Why modern life teaches us to fear obscurity
There seems to be a distinctly modern fear of an ordinary life, likely driven by the fantasies that have come to us throughout our lives via film, TV, and now a fully-steeped online experience that risks becoming more real than reality.
At this point, all of us have grown up with visions of Hollywood and stardom, world-class cars, boundless success. We see a life full of promise, adventure, fortune, beauty, and all forms of seduction.
And then we flick off the screen and find ourselves in our regular lives.
I used to be a bit embarrassed to tell people back in Canada that I had studied for years just outside of Vienna, had worked in and around London with a pop star’s manager as a singer myself, had learned languages and had many foreign friends, had worked in journalism for a stint in Spain and across Canada. I knew it sounded exotic and extraordinary. I didn’t like the insecurity it perhaps could trigger, how it made me feel different, or the idea that I may be presenting myself as more important as a result of the uncommon life I had led.
But more than anything, I didn’t like the incongruence between what it seemed to be when the words were coming out of my mouth—and what life really is, everywhere, no matter what we do.
Because fundamentally, inside of our own daily existence, all of life is ordinary.
The ordinary reality behind extraordinary lives
Yes, I would spend time wandering the streets of Vienna, stumbling into museums and praying before ancient shrines. I would read the best minds of our civilization in a centuries-old royal summer palace—complete with turrets! I would find myself in recording studios where some of the most famous songs of the century were written and produced, writing and singing my own.
But in between—which is always most of life—I would buy groceries. I would sleep. I would cry about being alone, or struggling with my health, or something beautiful I was reading. I would sneeze (always twice) at the cat hair in a place I was staying. I would call my family, build friendships and sometimes fall out with them, navigate budgeting, student loans, setting up bank accounts and wrangling unfair phone bills.
Famous performers often speak of this phenomenon and how difficult integrating it all is because, at the end of the day, no matter how many private jets or venue-clique glasses they order, they end up back in a hotel room or bedroom, empty. They have to shower, wash their hands, pry off the fake eyelashes, call their mom. They have to face that despite the god-like experience they may be having on stage, they are just normal, finite, ordinary people after the lights go down.
And one of the greatest sufferings in that life (the chronic drug overdoses, chaotic relational breakdown, and even suicides tell the tale despite the glittering perception) is that the ordinary itself becomes so difficult. They are forced to face their ordinariness no matter how much success erupts into their lives, but can barely reap the beauty of those fundamental human things.
Fame, obscurity, and what actually matters
Strangely, this beauty is exactly what so many fear. So many are concerned they will live and die in obscurity, without ever doing something of note.
And the truth is, most of us will—even the fantastically famous.
I remember someone telling me I reminded them of a famous singer from the 70s—someone, by the sounds of it and in my researching afterward seems to have been of Dua Lipa-level fame. I had no idea who she was. Many other similar stories have taken place in my time in entertainment, and I have usually not known the names when I was told: Eva Cassidy, Joan Baez, Linda Ronstadt. Even Joni Mitchell, with whom I share a hometown in Saskatchewan, was mostly obscure to me until my mid-twenties.
There are the Platos, Alexander the Greats, Joan of Arcs, and various royalty, emperors, military conquerers, philosophers, composers, and saints. But their memory is extraordinarily rare. Most of even the most famous fade quickly in a generation and are remembered only by God and a few who love them—who soon fade into obscurity, too.
Few of us even know our ancestors’ names beyond three preceding generations, much less anything meaningful about these people who make up our DNA.
The reality is that most of human life is obscure and small, even in its most famous, projected forms. Even the figures we know of have mostly been reduced to flickering legend. Very few can be said to be known as more than a kind of avatar for a time period. No one knows their real faces, and certainly no one knows their hearts.
Finding meaning in ordinary life
If even these can’t meaningfully be known, is the answer then a kind of hopeless fatalism, or an idea that nothing we do really matters?
Of course not.
What it is is an invitation to shift our thinking around what truly matters: the present, our capacity for love, and the people around us who are witness to who we are. For those with an eternal perspective, even more so we concern ourselves with what God sees and how we are living before His naked, burning eyes toward us. He is the only one who can bestow on us the value we seek: an “eternal memory.”
In the meantime, the ordinary and the present moment is where life truly happens, without reference to whether or not our names burst into the public consciousness for fifteen minutes or many centuries or never at all.
Our capacity to be attentive to reality and its richness is where we find a strong sense of self, meaningful belonging, and can cultivate an inner landscape full of the possibilities of the day. We can then live with an ordered, beautiful desire to pull every scrap of meaning from every pulsating moment, wherein there is a palpable universe of the extraordinary.
And that is the final point: our ordinary is the extraordinary, if we have eyes to see.
KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE 