你是否觉得你需要变得特别卓越，才配在社会上拥有一席之地?你对自己现在的成绩满意吗，你仍然在狂热的追逐成功，还是对你自己所谓的平庸感到羞耻？无论是在才智、相貌或受欢迎程度上，我们的父母都期望我们出类拔萃，在他们眼里，孩子自己的动机和品味并不重要，孩子需要的是成就，不能只是平庸。但，这会怎样影响我们呢？
It’s a rather simple question that quickly gets to the core of someone’s sense of well-being and legitimacy: did your childhood leave you feeling that you were, on balance, OK as you were, or did you somewhere along the way derive an impression that you needed to be extraordinary in order to deserve a place on the earth?
这是一个很简单的问题，却能直击某些人内心深处的幸福感和自我认同的要害：你的童年是否让你觉得你本来的样子就是挺好的？还是说，你在某个人生阶段开始觉得你需要变得特别卓越，才配在地球上拥有一席之地？
And, to raise an associated question: are you therefore now relaxed about your status, or else either a manic overachiever or filled with shame at your so-called mediocrity? Around twenty percent of us will be in the uncomfortable cohort, alternately refusing to believe that anything could ever be enough or cursing ourselves as “failures” (by which we in essence mean that we have not managed to beat insane statistical odds).
再进一步带来相关的问题，你是否对自己当下的地位感到从容自在？还是会陷入两种极端：要么拼命追求卓越，要么因为自己“平庸”而感到羞愧？大概有20%的人会陷入这种不舒服的纠结状态：他们一会儿觉得无论做什么都无法满足，一会儿又因为没有达到不切实际的标准而自责为“失败者”。（从本质上讲，我们的意思是，我们没法战胜离奇的统计概率）。
At school, we probably worked very hard, not because we were drawn to the topics, but because we felt compelled for reasons that were, at the time, not entirely clear. We just knew we had to come close to the top of the class and revise every evening. We may not be exceptional right now, but we are seldom without an acute sense of pressure to be so. In childhood, the story might have gone like this: a parent needed us to be special, by virtue of intelligence, looks, or popularity, in order to shore up a floundering sense of their own self. The child needed to achieve and could not, therefore, just be. Their own motives and tastes were not to be part of the picture.
在学校，我们努力学习，但不是因为对知识课题感兴趣，而是出于一种模糊的、难以言说的被强迫。我们只知道我们必须在班上名列前茅，每天晚上都要温习功课。也许我们当下并不优秀，但我们始终被一种“必须优秀”的压力笼罩。在童年，事情可能是这样的：父母需要我们在智力、外貌或社交能力上变得“与众不同”，以此来满足他们自身的某种自我意识需求。于是，孩子只能努力去“成功”，而不能简单地“做自己”，他们的兴趣和动机完全被忽略了。
The parent was, privately, in pain, unable to value themselves, battling an unnamed depression, furious with the course of their own lives, perhaps covertly tortured by their spouse. And the child’s mission, for which there was no option but to volunteer, was to make it all somehow better.It seems odd to look at achievement through this lens, not as the thing the newspapers tell us it is, but as a species of mental illness. Those who put up the skyscrapers, write the bestselling books, perform on stage, or make partner may, in fact, be the unwell ones.Whereas the characters who, without agony, can bear an ordinary life, the so-called contented “mediocrities,” may in fact be the emotional superstars, the aristocrats of the spirit, the captains of the heart.
父母内心可能正经历着痛苦：他们无法认可自己，被一种无名的抑郁困扰，对自己的人生感到愤怒，甚至可能在婚姻中遭受折磨。而孩子仿佛被命运选中，带着使命去拯救这一切，让父母的生活变得更好。从这个角度看，优秀似乎变得有些荒诞。优秀不再是报纸上宣扬的荣耀，而是一种心理上的扭曲。那些在事业上取得巨大成功的人，比如建造摩天大楼、写出畅销书、成为舞台明星或公司合伙人，可能正是内心最不健康的人。相反，那些能够平静接受平凡生活的人，那些所谓的“平庸之辈”，才是真正的情感强者。他们才是精神上的贵族，心灵的统帅。
The world divides into the privileged who can be ordinary and the damned, compelled to be remarkable. The best possible outcome for the latter might be to have a breakdown. Suddenly, after years of achievement, they can, if they are lucky, no longer get out of bed. They fall into a profound depression, develop all-consuming social anxiety, refuse to eat, babble incoherently, and in some way poke a very large stick in the wheels of day-to-day life, and are allowed to stay home for a while.
这个世界的人分为两类：一类是享有特权的人，另一类是被诅咒的被迫变得卓越的人。对后者来说，最好的解脱或许是崩溃溃。在多年努力追求成就之后，他们或许会突然陷入一种无法自拔的状态：无法起床，陷入深度抑郁，被社交恐惧症折磨，拒绝进食，甚至语无伦次。他们以一种极端的方式让自己从日常生活的轨道上脱离，最终被允许暂时停下脚步，留在家里。
A breakdown is not merely a random piece of madness or malfunction. It can be a very real – albeit inarticulate and inconvenient – bid for health. It is an attempt by one part of our minds to force the other into a process of growth, self-understanding, and self-development, which it has hitherto been too cowed to undertake.
崩溃并非只是毫无来由的疯癫或功能失调，崩溃其实是一种真实的自救信号-尽管表达显得笨拙且令人不适。但这是内心深处的一种挣扎，试图逼迫我们面对那些一直因恐惧而逃避的成长课题，推动我们去真正理解自己、发展自己。
If we can put it paradoxically, it is an attempt to jumpstart a process of getting well, through a stage of falling very ill. In an apparently ill state, we might cleverly be seeking to destroy all the building blocks of our previous driven yet unhappy careers. We may be trying to reduce our commitments and our outgoings, to throw off the absurdity of others’ expectations. Our societies – that are often unwell – are predictably lacking in inspiring images of good enough ordinary lives, at a collective and not just an individual level. They tend to associate these with being a loser.
从某种矛盾的角度来看，崩溃其实是一种通过让自己彻底“生病”，来重启康复过程的尝试。在这种看似病态的状态中，我们可能正好巧不巧地摧毁那些曾经让我们筋疲力尽却又不快乐的生活模式。我们试图减少自己的责任和付出，摆脱他人那些不切实际的残酷期望。而我们的社会——本身就不够健康——往往缺乏对平凡却充实的积极榜样。这种缺失不仅体现在个人层面，更体现在整个社会层面。社会常常把平凡生活与“失败者”画上等号，而忽略了平凡本身的价值。
We imagine that a quiet life is something that only a failed person without options would ever seek. We relentlessly identify goodness with being at the centre, in the metropolis, on the stage. We don’t like autumn mellowness, or the peace that comes once we are past the meridian of our hopes. But there is, of course, no center, or rather the centre is oneself.
我们常常觉得，只有别无选择的失败者才会去追求平静的生活。我们总是把成功和美好与站在聚光灯下、身处繁华都市、成为众人焦点联系在一起。一旦我们越过了希望的子午线，我们就不再喜欢秋天的成熟，以及随之而来的平静。但这个世界是没有中心的，或者说真正的中心就是你自己。
Occasionally an artist will make things that bring such bathetic wisdom home. Here is Montaigne, capturing the point in the third volume of his Essays, written a few years before his death towards the end of the sixteenth century: “Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating, and living together gently and justly with your household and with yourself – not getting slack nor belying yourself – is something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult. Whatever people may say, such secluded lives sustain in that way duties which are at least as hard and as tense as those of other lives.”
偶尔，会有艺术家用作品传递出一种质朴而深刻的智慧。蒙田在十六世纪末去世前的几年，在《随笔集》第三卷中写道：“攻占城墙、出使外交、统治国家，这些固然令人瞩目。然而，斥责、欢笑、买卖、爱、恨，以及与家人和自己温和而公正地相处-既不松懈也不背叛自我-这些才是真正了不起、真正稀有且真正困难的事。无论别人怎么说，这种看似隐居的生活，其实承担着不亚于其他生活那样艰难、那样紧张的责任。”
In the late 1650s, the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer painted a picture called The Little Street that continues to challenge our value system to this day. Perhaps success might – after all – be nothing more than a quiet afternoon with the children, at home, in a modest street. You catch a similar point in certain stories by Chekhov or Raymond Carver, in Bob Dylan’s Time out of Mind, in Thomas Jones’s study of A Wall in Naples (1782), and in the films of Eric Rohmer, in particular Le Rayon Vert (1982).
在1650年代后期，荷兰艺术家约翰内斯·维米尔画了一幅名为《小街道》的画，这幅画一直在挑战我们的价值体系，直到今天。或许，成功终究不过是在一条普通街道上的家中，与孩子们共度一个宁静的下午。你也能捕捉到类似的观点，在契诃夫或雷蒙德·卡佛的某些故事中，在鲍勃·迪伦的《被遗忘的时代》中，在托马斯·琼斯的《那不勒斯的一堵墙》（1782）中，在埃里克·侯麦的电影中，特别是在《绿光》（1982）中。
However, most movies, adverts, songs, and articles do not tend to go this way. They continually explain to us the appeal of other things: sports cars, tropical island holidays, fame, an exalted destiny, first-class air travel, and being very busy. The attractions are sometimes perfectly real, but the cumulative effect is to instill in us the idea that our own lives must be close to worthless.
然而，大多数电影、广告、歌曲和文章并不倾向于这样做，它们总是反复强调另一些事物更有吸引力，比如跑车、热带岛屿度假、名声、显赫的未来、头等舱旅行，还有那种忙碌到飞起的生活。这些事物的吸引力是真实存在的，但这种叠加效应逐渐灌输给我们这样一种观念：我们自己的生活近乎毫无价值。
And yet there may be immense skill, joy, and nobility involved in what we are up to: in bringing up a child to be reasonably independent and balanced, in maintaining a good-enough relationship with a partner over many years despite areas of extreme difficulty, in keeping a home in reasonable order, in getting a lot of early nights, in doing a not very exciting or well-paid job responsibly and cheerfully, in listening properly to other people, and in general, in not succumbing to madness or rage at the paradox and compromises involved in being alive.
然而，在我们所从事的工作中，可能藏着巨大的智慧、乐趣和高尚品质：把孩子培养成一个独立和心态平和的人，尽管在某些方面存在很多的困难，但多年来与伴侣保持足够好的关系，使家里保持整洁有序，多早些休息；认真且快乐地做好一份普通又不太赚钱的工作；真正用心去倾听别人的想法。总的来说，就是在面对生活的矛盾和妥协时，不让自己陷入疯狂或愤怒。
There is already a treasury to appreciate in our circumstances when we learn to see these without prejudice or self-hatred. As we may discover, once we are beyond others’ expectations, life’s true luxuries might comprise nothing more or less than simplicity, quiet, friendship based on vulnerability, creativity without an audience, love without too much hope or despair, hot baths, dried fruits, walnuts, and a little bit of dark chocolate.