t r a c y r u s s o . c o m

Beautifully Unspectacular

This is about a level of self consciousness so high in my generation, that it’s actually toxic….

I want to do is to shed a little light on why we’re all in the same boat, no matter the shape of the life we lead: because every one of us were told since birth that we were special. We were spoken to by name through a television. We were promised we could be anything that we wanted to be, if only we believed it and then, faster than we saw coming, we were set loose into the world to shake hands with the millions of other people who were told the exact same thing.

And really? Really? It turns out we’re just not all that special, when you break it down. Beautifully unspectacular, actually. And that truth is going to catch up with us whether we want to run from it or not. The paparazzo following me to the gym ain’t gonna be Herb Ritts and the guy he’s following ain’t gonna be Bob Dylan. It’s just a matter of how old you are once you embrace that fact.

So John Mayer has a blog. And I was going to mock this just a little bit until I got to the “beautifully unspectacular” phrase, which is, in and of itself, worth the link.

I’d think the ability to grasp normalcy would be hard after viewing life through the very tainted, (or maybe it should be twisted?), lens of living as a celebrity, but he identifies a very common condition of my generation.

He’s right. We were all told we were special. Extra-talented. Gifted. We were sorted into groups and given gold stars and taught how to have great self esteem.

But kids, sorry to break it to you, everyone can’t be special, it belies the meaning of the word. Some people have decent reasons for low self-esteem. And gold stars, well, they are meaningless wastes papers meant to lull you into behaving by creating a false atmosphere of competition.

At some point (for most of my friends it happened after they graduated from college, for me it was a bit earlier which largely accounts for my high school years) you realize no one really cares what your GPA was, or what club you were president of in high school. Gold stars don’t really have weight in the real world, and the whole system you’ve used to measure your successes suddenly doesn’t matter to anyone or even exist.

You recognize that it doesn’t matter how others judge you, what matters is how you judge yourself. Did you learn something from that experience? Did your work make a difference?

Eventually we make new measures of success. And hopefully they are more meaningful. Then somewhere along the way you learn to just be.

 (Slightly Related Note: I still think Mayer’s song “Waiting for the World to Change” is crap. If we wait around, change will never happen. It’s a catchy song with a horrible message. Don’t wait, act!)