The Ordinary Sacred
The Ordinary Sacred by Joan Westenberg.
In 1953, Ernest Dichter—the father of motivational research—wrote that the American consumer was no longer purchasing soap to clean themselves, but to feel clean.
Advertising wasn’t selling products.
It was selling identity.
A bar of soap promised not just hygiene but moral worth.
We’ve turned living into editing. When every bite is a performance, every outfit a brand decision, every hobby a pitch, there’s no space left for boredom. Or rest. Or actual pleasure.
After the collapse, after the burnout, after the creeping dread that none of the things I’d been told to care about were making me feel human, I started noticing what actually felt good. Not “aspirational” good. Not “productive” good. Just good. A grilled cheese sandwich eaten in the sun. A day without notifications. Saying no and not explaining. I didn’t see it as a philosophy. I just knew I felt less fake. Less hollow. Less like I was performing a version of myself I couldn’t stand anymore. Over time, I started tracing a pattern. What if I stopped managing my life like a brand? What if I let it be messy, private, low-stakes? What if that was enough?
The Ordinary Sacred is my idea for a philosophy of presence without spectacle. A life without audience. A refusal to curate the self into something consumable. It honors sufficiency over scale, texture over narrative, and experience over optics. It says: the real, unpolished, unposted life is enough—and always was.
TLDR: The Ordinary Sacred:
- Eat for yourself, not for anyone else — Real food, real joy.
- Work to pay your bills, not to validate your worth — Labor is not identity.
- Buy things, not signals — Use and want over performance.
- Live your own life, not for your feed — Escape is freedom.
Once you collapse identity into labor, every moment becomes a performance review. You’re not just working. You’re branding. You’re optimizing. You’re pretending that the thing you’re doing for rent is your soul’s calling. And if it isn’t? Then you’ve failed—not just professionally, but existentially.
And yes, there’s dignity in labor. But there’s also dignity in limits. Working more doesn’t make you more if it doesn’t make you more money to support your family, to live your life. You can be brilliant and not be busy. You can be wise and take naps. You can be proud, virtuous (if that’s your schtick), and completely unscalable.
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
“We must not admire those who own great possessions, but those who have the strength to do without them. For it is not he who has little, but he who desires more, that is poor. The man who is not in need is not the one who has much, but the one who can go without much.”
This is not an attack on beauty. Beauty matters. But performance is a parasite that feeds on it. When the primary function of an object becomes its optics, it’s already dead. A beautiful object that demands anxiety isn’t beautiful. It’s a burden.