âThe vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and thatâs okay.â â Mark Manson
For decades, parents, teachers, and well-meaning adults have told children they are special â uniquely gifted, destined for greatness, capable of anything they set their minds to. This message, Manson argues, has produced a generation of psychologically fragile adults who struggle to cope with the inevitable reality that most of life is ordinary.
In the 1960s and 1970s, psychologists began advocating for building childrenâs self-esteem as a pathway to better outcomes â better grades, healthier relationships, less crime. Schools adopted âeveryoneâs a winnerâ policies. Participation trophies became standard. Children were constantly told how special and exceptional they were.
The research results, when they came in, were sobering. Higher self-esteem didnât correlate with better outcomes the way researchers hoped. In some cases, artificially inflated self-esteem was associated with worse outcomes â more entitlement, less resilience, greater narcissism.
The self-esteem movement confused cause and effect. High self-esteem in people who had genuinely earned it â through developing skills, overcoming challenges, contributing to others â was indeed healthy and productive. But high self-esteem artificially conferred â told to children regardless of their behavior or achievement â produced something different: a belief that one deserves good outcomes without doing anything to earn them.
This is the essence of entitlement: the feeling that you deserve things simply by virtue of existing and wanting them.
Entitlement comes in two flavors, and both are destructive.
This is the overt kind â the person who believes theyâre smarter, more talented, and more deserving than others. They expect special treatment, get offended when they donât receive it, and attribute their failures to unfairness rather than their own shortcomings.
This manifests as:
This is the less obvious kind â the person who believes they are uniquely broken, uniquely screwed up, uniquely suffering. While it looks like low self-esteem, Manson argues itâs still a form of narcissism: the belief that oneâs experience is extraordinarily special, even if extraordinarily bad.
This manifests as:
Both types share the same root: the belief that one is exceptional, that oneâs experience is categorically different from the ordinary human experience. And both make it harder to engage realistically with the world.
Manson doesnât shy away from a mathematical reality: for every exceptional person, there are millions who are average. For every top-tier musician, athlete, or entrepreneur, there are hundreds of thousands of people who tried equally hard and didnât make it. Most people will not be famous, exceptional, or extraordinary by any conventional metric.
Hereâs what makes this more than just harsh arithmetic: the problem isnât being average. The problem is believing you deserve to be exceptional, and then feeling like a failure when youâre not.
A person who accepts their ordinariness and finds genuine satisfaction in ordinary life â good relationships, meaningful work, contribution to community â lives far better than a person who believes theyâre destined for greatness and spends their life falling short of it.
Accepting that you are not special in the grand scheme of things is not depressing. It is, paradoxically, liberating. When you stop expecting the universe to treat you specially, you can engage with reality as it actually is â and find genuine satisfaction in the ordinary.
Thereâs a cultural pressure â particularly acute in developed Western countries â to be remarkable. Social media amplifies this by showing curated highlight reels of othersâ lives, making ordinary life feel inadequate by comparison. Everyone else seems to be achieving something extraordinary, traveling somewhere exotic, building something impressive.
This creates what Manson calls a âtyranny of exceptionalismâ â an expectation that every aspect of life should be above average, exciting, and noteworthy. But most of life is simply not like that, and it never was.
Most days are routine. Most work is unglamorous. Most relationships involve navigating mundane conflicts. Most achievements are invisible to anyone but the person who made them. And this is fine. This is life.
The people who live well are not necessarily the people who achieve extraordinary things. They are often the people who have made peace with ordinary life and find genuine satisfaction in it â in the daily practice of a craft, in the accumulated small moments of a good marriage, in the quiet contribution of work that helps others without making headlines.
Mansonâs key reframe is this: accepting your averageness is not a resignation to mediocrity. It is a realistic foundation from which genuine growth can happen.
When you believe youâre special, you interpret failure as a contradiction of your core identity â catastrophic and threatening. When you accept youâre ordinary, failure is just information: something didnât work, letâs try differently.
Genuine humility â the honest recognition that you are one of billions of human beings, all of whom struggle with the same basic fears, desires, and limitations â is not a failure of confidence. It is the foundation of real confidence: the kind that doesnât need constant external validation because it doesnât rest on the illusion of superiority.
The people who are genuinely secure are usually not the loudest in the room. They are the ones who can sit with discomfort, accept criticism without crumbling, and engage with reality without needing it to affirm their specialness.
What does accepting your ordinariness actually look like in practice?
Think about an area of your life where you feel entitled â where you believe you deserve better outcomes than youâre getting. Is this entitlement based on genuine evidence, or on an assumption that youâre more special than ordinary circumstances? What would it feel like to fully accept the ordinary nature of that situation?