Ask people what they want out of life and you’ll likely hear the big things: recognition, wealth, achievement, freedom, status. Ask them what they actually remember, years later, and the answers simplify: a meal, a friendship, a habit, a quiet place.

The structure of our culture makes the ordinary feel illegitimate. It’s treated as something you have to pass through in order to reach the “real.”

Technology amplifies exceptionality. Social media = designed to reward outliers, not lifers. The metrics we use for economic success privilege scale and novelty. The most common things - meals, conversations, errands - are filtered out as noise. If you want evidence, look at the genres that dominate TikTok or YouTube: spectacles, extremes, disruptions. Nobody goes viral for doing laundry - unless they’ve invented some outlandish life hack - but laundry is the actual rhythm of life.

The consequence: we live ordinary lives, but ordinary life is constantly devalued. The sacred becomes invisible, precisely because it’s everywhere.

Historians wrote about rulers, generals, and wars, because those events left obvious monuments. But in recent decades the discipline has expanded to consider the longue durée: the history of climate, food, migration, disease, and everyday practices. Braudel’s history of the Mediterranean focused on grain prices, ship routes, and the cycle of seasons. And it was radical because it forced us to confront the possibility that the “background” of history was the real substance all along.

Gibbon described Rome’s decadence, decline, and the fall of empire. But archaeology tells us that long after Rome’s political collapse, people were still baking bread, herding animals, making pottery, trading goods across the Mediterranean. The empire as narrative was over, but the empire as daily life continued. Civilization is not defined by emperors alone; it’s as much about wells, kitchens, and fields. They rarely make it into the epic poems, but they kept people alive.

Tocqueville in early America noticed that democracy thrived because of ordinary habits, not heroic speeches: local associations, committees, town meetings and the voices of every day folks. None of these echo through the centuries, but they formed the backbone of civic life. Tocqueville argued that when these ordinary practices weaken, societies risk replacing substance with spectacle.

Does that sound familiar?

Novelists, more than any of us, seem to grasp this.

Jane Austen filled her novels with conversations, carriage rides, and parlor visits. Nothing “happens” in the grand sense, but her books endure because they capture the texture of social life. Proust made a whole cathedral of memory out of tea and a small cake. Woolf wrote essays and novels about meals, rooms, and time passing in a house. Even Homer, remembered for gods and battles, filled his epics with food, weaving, farming, and homecoming.

Tolstoy makes the point clearest. The spiritual climax of Anna Karenina is Levin mowing grass alongside peasants, feeling a rhythm that connects him to the earth. And Middlemarch concludes by praising Dorothea’s “unhistoric acts,” suggesting that the growing good of the world depends more on unnoticed kindnesses than on celebrated deeds.

If you’re searching for the sacred ordinary in literature, you can practically pick up any enduring work and find it. Writers seem to know, instinctively, that life isn’t lived as a sequence of highlights. It’s lived in repetition, chores, minor joys, quiet fears.

Why do we struggle to value the ordinary? A couple of explanations stand out.

Economics. Markets value scarcity, not sufficiency. A billion-dollar company is scarce, a family dinner is common. So the latter gets treated as negligible.

Psychology. Dopamine favors novelty. The ordinary is repetitive, so we underrate it. Except when we lose it. Ask anyone who has grieved, and they’ll tell you: it’s not the highlights that sting in absence, it’s the vanished rituals - the shared breakfasts, the daily conversations, the small gestures.

Technology. Social media amplifies extremes. You scroll and see outliers: dramatic vacations, career triumphs, perfect aesthetics. Nobody documents the daily soup-making, though that may have been the most sustaining act of their week. So the ordinary begins to feel like failure, simply because it is underrepresented.

This bias isn’t new, but it feels stronger than ever. Ancient philosophers warned against chasing reputation. Early monastic traditions elevated daily rhythms as a path to holiness. But our culture lacks the scaffolding that protected the ordinary from invisibility.

So how do we build that scaffolding again?

Ritual is one answer.

Religions ritualized the ordinary. Christianity centers its holiest act on bread and wine; Judaism sanctifies time itself through the Sabbath; Islam prescribes pauses for prayer five times a day; Buddhism turns breathing into a spiritual practice. All of these traditions invented their own exotic spectacles, but their adherents find their faith in the tasks everyone already does - we all eat, rest, breathe.

Ritual prevents the ordinary from dissolving into invisibility. If you light a candle at dinner, the meal becomes an event. If you walk at the same time each day, it becomes more than exercise. Anthropologists will tell you that rituals function as technologies of attention: certain ordinary acts aren’t trivial, they’re the architecture of meaning.

Modern life is growing thin on ritual. We still have birthdays and weddings, but the weekly or daily practices that used to anchor time have weakened. In their absence, we try to invent substitutes: journaling, exercise routines, “mindfulness.” These can work - to a degree, to some degree - but the broader point remains.

Without ritual, the ordinary dissolves into noise.

Hannah Arendt pointed out that political theory has long overvalued glory and undervalued labor. We like to write about leaders and revolutions, but garbage collection, water pipes, and bus schedules are what make cities livable. Collapse rarely begins with armies at the gates; it begins with the erosion of maintenance. When roads, schools, and sewage systems break down, everything else follows.

The Soviet Union’s end was preceded by shortages of soap and food. When the ordinary systems failed, the extraordinary superstructure collapsed. The lesson: if you want to preserve collective life, pay attention to maintenance.

It’s not glamorous.

It’s sacred.

The extraordinary has its place. But extraordinary things rest on ordinary foundations. Every scientific breakthrough depends on years of tedious lab work. Every revolution depends on countless conversations. Every cathedral was built stone by stone.

The ordinary is the condition of everything else.

But how do you protect that condition?

I have three rules, and I wish I kept to them more than I do, but here we are.

These aren’t glamorous interventions.

But that might be precisely the point.

Ordinary life doesn’t lack meaning. We lack the attention to see it. We skim past what’s always in front of us, looking for something more impressive, and then wonder why life feels so shallow, so scraped thin.

What would it mean to grant attention to the ordinary? To listen fully to a friend without checking a phone? To notice the pattern of light in a room? To mark the rhythm of daily chores as the very shape of existence? These things will never trend. They will never produce metrics. But they‘we all any of us are likely to recall at the end.

One day, the highlights will blur.

What remains?

The ordinary textures: the meals, the errands, the jokes with friends, the habits of daily life.

Those will be the sacred things.

The task is to see them before they vanish into hindsight.

A culture obsessed with exceptionality risks forgetting how to live. The sacred is not hidden. It’s not far away. It’s in the groceries, the laundry, the conversations, the walks, the dinners.

Life is not waiting to begin. It is already here, in ordinary time.