Everyone agrees that most people are average. This isn't a claim; it's arithmetic. "Average" is just the name we give to where most people are. Half fall short of it, half clear it, and the overwhelming majority sit close enough to the middle that the distance doesn't matter. Nobody disputes this. People nod — and then keep living as though they are the exception the rule gets measured against.
You do it. So do I. It's the most common belief there is, which is itself a kind of proof.
The conviction has a particular shape. Not "I'm better than everyone" — that's too crude, and most people are too self-aware to say it out loud. It's quieter: a sense that your inner life is unusually rich, that you see a little more clearly than the people around you, that your ordinariness is temporary — a phase before the real thing arrives. The outlier is always still loading.
Here's what building things teaches you, fast. You have an idea. It feels like yours. You go to check, and ten thousand people had it this morning. Now the checking is instant — you describe the thing you were going to make and the machine has already made a version of it, knew the shape of your thought before you finished the sentence. Originality was always rarer than we admitted. The only difference now is that the proof is on tap.
None of this is hard to say about other people. "Most people are normal" is an easy sentence; it flatters, because the speaker is obviously exempt. The quiet part — the one almost nobody says out loud, including me, most days — is the same sentence with the subject swapped. I am normal. Say it and notice the flinch. We have built an entire economy on that flinch. The feed is a machine for renting you the feeling of exceptionalism by the hour, and the rent is your attention, and you will never own the thing.
The trap was never being average. The trap is the gap — the distance between the remarkable person you were promised you'd become and the ordinary one reading this. All the misery lives in that gap. And there are only two ways to close it: become exceptional, which almost none of us will, by definition — or stop believing you were owed it.
The people who seem unhurried, the ones who look free: watch them. Most of them didn't win the lottery of being special. They just put the ticket down. Normal isn't a verdict. It's the weather. It was always going to be the weather. You can spend the life you have fighting the climate, or you can dress for it and go outside.