Aiming for "Good Enough" is Better than You Think—And Harder than it Sounds

Living into our ordinary, daily commitments is a path to an exceptional life.

The Harvesters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565.

I’ve often thought about how the world would change if we stopped trying to be “the best” and simply started trying to live ordinary but beautiful lives.

Social media, especially, seems to cultivate in us a sense that a worthy life must be publishable, enviable, beautiful, and exceptional. “Ordinary” is a failure. And trying to live a merely decent, good enough, life is so passé.

Someone might also suggest, more seriously, that aiming for “good enough” in our lives is an excuse for mediocrity. As the saying goes: dream great and your dreams will fall short. The idea here is that if you can come up with the most fantastic dream, your true life will follow. Then all you need to do is journal every morning, visualize your growth, and act. And those dreams will become a reality.

The Dangers of Being Exceptional

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with thinking about the overall trajectory of one’s life. It’s generally important to get clear on the most important things in front of us, think about how to habitualize those practices, and schedule them into your life. That is a large part of what I am trying to do with this writing project. After all, life is finite, we are going to die, and having a sense of your mission is important if you are going to live well for yourself and for others.

But I think that this kind of thinking—aiming for an outwardly exceptional life that rises above the herd—can also be harmful. Why is that? The mentality that it encourages says that your life is worthwhile only if it is exceptional, different, special. You need to be the next CEO of a fortune 500 company, the next president of the United States, the next New York Times bestseller.

Again, I’m not trying to deflate any of those goals. Having goals is a good thing! And big goals are a good thing. And aiming for excellence in your profession and work is also a good thing. My point rather is to suggest that if we are trying to pursue those external goals above all else, even our relationships, it certainly means that we will make ourselves and those around us unhappy. Because life is ultimately about relationships and communion.

For example, a big internal goal might be to practice honesty, courage, playfulness, moderation, or purity. A big relational goal might be to aim for a better relationship with your spouse, friends, children. As my wife recently told me, happy relationships don’t just happen. “People with thriving relationships don’t just ‘fall’ into them; they don’t just happen. Olympians don’t just wake up able to do the work they can do.” We don’t just wake up with perfect relationships either. We need to practice at them, daily, weekly, monthly. Year in, year out.

What Is “Good Enough” in Life?

What do I mean by aiming for “good enough,” for a decent life? I basically mean fulfilling our responsibilities in our relationships and living an upright—kind, faithful, generous, honest—life. And that is actually a lot harder than it sounds.

Many people claim that being a good spouse and parent as the most difficult thing they have ever done. It is also probably the most important work of their life, seeing as it deeply involves the lives of other people and their futures.

In more concrete terms, it means, for starters: getting up on time, making your bed, preparing breakfast for yourself and others, doing your daily work (whether it is in the house or outside it). It means preparing dinner and sweeping the floor and doing the dishes. It means keeping up with friends and family and sometimes leaving work early to see them. At some point, it will also mean keeping up with all of the above in the midst of sickness, unemployment, loss, and loneliness.

Heroism is Choosing Not to Escape Your Life

And it means avoiding all sorts of ways in which many people lose the trail: into compulsions, infidelity, workaholism, absentee parenthood, or whatever.

I think living a sober life is itself a major accomplishment. One psychologist has observed that what is surprising is not how many people develop addictions—what’s surprising is that not all of us become addicts. Why? It’s different for everybody. But, often enough, it’s because life is hard. And we want to escape. Simply choosing not to escape from the boredom of your life strikes me as heroic.

This can happen in small ways and large ways. Every time we open a new tab on a computer, or flick open a smartphone, or turn to email, it’s often an attempt to escape from the ordinary boredom and discomfort of the stuff in front of us.

We often forget that. And in the humdrum roll of our lives I wonder if it would help us to remember: look, by living faithfully, you are doing something heroic.

By resisting that temptation, by waking up in the morning, by changing the toilet paper roll, by practicing a moment of patience with your significant other or child or coworker, you are doing something that is actually quite exceptional.

By all means, if you are already living “good enough” by these standards, reach higher. But how many of us can honestly say: I am regularly fulfilling even the basic responsibilities due to my spouse, my children, my friends, my community? I, for one, still need plenty of practice in these ordinary yet important routines.

We can be so caught up in work, or else numbing ourselves on social media and the internet, dreaming of another life, that we miss the obvious “work” in front of us of living into our relationships with purpose and presence and charity.

Practicing Hope, Practicing Fidelity

Now, in the midst of this all, I am not saying life is about gritting your teeth, clenching your fist, and just powering through the dreariness of it all. We need adequate shelter, nutrition, sleep, and physical exercise. We need rest, relaxation, play, and recreation. It is helpful to have some time pursuing hobbies that have no ends beyond themselves. We need time in mediation and prayer and worship to connect with a purpose and plan greater than ourselves. Yes, absolutely!

But even with all that, the demon of insignificance can still creep up on us and whisper in your ear: “What you are doing does not matter. Your work and your life do not matter. It is unseen and of no value. You need to be famous, to be great, to be powerful, to be wealthy. Only then will you be enough. Only then will you be ‘seen’ by others. Only then will you be happy.” But that really is a lie.

To live a decent life—of fidelity to your responsibilities and relationships—is the most difficult task that this life offers. To do that well, even in relative obscurity, is not a failure. It is a task that few people actually live up to well. And while the fruits of such a life may not be wealth and fame, they are far more enduring.

One does not need to be on the front page of the paper to live a worthy life. One does not need to have a second vacation home in the Bahamas to have a worthy life. One does not need a chiseled body to live a worthy life. We just need to be faithful in the small commitments to ourselves and others, day in, day out.