October 25th, 2025

Your life is very normal and good enough

If you’ve ever gone through series of heartbreaks or a failed romantic relationship, or several years of not being able to get a job, you may wonder how statistically normal your case might be, you may start to feel like your short comings are a unique curse. But in actuality they are not unique. Every single person on earth isn’t exempted from trials. Even our Lord Jesus Christ went through his own fair share of trials and tribulations when He took on the form of man. 

Our assessment of our stories suffers from an unfair asymmetry. We know our own lives from the inside but generally only encounter other people’s in heavily, edited, sanitized form from the outside. We see other people’s relationships, careers, progress, marriages, in social situations where politeness and cheeriness are the rule. We seem to trust the blurred summaries of their lives. But we don’t have access to footages from the bedroom, we can’t see their everyday difficulties.

We can’t help but be aware of our own situation. Because of this asymmetric analysis, we come to the conclusion that our own lives and relationships are a great deal darker and far more painful than is common. We need to be fair to ourselves and our loved ones to create space in our minds for the scale of our ignorance. In actual fact, we simply don’t know. We are lacking data. We owe ourselves a richer picture of love than we have.

Misery is actually a rule, isolation, pining for a lover, some peace and compatibility, joblessness, being broke, confusion, far more than the public sources ever admit. It’s not that your life is damned. But sometimes, life is inescapably a difficult project. Part of the reason why we are so miserable is because we have the wrong kind of art. The movies we watch are oddly coy and cheesy. The novels don’t tell it how it is. The truth is the dominant emotion in most relationships is ambivalence. That is a complex mixture of love and hate.

Your life is very normal and good enough.