In “Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary?” Joshua Rothman cuts deeply for The New Yorker:
What’s true for Little League holds for the rest of life. In some contexts, at some times, we strive for excellence, pushing ourselves. Elsewhere, we shrug, accepting our own ordinariness or mediocrity. The excellent and the ordinary coexist, but have an uneasy relationship. With phrases like “you win some, you lose some,” we acknowledge how, on an ordinary day, in an ordinary life, events cluster around a medium level of quality; in theory, we could be happy in the range between not-so-bad and pretty-good. Yet, for many people, it becomes difficult to find satisfaction in what’s regular. The excellent starts to shame the ordinary, leaving it worse off. We want to play winning seasons, not average ones. Having dunked once, we’d like to keep doing it. We’d prefer “great” weekends and vacations. On the largest scales, we oscillate between wanting to lead extraordinary lives and embracing the “merely” ordinary.
To paraphrase: if the questions are, is this it? Is this all there is? The answer is yes.