为什么做一个普通人如此困难Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary?

Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary? It’s what most of us are, most of the time. Shouldn’t it be enough? By Joshua Rothman. My son’s Little League season started not long ago.

为什么做一个普通人如此困难?我们绝大多数人，在绝大多数时间里，都只是普通人。这难道还不够吗?我儿子的少棒联盟赛季前不久开始了。

A sign appeared at the ballpark offering a five-point list: These are KIDS. This is a GAME. Coaches are VOLUNTEERS. Umpires are HUMAN.No scholarships will be handed out today.

球场上挂出了一块牌子，列出了五点提示:他们还是孩子;这只是一场游戏;教练是志愿者;裁判也是普通人;今天这里不会发放任何奖学金。

The sign concluded with a simple “Thank you.” Grownups at the games had been decorated, but youth sports can often be out of control. The heavy vibes of Little League have many causes, rooted in a single question: How serious are youth sports supposed to be? Professional athletes pursue excellence, but kids aren’t professionals; many play just because their parents sign them up.

告示的结尾简单地写着“谢谢”。虽然我参加的几场比赛中成人都表现得相当得体，但青少年体育赛事往往容易失控。少棒联盟里那种沉重的氛围有诸多原因，但都源于一个问题:我们到底该对青少年体育抱有多认真的态度?职业运动员追求卓越，但孩子们并非职业选手，许多人打球只是因为父母给他们报了名。

On my son’s team, ambitious young athletes share the dugout with reluctant participants and kids wanting to throw a ball with friends. For every player crying over a strikeout, another has fun no matter what. After a bad defeat, my happy-go-lucky son ambled over to a frustrated teammate. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “We lost!” the boy exclaimed. My son looked surprised: “We did?”

在我儿子的球队里，立志出类拔萃的小运动员、心不甘情不愿的参与者，还有只想和朋友一起扔球的孩子共处一个休息区。有球员因三振出局而大哭，也有人无论如何都能自得其乐。一次惨败后，我那乐天派的儿子溜达到一个沮丧的队友身边。“怎么了?”他问。“我们输了!”那个男孩大喊。我儿子一脸惊讶:“输了吗?”

What’s true for Little League holds for life. Sometimes we strive for excellence; elsewhere, we accept our mediocrity. The excellent and the ordinary coexist uneasily. With phrases like “you win some, you lose some,” we acknowledge that events cluster around a medium quality. Yet, it becomes difficult to find satisfaction in what’s regular. The excellent shame the ordinary, leaving it worse off.

少棒联盟里的现象，同样适用于生活。有时我们力求卓越;而其他时候，我们接受自己的平庸。卓越与平凡的共存总是难以融洽。通过“有赢就有输”这样的话，我们承认了事物往往维持在中等水平。然而，要在寻常事物中找到满足感变得愈发困难。卓越让平凡感到羞愧，使其处境更加糟糕。

We want winning seasons, not average ones. Having dunked once, we’d like to keep doing it. We prefer great weekends. On large scales, we oscillate between wanting extraordinary lives and embracing the merely ordinary. Society is shaped by the relentless pursuit of excellence. Cars and houses get bigger, grades inflate, and parents spend more hours with their children than in previous generations.

我们渴望打出获胜的赛季，而不是表现平平。有过一次扣篮，我们就想不断重温。我们向往精彩绝伦的周末。在宏观层面上，我们总是徘徊在渴望非凡人生和拥抱纯粹平凡之间。整个社会都被对卓越的无休止追求所塑造。汽车和房子越来越大，分数持续膨胀，父母花在孩子身上的时间比前几代人都要多。

“There’s a lot of talk of ‘That’s amazing!'” comedian Maria Bamford says. There’s no room for a two-star experience. Against constant progress, ordinaryness feels like backsliding. Recently, I made an album of drifdy music from my mother-in-law’s harp recordings. It’s decent, which means I can’t enjoy it; I only think of improvements. Without improvement, we get nowhere; without excellence, we wallow.

“社会上充斥着‘太不可思议了！’这样的赞美，”喜剧演员玛丽亚·班福德说。这里已经没有“两星级体验”的立足之地。在不断进步的背景下，平凡让人感觉像在倒退。最近，我用岳母弹奏竖琴的录音制作了一张空灵风格的专辑。水准还过得去，这意味着我无法享受它;我满脑子想的都是哪里还能改进。不改进就停滞不前，没有卓越就会沉沦。

Yet many are trapped in what philosopher Avram Alpert calls “greatness thinking.” An obsession with greatness begins as a meaningful response to an imperfect life but spirals out of control because the extraordinary is statistically rare. Veering between striving and settling, a person caught in this trap struggles to admire the best without making everything else seem worse. Why must everything be so good?

然而，许多人陷入了哲学家阿夫拉姆·阿尔珀特所说的“伟大思维”之中。对伟大的痴迷最初是对不完美生活的积极回应，但它极易失控，因为从概率上讲，非凡本就是罕见的。陷入这种陷阱的人在奋斗与妥协间摇摆，很难在欣赏顶尖事物的同时不让其他一切显得黯然失色。为什么每件事都非得那么好不可？

One answer is that philosophers have spent millennia arguing for excellence. Aristotle used the term arete, expressing maximized potential. A given thing’s arete reflected its nature. A person achieved arete by being highly moral and rational. Alpert quotes Aristotle urging us to live in accordance with our best. Aristotelian excellence is scalar: the better you are, the better you have to be.

一个答案是，哲学家们花了数千年的时间为卓越辩护。亚里士多德使用了“aretē”（卓越）一词来表达将潜能发挥到极致。事物的卓越反映了其本质。人通过尽可能具备道德和理性来实现卓越。阿尔珀特引用亚里士多德的话，敦促我们遵循内在的闪光点去生活。这种卓越是阶梯状的：你越优秀，你就必须变得更优秀。

For a schoolkid,arete might mean trying hard;for an athlete, it means discipline.The problem is that Aristotle’s is only one argument. Kant believed we have a duty to be great. Nietzsche thought overcoming limitations to achieve great things is crucial. Existentialists sensed that halfhearted activity amounts to not taking responsibility for your life. These arguments outweigh the intuition that ordinary life is meaningful.

对学生而言，卓越可能意味着努力拼搏；对运动员来说，它意味着严格自律。问题在于，亚里士多德的观点只是众多论述之一。康德认为我们有责任尽可能成就伟大。尼采认为克服局限以成就伟业至关重要。存在主义者则觉得，半吊子做事等同于不对人生负责。这些观点压倒了“平凡生活也充满意义”的直觉。

They are joined by familial and psychological pressures. And then there’s social and economic competition. The sum is a lifestyle that turns talents into a desire to win spots atop competitive hierarchies. This tendency is at the heart of much that is wrong in our world. Alpert’s book imagines a reality where the desire to be great is replaced by aiming to be “good enough.”

伴随而来的还有家庭和心理层面的压力。当然，还有社会和经济领域的竞争。这一切构成了一种生活方式，它将我们的天赋转化为一种想在竞争等级顶端占据一席之地的欲望。这种倾向正是我们世界许多问题的核心。阿尔珀特的书构想了一个现实，在这个世界里，对伟大的渴望被“足够好”的目标所取代。

A good-enough life is characterized by decency and sufficiency. It incorporates limitation: we are limited, and others’ limitations are opportunities for mutual aid. You might wonder if society could actually be reoriented this way.

足够好生活的特征是体面和知足。它包含局限性：我们都有局限，而他人的局限正是我们互助的契机。你可能会好奇，社会是否真能以此为导向重构。

Won’t people cease exceptional work if greatness isn’t the goal? Alpert argues that what is truly unrealistic is believing we can survive our greatness culture with its inherent inequalities.

如果伟大不再是目标，人们难道不会停止杰出的工作吗?阿尔珀特认为，真正不切实际的想法，是我们竟然相信自己能在充满不平等的伟大文化中继续生存下去。

“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough,” Stuart Smalley used to say on TV. He represented writers suggesting we embrace good-enoughness for personal happiness. Yet such strategies are often greatness thinking in disguise and too incompatible with social pressures. The ideology of greatness is ingrained.

“我已经足够好了，我也足够聪明，”电视上的斯图尔特·斯莫利曾这样说。他代表了那些建议人们为个人幸福去拥抱”足够好”的作家。然而，这类策略往往是披着伪装的伟大思维，且与社会压力格格不入。伟大的意识形态已根深蒂固。

Alpert doesn’t diminish genius, but notes there are always more talented people than available positions. Our systems fail at harnessing the abilities of 7.7 billion good-enough humans.

阿尔珀特并未贬低天才，但他指出，才华横溢的人总是多于现有的职位空缺。我们的体系未能有效利用77亿“足够好”的人类所具备的能力。

“The Good-Enough Life”explores dislodging greatness from our minds. Being a good-enough friend might open you up to more connections. Alpert follows Donald W. Winnicott in seeing ordinariness as both relaxing and difficult.

《足够好的生活》探讨了如何将对伟大的执念从头脑中剔除。做一个足够好的朋友可能会为你开启更多的连接。阿尔珀特追随唐纳德·W·温尼科特的观点，将平凡视为既令人放松又充满挑战的事物。

Sometimes it is easier to go all-out for individual greatness than to accept yourself as an ordinary person among others. Being ordinary responsibly takes energy; you must turn from personal aims to aligning efforts with everyone else. Is there a positive case for actively pursuing ordinariness? It’s hard to discern because ordinary life is infrequently represented in art, likely because it is seen as boring.

有时，全力以赴去追求个人伟大，比接受自己是芸芸众生中的普通一员要容易得多。负责任地保持平凡需要耗费精力;你必须从个人目标转向让自己的努力与众人相契合。是否有一个主动追求平凡的正当理由?这很难看清，因为平凡生活在艺术中鲜少被呈现，大概是因为它被视作无聊。

In Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” Anna’s messed-up life is fascinating, while Levin’s mundane existence is less fun to read. Two narratives do focus on the ordinary: comedy and realism. In “Seinfeld,” we see regular people talking about nothing, delighting in heightened triviality. In “Ulysses,” we zoom in on shabby daily details. Both succeed in showing the everyday, but they also twist it into something different.

在托尔斯泰的《安娜·卡列尼娜》中，安娜一团糟的生活令人着迷，而列文平淡无奇的日常则没那么有趣。有两种叙事确实聚焦平凡:喜剧和现实主义。在《宋飞正传》中，普通人聊着毫无意义的琐事，陶醉于被放大的琐碎中。在《尤利西斯》中，镜头拉近到略显破败的日常细节。两者都成功展示了平凡，但也将其扭曲成了别的东西。

Narrative dynamics pull us toward greatness thinking; stories need heroes brought low. Many forces actively obscure the virtues of ordinary life. In “Boyhood,” Karl Ove Knausgaard reflects on his father, having fewer memories of his mother. Domestic labor is undervalued; a mother’s care is overshadowed by a dad’s histrionics. Yet Knausgaard, now a father, wants to keep his own role submerged and taken for granted.

叙事的内在动力将我们推向伟大思维;故事需要被击垮的英雄。许多力量在掩盖平凡生活的美德。在《童年岛屿》中，卡尔·奥韦·克瑙斯高回忆父亲，而对母亲的记忆却寥寥无几。家务劳动总被轻视;母亲的关爱被父亲戏剧化的举动掩盖。然而，如今已为人父的克瑙斯高，却想隐藏自己的角色并被视为理所当然。

“Should they have completely forgotten I was there when they turn forty themselves, I will thank them,” he writes of his children. It is almost as though he wants to protect ordinariness by keeping it ordinary. When ordinariness is elevated, does it risk becoming extraordinary and losing its character? If we value only the best experiences, we might look askance at our ordinary life.

他在谈及孩子时写道：“如果等他们到了四十岁时，完全忘记了我存在过，我会感激他们。”这就好像他想通过保持平凡本来面目来守护这份平凡。当平凡被捧上神坛时，它是否会面临变成非凡事物并失去其特性的风险？如果我们只看重顶尖体验，我们可能就会用怀疑的眼光看待平凡的生活。

To properly cherish the ordinary, we must do so without making it into something extraordinary—that would be greatness thinking. To ground yourself in the ordinary, you might have to accept that life is made of stuff you’ll forget. You may have to resolve the tension between ideas like “value” and “ordinary.” We ask, “Is this all there is?” The answer might be “yes.”

为了正确地珍视平凡，我们绝不能把它强行变成某种非凡的东西——那就是伟大思维。为了让自己在平凡中扎根，你可能必须接受生活本就是由你会遗忘的琐事构成的。你或许需要去化解“价值”与“平凡”这类概念之间的冲突。我们会问：“生活就仅仅如此吗？”而答案很可能是：“是的。”

主旨

文章通过青少年体育赛事中成人对“卓越”的过度追求切入，深入探讨现代社会对“伟大”的无休止向往及其引发的焦虑，引入“伟大思维”概念，剖析其对平凡生活的挤压。进而结合哲学观点（亚里士多德、康德、尼采等）、社会现象与个人案例，对比“卓越”与“平凡”的关系，提出“足够好生活”的理念——以体面、知足和互助为核心，接纳局限而非盲目追逐非凡。最终引导读者反思如何在叙事、艺术与生活实践中珍视平凡，化解“价值”与“平凡”的冲突，回归真实的生活体验。