The Glory of the Ordinary

Not long ago, I was sitting on my couch in my apartment in the middle of New York City, scrolling through endless videos on my phone. The afternoon sun snuck in through my window and reflected on the screen I had been staring at for an hour. As video after video of both strangers’ and friends’ lives swept by on a digital stream to nowhere, I found myself transfixed, gazing on in raptured interest. Each clip, each sliver of film, gave me a peek into the fascinating moments countless others were currently living around the world. A large portion of the videos were people in interesting places doing interesting things — a romantic vacation to Europe with their significant other, a gourmet meal at a new restaurant with friends, a red carpet event with a celebrity sighting, a breathtaking hike in a national park.

I looked up from my phone and out my fifth story window that looked across the sprawling metropolis that is Manhattan. I sighed as I remembered that New York City was the greatest city in the world, filled with the greatest food, art, and entertainment the world has ever known, just on the other side of my front door. And here I was, in the middle of it, sprawled on my couch, where I had been for a week, more or less. I thought back over my week to all the places and things I had done and realized how un-Instragrammable my life had become.

I had taken a couple of walks on my usual path through Central Park, gotten a tea at my regular boba spot, sat on a different couch in my friend’s apartment like I always do, and seen a movie with my friends at the same theater we’ve been going to every week for five years. A twinge of both depression and guilt rushed over me as I contemplated the juxtaposition between the videos of people adventuring to fascinating places and doing amazing things and the very predictable life I was living, even in the middle of New York City. It’s not that I don’t have a good reason that my list of regular places is small — cities are very expensive, and as a writer/creative, I work from home. But the real truth is, I go to the same handful of places and do the same handful of things with the same handful of people because I like it, and I feel bad about that.

We currently live in a dystopian age where lives are no longer lived; they’re performed, they’re filmed, like little movies or reality TV shows for the world’s entertainment. The more interesting the show and its characters, the more comments, likes, and engagement. Some people actually make a living out of this digital life performance, but many of us do it for free. And if there’s something that we’ve all learned, whether we’re digital performers or scrolling viewers, it’s that the all-powerful algorithm will bless better, bigger, more interesting content.

This means we aren’t just exposed to the lives of the rich and famous celebrities thumbing through a magazine in the checkout line, stars that we can contextualize as “other” than us and not objects to compare our lives to. Now we are exposed to thousands of “normal” people, even our friends, who all seem to be living exceedingly more interesting lives than we are, often marked by the seemingly endless amount of fascinating places they go, the activities they take part in, and the cool people they do it with.

As a result of this algorithmically influenced phenomenon, we have now begun to associate a good life with one that is filled with a never ending succession of new places, notable activities, with novel people. But is that the truth?

Just a few years ago, during a global pandemic when the entire world was stuck at home, in need of entertainment to fill up some of the endless hours inside, I decided to use some of my time to go back through and watch some of my favorite sitcoms from years past. I did this because, first, sitcoms have many episodes spanning many seasons to take up time with, and second, I love the genre of sitcom, a beautiful combination between live theater and film that culminates into a fantastic vehicle for great characters, witty dialogue, and simple but engrossing narratives. And I’m not alone in my love for sitcoms. While there are fewer now, they’ve been one of the most consistently beloved, watched, and culturally connective programs on television, stretching back decades and decades to shows like I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, all the way up through Seinfeld, Frasier, and Friends in the ’90s, to How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, and The King of Queens in the early aughts.

As I sat there on my couch in my tiny New York apartment, watching episode after episode of these beloved shows, something struck me. All of these shows take place in a small number of very normal locations: an apartment, an office, a home, a school, a coffee shop, or a bar. And not just occasionally — no, the entire series, countless episodes and numerous seasons of any particular show, would take place in just a couple of non-exciting, non-cool, places. What’s more is that they revolved around the lives of normal people — a delivery person, a psychiatrist, a struggling artist/writer, a stay at home mom.

With this realization, suddenly my entire definition of what a substantive and interesting life could be shifted. These shows were stories about normal people, doing normal things in normal places. They didn’t scoff or condescend at the normalcy; they reveled and celebrated it, revealing the beauty and value of what my friend Joseph calls “the glorious ordinary.”

As a culture now steeped in modernity, we have tacitly come to accept a definition for what a “good” or “interesting” life looks like. An unrealistic and even undesirable image constructed almost entirely from social media and peer pressure that says interesting lives are a never-ending series of stimulating new experiences, places, and people. But as I watch these sitcom series, ones that have captured the hearts, eyes, and souls of countless millions for almost one hundred years, I realize that these shows connected to us in such a meaningful way not in spite of the simplicity of the setting they took place in, but because of it.

These shows gave us a vision for what truly meaningful lives actually looked like. Lives that were filled with joy, connection, and love that occurred entirely in the midst of the ordinary. They told us that a meaningful life can and does take place in the normal places, with the normal people, doing the normal things in the places in which we all already dwell. Instead of explosions, car chases, exotic locations, and fancy parties, they showed us laughter in living rooms, deep conversations between friends on a couch, meals around the family table, births, deaths, arguments, falling in love. We see this celebration of beautiful lives lived in “normal” circumstances not only in sitcoms, but in some of the greatest written works ever penned. Living in New York City and working as an actor has allowed me to study, perform, and view some of the greatest plays ever written, and what’s stunning is just how many of those plays, written by the greats like Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Wilson, take place in a single everyday room. Even some of the greatest plays of Shakespeare take place in nothing more than rooms of a home. But for the ultimate example of a rich life, well lived in the context of normalcy, we need look no further than Christ, who changed the entire course of history, and yet spent most of his adult life in his hometown as a working carpenter, having conversations on hills with local fishermen.

The Apostle Paul wrote, “Make it your goal to live a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands.” In the handful of decades I have wandered this earth, I have been blessed enough to experience much of what this world has to offer. I’ve traveled around the world, dined in five-star restaurants, hung out with celebrities, gone to fancy parties, walked red carpets at film premieres, sat on top of mountains, sailed across seas, and had my fifteen minutes of fame — and I’m thankful for each of those experiences. But no matter what I do or where I go, I find my heart doesn’t long for those short-lived, flash-in-the-pan experiences that look good on social media or in movies, but rather it hungers for the things I know to be ultimately satiating. The basic human experiences like eating a meal with my family in my childhood home, taking a walk with my wife on the path we always take, having a deep conversation with my friend in his apartment, going for a drive and singing at the top of my lungs to my favorite songs — these are the moments that make life full, beautiful, and worth living. They are ordinary, but gloriously so.

We all will find ourselves with the occasional wave of discontentment when surveying the oft dreary monotony of our everyday lives. We will scroll and see pictures and videos of both celebrities and friends living what seem to be the newly agreed upon definition of a “good life” and feel we are missing out or wasting the short time on this earth caught in a soft cage of mundanity. But take heart and turn on an episode of your favorite sitcom to remind yourself, the most valuable and beautiful moments of your life will happen right there where you are, doing what you do, with the people around you now — in the midst of the glorious ordinary.

Nathan Clarkson is an award-winning film and television actor, a Publishers Weekly bestselling author, a Netflix trending filmmaker, and an iTunes top 100 podcast philosopher on The Overthinkers. He lives between the streets of New York City, the lights of Los Angeles, and the mountains of Colorado Springs. For more visit here.