On The Tyranny Of The Median
Modern Culture Worships The Middle
The median, the average, the norm—these are the new saints of sanity. We measure ourselves against them, adjust our habits to match them, and apologise when we fall too far outside their blessed range.
The median has become our morality.
Statistics—those clean, numerical consolations—pretend to show us what we are. But they can only show where most people have gathered. They cannot tell us whether the gathering makes sense, or whether it even feels good to be there.
The bell curve, that beloved symbol of normalcy, has quietly become a moral instrument: to be near its summit is to be well; to stray too far along its tails is to risk diagnosis.
In this schema, solitude becomes illness, and abundance of company becomes success. Yet both extremes can be equally hollow. A man with no one to speak to may be isolated, but a man with everyone to speak to may be deafened. The first cannot hear others through the noise of himself; the second cannot hear himself through the noise of others.
The tyranny of the median lies in its quiet cruelty. It invites comparison not as curiosity but as judgement. It tells us that to live too quietly is failure, to feel too deeply is instability, to differ too much is disorder. The language of variance is replaced with the language of correction.
But peace does not exist in the middle. Peace is not a statistical event. It is the absence of comparison altogether—the point at which you no longer ask where you stand in relation to others.
A man’s equilibrium cannot be plotted on a graph. It is found by knowing his own location on the continuum—whether he sits at the crowded end or the quiet edge—and by accepting it without apology.
The goal is not to return to the middle, but to inhabit one’s own frequency fully. When you stop trying to be average, you stop being measured. And in that release from measurement, the tyranny dissolves.
