Is ‘being ordinary’ on anyone's New Year’s Resolution list?
How being ordinary might be one of our most overlooked and undervalued human attributes
The start of a new year is, predictably, a moment of resolution. We are encouraged to reflect on what we will improve, optimise, or become: healthier, more productive, more fulfilled. Progress is imagined as upward movement, where we start small and with the help of our resolutions, we can live well and become a better version of ourselves.
But perhaps what tends not to get attention is how narrow this vision of the good life has become. It leaves little room for continuity, maintenance, or simply being good enough so that standing still can be considered stagnation. In other words, ordinariness is something to be overcome rather than sustained. And this does not stop at January resolutions; it extends to work, politics, culture, and moral life more broadly, such that exceptionalism is privileged over sufficiency and peaks of performance over steadiness.
We will explore the case that ‘ordinariness’ is perhaps less a failure of ambition or imagination but is instead a structural requirement of contemporary life. Most systems do not depend on continuous improvement or peak performance, but on repetition, maintenance, and the capacity to simply keep going. And yet, despite it’s importance, we do not credit it with the importance that it deserves.
This raises some hard questions for behavioural science, which has largely been built around moments of decision, interventions, and change, and has paid much less attention to how people sustain effort and remain involved in systems that rarely work as designed.
We ask the question of whether being ordinary is perhaps a human strength that is one of our most important, yet overlooked and underexplored qualities.
The work of the ordinary
Ordinariness rarely features explicitly in political, cultural or organisational analysis, partly simply because it is designed not to. Instead, it operates as what we might call background infrastructure: the routines, habits, tacit judgements, shared ways of living that allow us to live without constant explanation or justification. This means that when it works, it disappears. In this sense, ordinariness provides our lives with a set of taken-for-granted conditions that enable coordination without friction.
From a psychological perspective, it has long been established that we simply need a “good enough” environment for early caregiving: predictable, unremarkable, and not one demanding constant monitoring or response. Subsequent work has extended this insight beyond childhood, showing that when ordinary environments erode, whether in families, workplaces, or institutions, then anxiety tends to fill the gap, and our behaviour becomes more defensive, brittle, or performative.
And from a sociological perspective, much of our day-to-day social order is maintained through what is unspoken, relying on shared, routinised assumptions that simply do not need to be articulated. The trivial, in this sense, is not a space filler but has an active role organising work whilst not shouting about itself. But when everyday assumptions become visible, contested, or moralised, then coordination becomes more effortful rather than more secure.
From an institutional perspective, Richard Sennett’s work shows what ordinariness contributes to organisational life. Across studies of craftsmanship, authority, and work, Sennett suggests that institutions rely heavily on routine competence, tacit skill, and the slow accumulation of practical judgement. These ordinary forms of capability allow work to proceed without constant oversight, innovation, or self-presentation. They stabilise cooperation, support learning over time, and make sustained participation possible even in complex settings.
Taken together, these perspectives suggest that we can start thinking more clearly about: it is not simply a passive background but instead allows systems to function without constant strain. The implication here is that eroded, overloaded, or made into something that is permanently visible, then friction multiplies.
The illegitimacy of the ordinary
Despite the value of the ordinary, this stage has typically had little legitimacy. Societies increasingly frame adequacy, restraint, and continuity not as virtues but as signs of a lack. Ordinariness is often associated with a lack of ambition, adaptability, or drive in cultures that attach value to visibility, aspiration, and continual self-advancement. And this is not merely a cultural preference but a moral judgement.
Contemporary organisational and policy language increasingly references qualities that exceed the ordinary: resilience, agility, passion, purpose, and high performance. These are presented as neutral virtues, but instead, theorists suggest, they serve to distinguish those who can sustain exceptional demands from those who cannot. And this distinction is as much one of moral character rather than simply capacity: cultures organised around achievement and recognition tend to treat limits, dependence, and modest aspiration as signs of personal failure.
And these are individual, personal failures as Barbara Ehrenreich showed in her analysis of the way encouragements of positivity and self-transformation divert structural limitations into individual responsibility. This means that what cannot be overcome is seen as an attitudinal challenge.
So, we have a contradiction. On the one hand, modern institutions rely on ordinary labour such as routine competence, informal coordination, care, and maintenance, but on the other hand, it is devalued in language and expectations. Ordinariness is critical to our functioning, but unacknowledged.
A wider intellectual shift: from exception to maintenance
This is consistent with the academic environment where across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a shift has taken place across the humanities and social sciences, turning away from models that privilege rupture, heroism, optimisation, and peak moments and instead towards frameworks that foreground maintenance, repair, and the ordinary conditions of continuation.
In the field of history, a twentieth-century shift away from event-centred narratives redirected attention toward long durations and routine practices, most notably through the rise of everyday history. What mattered was no longer only what changed the world, but what kept it going.
In sociology and anthropology, attention has increasingly shifted from norms as formal rules to norms as lived practice. Everyday living, tacit knowledge, and informal work has came into focus, with our social lives understood as something we actively sustain through routine action rather than simply imposed from above.
In feminist theory, this turn was probably the sharpest. Care, emotional labour, domestic work, and endurance, long treated as private or pre-political, have been re-theorised as central to how societies reproduce themselves. What had been dismissed as “ordinary” was revealed to be structurally necessary for a functioning society, yet unevenly distributed.
Across these areas, it seems that the central problem is no longer how to produce change, but how to sustain life under pressure. The ordinary is where coordination happens, where harm can be managed, and where endurance is navigated.
When the background won’t stay in the background
One of the defining characteristics of modern society is that of culture wars: often described as disputes over values or identity, we can also see them as conflicts over the organisation of ordinary social interactions. They operate by bringing ordinary practices into permanent visibility: how people speak, teach, care, joke, discipline, manage, consume, or remain silent is no longer allowed to remain unremarkable; it is read as a signal of allegiance or intent. Everything is required to mean something.
This is how symbolic power operates – it is less about imposing beliefs but is instead about imposing the requirement to justify. This means that what once ‘went without saying’ is forced into articulation, meaning that routine judgements are subject to an explicit moral evaluation and background practices are elevated into tests of legitimacy. This means that everyday decisions such as what to eat, what to buy or avoid, are increasingly seen as moral statements, requires justification in ethical terms (such as sustainability, health or societal responsibility). Ordinary consumption begins to function as a form of expressive labour: choices are expected to signal values, awareness, and responsibility, rather than simply meeting needs.
The effect is greater friction in everyday life as low-stakes interaction becomes high-stakes. People end up second-guessing themselves in situations that previously relied on shared, if imperfect, understandings. A state of ordinariness is harder to sustain if everyday life is one in which we are continually asked to account for ourselves.
The ordinary is not equally distributed
Importantly, when we demand people to explain themselves, these pressures are not evenly distributed. As Alva Gotby argues, if we demand people to explain themselves then this privileges those with time, energy, and linguistic confidence. This makes culture wars so exhausting: it is often less about resolving disagreement and more to do with escalating the baseline of what participation in everyday life requires of us.
And this comes with dangers: philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that when common sense erodes, we become increasingly dependent on ideology or authority to orient ourselves. What is lost is not simply a form of consensus, but the ordinary capacity to act without instruction from above. And this seeps into everything from organisational life, digital platforms, and personal relations, continually converting ordinary situations into sites of moral scrutiny.
The question then becomes how much exposure, explanation, and emotional labour anyone can reasonably sustain. When ordinary practices are repeatedly pulled into scrutiny, behaviour recalibrates. We typically do not make a coordinated refusal or a collective exit, but there is an adjustment. We remain present while reducing the surplus energies, the extra hours, the additional care, that these systems rely on.
Seen against this backdrop, behaviours that are often described as disengagement begin to look different.
Opting out without leaving
Take quiet quitting, a term that was trending a couple of years ago. Commonly framed as a collapse in work ethic, it is perhaps more accurately understood as a response to the moralisation of work. If employment increasingly demands not only competence, but enthusiasm, identification, and emotional availability then we may find that while participation persists, its scope narrows. This means that tasks are completed but additional commitment is withdrawn. Work is given a more ordinary status: bounded, means to an end, finite.
A similar pattern appears in politics. Declining turnout, protest fatigue, and political disengagement are often interpreted as a crisis with democracy. But these shifts can also be read as responses to a political environment organised around spectacle, outrage, and constant mobilisation. We have limited capacity to remain in a permanent state of moral outrage so participation becomes more ad-hoc and situational.
Digital life is another example with reduced public posting, preference for private group chats, and minimal digital traces, often framed as withdrawal. Yet recent analysis by Kyle Chayka describes a shift toward ‘posting zero,’ in which ordinary users no longer see incentive in broadcasting their lives publicly. Social interaction does not disappear; it migrates into lower-visibility, more private, and more ordinary forms, such as direct messages and small-group chats.
Shifts in consumption follow the same structure. Repair, reuse, and non-participation are often seen as sustainability practices, but they can also reflect disengagement from a system in which identity is expected to be continually expressed through the choices we make. As Eva Illouz has shown, consumption functions as a form of expressive and moral labour rather than simple use or need. On this basis, reducing participation is a way of lowering cognitive and emotional demands on us and avoiding making a statement.
The historian E. P. Thompson famously showed how everyday expectations form a moral economy: a shared sense of what is tolerable, fair, or decent in ordinary life. When these expectations are violated, resistance does not necessarily take the form of overt confrontation. More often, it appears as withdrawal, non-compliance, or the quiet redefinition of norms. We necessarily stay inside systems of everyday life but adjust how much visibility, and emotional labour we supply. Our participation does not end but it does become thinner, quieter, and more constrained.
The danger that also lives in the ordinary
At this point, the argument requires a complication. Social theory has long recognised that power does not operate only through rupture or force, but through normalisation. Practices become durable not because they are uncontested, but because they are repeated. What is repeated comes to feel inevitable; what feels inevitable is less likely to be questioned. Ordinariness lowers cognitive and moral alertness, encouraging continuity rather than interruption.
As Arendt famously argued, some of the most serious forms of harm are enabled not by fanaticism or ideological extremity, but by habit, procedure, and compliance with everyday roles. Violence appears not as excess, but as behaviour that presents itself as “nothing out of the ordinary.”
Feminist scholars have shown how asymmetric power relations shape what is allowed to become ordinary. The private, the domestic, and the taken-for-granted are not neutral spaces but historically structured by gender, dependency, and silence. Much of what appears “natural” or “just how things are” rests on unpaid, feminised labour: care, emotional regulation, social smoothing, endurance. So where power is uneven, ordinariness can stabilise domination. From this perspective, the problem is not ordinariness itself, but unexamined ordinariness under conditions of unequal power.
This suggests that ordinariness can function in two distinct ways. First ordinariness as refusal limits capture. It withdraws intensity, visibility, and surplus emotional energy from systems that demand us to be escalating and optimising. But ordinariness can also act as cover, allowing power to dominate by rendering it familiar, routinised, and socially unremarkable.
Although they may appear the same, they are not. The implication is not that the ordinary should be abandoned, but rather that it should be something which we can disrupt. There is a need for power relations to be visible, contestable, and subject to challenge so that the ordinary does its work of allowing people to live reasonably: with familiarity, continuity, and trust. Only through this can the ordinary be the infrastructure through which a good life is sustained.
Ordinariness as a human capacity
Being ordinary is rarely considered a skill in its own right. But as we have seen, human life is sustained not through constant decision or expression, but through background continuity, having a world that is stable enough to act within.
This means that our ordinariness is the way we regulate exposure to systems that demand we exceed our capacity. Political theorist Philip Pettit emphasises that freedom is not only exercised through voice or participation, but through the ability to remain unexceptional, to avoid being constantly mobilised, categorised, or intensified. Under these conditions, ordinariness functions as a boundary-setting capacity: it limits how much of the self is made available for extraction.
From a systems perspective, this capacity is critical. Complex systems do not fail only through shock; they fail through exhaustion. What keeps systems viable over time is not continuous optimisation, but tolerance for slack, redundancy, and low-intensity functioning. Ordinariness is the human version of that principle, absorbing fluctuation, smoothing, allowing imperfect conditions without resulting in collapse.
This is a challenge for behavioural science as much work tends to focus on moments of activation: decisions, nudges, incentives, interventions. Ordinariness operates elsewhere is perhaps what happens between decisions, how people manage disappointment, ambiguity, and sustain effort in systems that rarely work as designed. Its effects are long-term, cumulative rather than immediate, muted rather than expressive.
Seen in this light, ordinariness is less a failure to engage and more a capacity for staying human under pressure.
This suggests that the behavioural task is not always to increase motivation or intensity but to defend the ordinary and design systems that do not require exceptional effort, constant vigilance, or moral performance in order to function. In a world increasingly organised around exceptionalism, being ordinary is not a deficit but a form of judgement.
Conclusions
There is a strong case that, whilst being ordinary today is not about rejecting change or ambition, it is about resisting a model of participation that treats intensity as a virtue and exhaustion as evidence of insufficient commitment. Ordinariness, it seems, can be about refusing the idea that a life must constantly prove its worth to count but also question systems that only function when people exceed what is reasonable.
Seen in this way, we can see how low key adjustments people make such reduced participation, clear boundaries to effort, a retreat from having permanent visibility point to a mismatch between what contemporary systems all too often demand and what we can personally can sustain. Being ordinary becomes the way in which that mismatch is expressed.
For behavioural science, this is perhaps a little uncomfortable as if behaviour is shaped by overload rather than ignorance, then the problem is not always a job that is about managing our behavioural lives - it is instead a matter of excessive demand. The task is not simply to behaviourally ‘activate’ people, but to ask what kinds of participation is reasonable in the first place. And what can be left unoptimized and unexpressed.
Perhaps a defence of the ordinary means reshaping how life is organised so that participation does not depend on constant performance. At the societal level, it means resisting cultures that equate worth with constant visibility and moral signalling of our choices, whilst allowing shared spaces where people can belong simply without having to explain themselves. In the public sector, we might suggest this involves designing systems that work for ordinary capacity rather than heroic effort to get solutions. This means making continuity is easy, having to justify to be kept minimal. For brands, it perhaps this means earning legitimacy through being reliable and restraint rather than constant attention: fitting into everyday life without demanding a values alignment, some kind of identity attachment in return.
Looking at 2026 and how this may pan out, we may not see some kind of sudden mobilisation or huge rupture but perhaps people quietly redrawing the boundaries of what they will give, explain, or endure could ultimately be a bigger disruptive influence.
In an age that celebrates exceptionalism, reclaiming the ordinary may well be the most radical act as it sets out the way that a human life should be liveable.
Implications for brands
Ordinariness may well become increasingly a signal of trustworthiness and fit, rather than appearing as a lack of distinctiveness. This means that brands that integrate quietly into everyday routines may well be relied on more than those that demand attention.
Over-signalling purpose, values, or identity risks turning consumption into emotional labour. This subtly raises the cost of engagement and might encourage withdrawal rather than loyalty.
Qualities that matter may well now relate to reliability, clarity, and restraint - more than novelty. In 2026, being easy to live with may well outperform being exciting.
Brands that respect opting out, such as fewer prompts and optional engagement, may be better aligned with how people now manage their cognitive and emotional bandwidth.
Implications for government and public sector
There is a danger that systems that require constant explanation, proof, or self-advocacy treat citizens’ capacity as unlimited and in the process exclude those with less time, energy, or confidence.
Public services may work best when they blend into the background of ordinary life with minimal vigilance, performance, and justification, but at the same time can be interruptible when power is uneven or harm is present.