On Average

I read this fabulous article today on cnn.com and had to share it. I hope it's OK to reprint this...like I said, I got it from cnn.com and the author is listed:

One Day in America
by Nancy Gibbs

No one, of course, sets out to be average. We're all about skyscrapers and Big Gulps and $200 sneakers that promise an extra edge on the court. Peoria, Ill., once paid a p.r. firm $60,000 to help counter its image as the most average city in the country, an image that "really hurts," said a local official. Who'd settle for being the most like everyone else?

Even finding the Average American is a challenge, since means and medians and majorities can hide as much as they reveal: pity the statistician whose job it is to flatten us into a trend. The average household has 2.6 members, but most families prefer their children whole. On average we are 36.6 years old, but in reality we are newborn and toddling, aged and wise. We exercise close to the recommended 20 minutes a day—but that's because 17% of us exercise for well over an hour, while the rest of us scarcely stir at all. The vast majority of Americans believe in God, and more than 90% own a Bible, but only half can name a single Gospel, and 10% think Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. So what's the average state of our eternal souls?

But if the perfect average is a mirage, you can still learn something by comparing yourself to the crowd. Depending on how closely you cleave to the statistical norm, you prefer figure-skating to nascar, live in the state where you were born, spend more money in restaurants than grocery stores and are just as happy as you would be if you earned 20 times your salary. At some point today you will say a prayer, not floss, take a shower for 10 minutes but not sing in it, drive an eight-year-old car to work, spend 95% of the day indoors and 21⁄2 hours online, consume 20 teaspoons of added sugar and not save any money. On weekends, people over 75 spend 11⁄2 hours reading, while those from 15 to 19 spend seven minutes. On Thanksgiving, 88% will eat turkey; most Americans prefer the white meat; the rest of the world, the dark. The average family has more televisions than people—but we spend about the same amount of time watching them as we did 40 years ago.

Our times have changed since 1965, when the typical family had a breadwinning father and a stay-at-home mother; now about 20% of families do. Economists warned in 1999 that working parents had 22 fewer hours of family time than they did 30 years before, which set off alarms about neglected latchkey children growing up loose and wild compared with Ozzie and Harriet's—except that the warnings were flatly wrong. Parents are both working harder and spending more time with their children—especially fathers, who spend 153% more time each week on child care than in 1965.

That means something else has to give, yet we are not sleeping less, nor do we have less free time in general. Look closely at the snapshots, and you see the old rules fading: that you can't be in two places at once, that there are only so many hours in a day. When Mom and Dad are standing in the school bleachers, cheering the baseball team while e-mailing their marketing team, are they at work or at play? We watch the news while cooking dinner, whiten our teeth while we sleep. Modern parents multitask about 40 more hours a week than did their counterparts in 1975. Time spent solely with other adults has fallen, particularly with the adult you are married to: pure spousal time is down 26% since 1975.

When you peel back the numbers and look at the lives underneath, it turns out there's much to love about Average, and much to learn, as Kevin O'Keefe discovered when he set out to write The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen. We may be fascinated by the rich and famous, but polls show we don't want to be them: the average American lives 13 years longer than the average celebrity, who is four times as likely to commit suicide. What O'Keefe found in his travels was that being average usually means having a certain balance in your life. "Once you explain it in those terms," he says, "it's a pretty fulfilling thing for most Americans." Think of it as the wisdom of crowds, and pretty soon the average just might become your ideal. *end of article*

I read this and immediately thought, "for the most part, I would love to be average." Now, when compared to others in my locale, family life and those my age, there's a good mix going on. I probably go beyond the average in many areas and possibly "below" the average in others.

I have a college education, which is pretty average for people my age but no where near the norm in my family. My husband, who I married fairly young compared to the Northern U.S. but fairly late in life compared to the Southern U.S. (probably not really - it just seems that way), also has a college education (and really is a frickin' genius). We purchased a very inexpensive yet charming home and took on the task of renovating it - certainly not the average for a 20-something married couple three years out of college. And the big one: we've been married for five years now and just have a dog. That's right ladies and gents, no kids. This is probably not as big a surprise for the Northerners again, but the Southerners are having a hard time with it, especially the family members. Bless their little hearts... (but that's another post for another day).

But the area in my life I would like to be average in right now has to do with parents. So many of my friends, and even some family, seem to be able to go to mom and dad for help anytime. For Chris and I, it works the other way around. Our not-so-independent moms love coming to us for help. I won't get into details. It's a recent thing for Chris' mom but it's the "average" behavior of my mom. She's learning to be more independent, especially after a two-hour conversation with the baby in the family (that would be me) that consisted of phrases like "I can't always take care of you" and "You're going to have to own up to the consequences of your decisions." Who's the parent here? So here, I would like to be a bit more average.

I'm proud of most of my non-average behavior though. I'd like to have more of it. I'd like to spend more time helping others, volunteering to help build a house or feeding the hungry - or even some day be like my friend Kari who spent two straight years of her life in Africa teaching small villages about the importance of public health while also giving and receiving a great deal of love to/from people who may not consider themselves "without" anything!

But when I read this article, I was so surprised at where I stood on each topic. Our household, in fact, has 2.6 members. Sadie is almost a person! I am proud to say that I can name the Gospels and I know that Joan of Arc is NOT Noah's wife. I DO prefer figure skating to NASCAR. I probably spend more money in restaurants than at the grocery store - so sad! I drive an eight-year-old car to work and probably spend 90 percent of my time indoors. I don't sing in the shower; that's what my car is for.

Hm... interesting...