Average is not just an individual’s absence of blinding brilliance, or their lack of want for success or their acquiescence in a middling status. Because most of us are average in one or more things, average has a sizable community, even larger than its competitors. Because it is a shared phenomenon, average is a collective endeavour. Because within its sphere we are one with a lot of others, average can easily make us feel intimate, more friendly, more accepting, and sometimes even more emotional with others like us. This is another joyous moment of it.
To be a human and a self-agent is to be a validating animal. Popular notions of excellence or productivity may have us think that we ought to add value to any human enterprise – in friendships, relationships, professions, businesses, creativity, intellect, etc – by harnessing something outside ourselves that we already do not have. Those notions will also make us think that if we don’t have that outside reservoir of capability, we basically have no talent or aptitude for this modern life. To me, the opposite is closer to the truth. To seek and find one’s superpower; then to use it just as it is, is to be able to harness one’s abilities as they are. With consistent application and time, those abilities will improve. When we stop doing this, the true intimate connection between one’s self and one’s ability disappears. Regrettably, it is not only the ability to be proficient in something that we will slowly lose in such circumstances but our entire meaningful lives.
Every individual, even one who appears to be timid, or is often a quivering mess, has a core of titanium for something. But an individual who finds joy in his or her averageness is of a different order. No whiff of his or her limitations elsewhere, or his or her lack of high proficiency in something, holds them back. Obviously, as does everyone, such an individual must harbour some deep-seated anxieties about themselves somewhere in their psyche. But they still act as if they have no such anxieties. In a way, their certitude becomes their enduring ability to excel in something, however meagre or insignificant others may view it.
Victor Borge, the Danish-American author and comedian once said that laughter is the shortest distance between two people. I would add that joy is the shortest distance between two experiences. In that sense, it appears to me that the electric shock of joy is always strongest just before its enjoyment, especially in instances of ordinariness and mundanity. Have yourself an average day!
*Radipati is a regular Mmegi contributor