By a concerned observer of modern society
Everyone Has a Right to Be Celebrated
We live in a world that is obsessed with the exceptional. Our headlines worship billionaires, our social media feeds elevate influencers, and our children grow up believing that unless they become extraordinary — unless they win, break records, go viral, or disrupt an industry — they have somehow fallen short. This is not just a cultural quirk. It is a quiet crisis, and it carries a very real cost.
Let me be clear from the outset: I am not arguing against progress, achievement, or excellence. The world needs its innovators, its artists, its leaders. But a society that only celebrates its peaks — and forgets the vast foundation beneath them — is a society in the process of tearing itself apart.
The Foundation We Keep Ignoring
Think about the last person who received a standing ovation in your city. A sports hero, perhaps. A tech founder. A celebrity. Now think about the nurse who worked a double shift last night. The bus driver who got every passenger home safely in the rain. The single parent who held three jobs together and still helped their child with homework. The teacher who spent their own money on classroom supplies.
These people will not receive a standing ovation. They will not be profiled in a magazine. Their stories will not trend. And yet, without them, nothing works. Not the economy. Not the community. Not even the celebrated few, who were almost certainly shaped, carried, and supported by ordinary people long before anyone knew their names.
The world is moved along, as Helen Keller once observed, "not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker."
When Celebration Becomes Currency
Admiration, in itself, is harmless and good. The problem begins when celebration becomes a resource — when money, political attention, infrastructure investment, tax advantages, and media oxygen flow so heavily toward the already-visible that the invisible are left depleted.
This is the pattern we must examine honestly. An extraordinary person rises. Society celebrates them. Resources follow celebration. The celebrated one gains access to capital, networks, platforms, and leverage that ordinary people cannot touch. So far, this seems fair — a reward for genuine achievement.
But what happens next? Too often, the extraordinary begin to cruise on the goodwill and labour of the public that first elevated them. They use public roads, public education systems, publicly funded research, and publicly sustained markets — while lobbying against the taxes that maintain those very systems. They extract value from the commons while their wealth and influence insulate them from its deterioration. The ladder is pulled up. The gap widens.
As the French writer Anatole France put it with sharp irony: "The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." We celebrate equality of opportunity while ignoring the profound inequality of condition that makes that equality largely fictional for millions of ordinary people.
The Widening Gap
The numbers are not subtle. In the United States, the wealthiest 1% now hold more wealth than the entire middle class combined. In the United Kingdom, the 50 richest individuals possess as much as the poorest 14 million households. Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic — during which ordinary people stocked shelves, drove ambulances, and dug graves — saw the world's billionaires increase their collective wealth by over $5 trillion.
But the gap is not only economic. There is also a gap in recognition — a growing chasm between who society tells us matters and who actually holds the world together. A hedge fund manager who shuffles money earns hundreds of times more than a social worker who saves lives. A celebrity's throwaway post reaches millions; the quiet heroism of a community nurse goes entirely untold.
When we repeatedly tell people — through our culture, our salaries, our media, and our institutions — that their ordinary contribution does not merit celebration, we are not just making an aesthetic choice. We are making a political one. And the people we systematically exclude from celebration eventually begin to feel it, in the form of disillusionment, disconnection, and the quiet despair of a life told it was never quite enough.
Progressing at Whose Cost?
I want to be precise here, because this argument is easy to misread. I am not suggesting that society should not progress. I am not arguing for mediocrity, or for tearing down those who have genuinely achieved. Progress matters. Innovation matters. Excellence matters.
What I am saying is this: progress must be accountable to the people who make it possible. When a pharmaceutical company develops a life-saving drug using decades of publicly funded research, then prices it out of reach for ordinary citizens — that is progress at the public's expense. When a technology platform becomes indispensable to society and then extracts rent from that dependency while avoiding taxes and suppressing wages — that is excellence turning extractive. When a society invests its admiration, its resources, and its imagination almost entirely into producing and celebrating the exceptional few, while the conditions of ordinary life quietly erode — that is a civilisation confusing its peaks for its foundation.
The philosopher John Rawls argued that a just society is one whose rules you would choose if you did not know which position in it you would occupy. By that standard, we should ask: would any of us, not knowing whether we would be born extraordinary or ordinary, design a society that celebrated only the former?
Stories from the Ground: The Ordinary Who Changed Everything
History, looked at honestly, is full of examples that complicate the narrative of the lone exceptional figure.
The women of Bletchley Park. The breaking of the Enigma code in World War II is remembered through the name of Alan Turing — a genuine genius. But thousands of women, working as operators, typists, and analysts, processed the intelligence that made his theoretical work actionable. They worked in shifts, anonymously, without recognition. The war could not have been won without them, and history spent decades forgetting they existed.
Essential workers during the pandemic. In 2020, the world paused to applaud healthcare workers, grocery employees, sanitation staff, and delivery drivers. It was a rare and genuine moment of recognition. Within two years, many of those same workers faced wage stagnation, burnout, and understaffing — while the wealth of those who profited from the digital economy they sustained doubled and tripled. The applause faded far faster than the debt did.
The village teacher. Behind virtually every celebrated mind is a teacher we will never name. Someone who noticed a spark, stayed late, believed first. They receive none of the credit and, in most countries, struggle to earn a dignified living. Yet in the most literal sense, they are the architects of every success story we tell ourselves.
Unpaid caregivers worldwide. Globally, women perform an estimated 75% of all unpaid care work — raising children, caring for the elderly, holding households and communities together. Economists estimate this labour, if paid at market rates, would be worth tens of trillions of dollars annually. It is the invisible infrastructure of every economy on earth. It is almost entirely uncelebrated.
Voices That Said It Better
"Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love." — Mother Teresa
"The most heroic word in all languages is revolution. The most heroic people in the world are the ones who don't make the news." — Howard Zinn
"Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for kindness." — Seneca
"We do not need to be extraordinary to be worthy of celebration. We simply need to show up — for each other, for our communities, for the quiet and unglamorous work of keeping the world running." — Anonymous community organiser
What a Better Balance Looks Like
None of this requires us to dim the light on those who shine brightly. It requires us to widen the definition of what deserves light in the first place.
It looks like wage structures that reflect the genuine value of care work, education, and manual labour — not just what the market happens to reward. It looks like tax systems in which the extraordinary contribute proportionately to the commons that made their rise possible. It looks like media that tells more than one kind of story. It looks like parents and schools teaching children that the quiet consistency of an ordinary life lived with integrity is not a consolation prize, but one of the finest things a human being can achieve.
And it looks like each of us, in our own communities, finding someone ordinary who deserves to be seen — and seeing them.
Your Voice Matters
This essay argues that ordinary voices have been overlooked for too long. So it would be contradictory to end without asking for yours.
We would genuinely like to hear from you:
- Who is the most uncelebrated person in your life — someone whose contribution is enormous but invisible? What do they do, and why do they deserve recognition?
- Do you believe our society is getting better or worse at valuing ordinary contribution? What has changed, and what needs to?
- What is one concrete thing — in policy, in culture, or in your own community — that you think would help close the gap between how we treat the extraordinary and the ordinary?
- And perhaps most simply: who in your life has never been properly thanked? Name them, if you are willing. Tell us their story.
Leave your thoughts in the comments below. Share this piece with someone who deserves to read it. And if you know someone ordinary who deserves a moment of celebration — today might be a good day to tell them so.
The world does not only run on genius. It runs on faithfulness — on the millions of people who show up, quietly, every single day, and do what needs to be done. That is not ordinary. That is extraordinary. We just forgot to call it that.
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