Being Average

For Thoreau, social conformity creates a dull and deadening averaging tendency. He ends Walden with a parable about a “beautiful bug” that, having been deposited as an egg some sixty years previous in an apple tree, gnaws its way out of the kitchen table built from the wood of that tree. “Who knows,” Thoreau asks, “what beautiful and winged life . . . may unexpectedly come forth . . . to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!” For Thoreau, we capitulate to being average; it is not our destiny.

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As a young man, I wanted to zig-zag, to tack, to feint and juke, rather than straighten to the average tendency. I wanted to be one of those fireworks that spins wildly, shooting off sparks and bursting into a mad profusion of clamor and color. I was determined to be one of the chosen, one of the elect, polymathic, an outlier, off the chart, gauge-breaking, one of a kind.

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In my last year of Little League baseball, I lost only one game as a pitcher and led the league in home runs. In my first year of American Legion baseball, I won only one game and hit no home runs. Fifteen years ago, in a slow-pitch softball league, I had no hits. I never hit the ball out of the infield. My career in slow-pitch softball was unsullied by success.

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The word “average” is taken to mean normal, ordinary, in the middle, what most things are. As an arithmetic mean, it denotes the sum of items divided by the number of items. It is not to be confused with “median,” the middle number in an ordered sequence, nor with “mode,” the most frequently occurring number. In its common usage, “average” means all three; it means being meaned, medianed, and moded

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Moby Dick is now considered an extraordinary novel, above average’s above average, a masterpiece, perhaps the greatest ever written. Pure lyricism spills from Melville’s pen. The novel tells a dark truth about human nature and the universe, a universe Ahab defies. It explores Miltonic themes of fate and free will. It is celebrated for its democratic spirit. Most book reviewers at the time praised it for its imaginative sweep. Readers, however, were unimpressed; the novel did not sell. “Dollars damn me,” he told his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. He couldn’t write what he wanted to write and make a living. He turned to poetry and lived out his years, forgotten except as a less than average American writer, as a tax collector in New York. His reputation underwent a revival beginning with his centennial in 1919, and by the mid-1930s he had been catapulted from the rank of a lesser writer to the pantheon of literary immortals, a tax-collecting Matthew who finally received his beatific summons.

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Rory Mcllroy, a 22 year-old Irishman, won the 2011 U.S. Open with a record-setting score of 16 under par, surpassing the previous record of 12 under par set by Tiger Woods in 2000. Mcllroy’s score will be bettered and he will become a footnoted second. That bettered score will be bettered yet again, and again, and Mcllroy’s score will come to seem customary, middling, average.

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Some interesting averages: The average weight for U.S. males is 191 pounds; for women, 140 pounds. Both men and women use 16,000 words per day; their vocabulary averages 5 to 6 thousand words. They repeat themselves a lot. On average Americans laugh 13 times per day, eat 35,000 cookies in a lifetime, have 1,460 dreams per year, eat 18 acres of pizza per day, and consumes 3.1 cups of coffee per day. On average, a full moon occurs every 29.5 days; a blue moon, two full moons in one month, occurs once every 2.5 years. Once in a blue moon I dream of laughingly eating a cookie-topped pizza and washing it down with Starbuck’s Venetian Robusto. With a Hersheys Milk Chocolate Bar with Almonds on the side. It averages 6 whole almonds per 52 gram (1.8 ounce) bar.

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The average age for getting bifocals is 40. I got bifocals at 40.

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The average measures a tendency toward centralization, but not everything has a central tendency. What is the central tendency of dogs? Of a dewed, sun-dappled meadow? Of ice cream? Of home and poetry and courage and mirth and dignity and the little shard of mystery we are?

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No one wants to be average. No one wants to appear ordinary to themselves, or to others. We almost always overestimate our knowledge, our common sense, our practicality. We almost always consider ourselves more original, more distinctive than we are. We set our lives to the meter of I-am-ic. We like to think of our lives as a bit of guerilla theater. What we fear is invisibility, a life unacknowledged, unheralded, ciphered, a cursive stroke written in disappearing ink. We fear cloaking conformity. To be average is a shackling littleness we desperately seek to leave behind. Average is tyrannous. The mean is mean.

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In 2010, the Scream Awards, given to movies in the horror, sci-fi, and fantasy genres, had 32 categories, including one for the best mutilation scene. In his book Everyone’s a Winner: Life in Our Congratulatory Culture, University of Delaware sociologist Joel Best introduces the term “status affluence,” a recent phenomenon exemplified by the proliferation of awards and the emergence of subcultures and lifestyle clusters where group identity is often consolidated by handing out or receiving awards. We are rapidly becoming average at being above average.

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The last line of Middlemarch, referring to the idealistic Dorothea: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

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At my last wellness screening, everything—blood pressure, BMI, HDL and LDLcholesterol, triglycerides—checked out average, within the normal range. Here, average is good. My weight is below, well below, the 190 pound average for males. Below average is considered bad, but in this case it is probably good. I drink more, much more, coffee than the 3.1 cups per day average. Above average is good, but in this case it is probably bad. “Average” is a slippery word, never definitive, always contingent on circumstance. There is always a slippage between public and private meaning, what the world knows and what we know. Too often we take the world’s word for it.

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To be average means to have been measured against something else. Average is a relational concept. It has the seductive, come-hither appeal of metrics. I’d like to think individual subjectivities are unaverageable, but even personally chosen measures of self-assessments are based on criteria we have internalized from the cultural milieu. Who is the “I” that measures? That is being measured? Are we available to ourselves as ourselves?

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Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture Atlas Slave depicts a half completed human figure that seemingly strains to break free and emerge from, to transcend, the block of marble that contains it. Thoreau’s apple-tree bug has a precedent. It is an old idea.

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A new genetic paradigm, called epigenetics, is currently taking shape in biology. It revises the idea that DNA is deterministic, that it acts as a foreordained blueprint, that our genome shapes who we will be. DNA is itself shaped by the cells that contain it. Our cells, it turns out, are affected by a variety of environmental factors, even by our social networks, and these factors cause chemicals to attach to the gene which control its expression. Life is creative, not foreordained; ongoing, not given; a sculpture in process, in transit, mustering itself. We are, beyond measure, beyond average. We are our own average.