In Defense of the Unremarkable Days
...not every day has to be a good day.
Not every day has to be a good day.
I don’t know who needs to hear that, but I’m assuming it’s all of us. Because somewhere along the way, we absorbed the idea that every day should matter. That it should either be memorable, productive, emotionally significant, or at the very least, something we can look back on and say, That day moved me forward.
We were taught to make each day count, because life is short and time is precious and all those phrases that sound meaningful until you realize they’re just stress dressed up as wisdom. We act like we can outsmart regret if we just optimize our schedules enough. But all that pursuit really does is make rest feel like laziness and stillness feel like missed opportunity.
But the truth—the annoying, unavoidable truth—is that most days are just days. They come and go without ceremony. They show up, they ask nothing special of you, and they disappear quietly into the folder labeled Miscellaneous Life.
And still, we treat them like personal failures.
As if the point of being alive is to create some kind of highlight reel—something we can stitch together at the end and say, Look at all that meaning. But life isn’t made of meaning, not in the way we were taught to expect. It’s made of hours, and moods, and meals, and errands, and conversations you forget almost immediately after they happen. It’s made of the quiet, unspectacular days that add up to something—you don’t know what—but something, all the same.
I used to think that was a flaw. That if a day ended without a story attached to it, I’d somehow wasted it. But I’ve started to believe that the unremarkable days—the ones we’re so quick to write off—might be the ones holding everything together.
The Bad Days
There are bad days that announce themselves early — a text you didn’t want to wake up to, a meeting you forgot you had, or one of those mornings where you catch your reflection and think, Interesting. I appear to be aging exclusively in my neck.
Then there are the quieter bad days, the ones that sneak in while you’re still trying to be functional. You sit down to work, and your brain responds with a soft no thanks. You stare at an email for so long it starts to feel like a personal attack. You think about texting someone back, and instead, you put your phone face down, like the message might evaporate if you just refuse to perceive it. Nothing catastrophic happens — you just hit some invisible wall and slide slowly down it, like a cartoon character who got tired halfway through existing.
And then, of course, there are the real bad days.
The ones that come with weight. With grief. With the kind of sadness that doesn’t need a reason because it’s been living in your body for months, waiting for an opening. The days when you’re too tired to cry, but also too tired to do anything that might stop you from crying. The days where you move through your routine because momentum is the only thing keeping you upright. When just being awake feels like something you should get credit for.
I’ve had all of these days. I’ve eaten dinner standing at the kitchen counter, too restless to sit. I’ve googled things like why am I suddenly crying over a commercial for allergy medication. I’ve laid in bed, scrolling mindlessly for hours, because somehow it feels easier to consume 700 unrelated thoughts than to sit quietly with one of my own.
And here’s the part I want to say carefully — because it’s the part I wish someone had said to me:
There’s no prize for handling these days well. You don’t get extra credit for staying productive, or staying optimistic, or making it all look easy. You’re allowed to have a bad day without fixing it. Without reframing it into something profound. Without making it a lesson in resilience or gratitude.
Sometimes a bad day is just a bad day.
Some bad days don’t end when the sun goes down. Some bad days bleed into the next, until they stop feeling like days at all and start feeling like weather — something you live inside, something you can’t escape, something you forget isn’t permanent. Those days deserve your gentleness, not your performance.
Bad days are the foundation. They’re the part no one sees — the part buried underground. They hold the weight of everything above them — unspectacular, unseen, unavoidable. They dig into you, carve out space you didn’t ask for, make you heavier than you were before. But without them, there’s nothing stable to build on.
And the thing is — I don’t resent them. Not anymore. Because in hindsight, those days gave me everything I actually know about myself. Not the shiny version, not the bio you’d write for a networking event — the real version. The one who had to sit in the dark and ask the hard questions. The one who had no choice but to figure out what still mattered when everything else got taken away.
I wouldn’t choose them again — I’m not that evolved — but I can’t pretend I’d be who I am without them. They built the depth the good days get to stand on. And honestly, they did make me a little funnier.
Because the truth is, whether the bad days are minor inconveniences or the kind that leave a mark, the only way through them is through them. You can’t self-care your way out of grief. You can’t gratitude-journal your way out of depression. Sometimes, all you can do is sit inside the storm and remind yourself that you’ve been rained on before — and you’re still here.
The Unremarkable Days
Most days are unremarkable, which feels like an oversight, considering how much effort it takes to get through them.
You wake up, vaguely tired, vaguely fine. You make coffee. Answer an email. Open the fridge. Close the fridge. Open it again, as if something new might have materialized in the last 12 seconds. You send another email, convince yourself you should be drinking more water, and for some reason, decide to check your credit score. Nothing is particularly wrong, but you’re also not thriving. You’re just… here.
And for some reason, that feels like a problem.
I used to think an average day was a missed opportunity. That if I wasn’t making memories, making progress, or making something of myself, I was falling behind. That an unremarkable day wasn’t just a neutral experience—it was a failure to maximize time, a wasted chance to be better.
But the thing no one tells you: most of life is filler.
Not in a bad way—just in a factual way. You don’t get a plot twist every Tuesday. There’s no personal growth arc on a random Thursday afternoon. Most days are made up of emails and errands, commutes and conversations, grocery lists and laundry cycles, eating a meal you barely remember making while scrolling through content you barely remember consuming. The unremarkable days are the majority of life. They always have been. And if you try to fight them—if you insist on forcing every day into something meaningful—you’ll exhaust yourself into oblivion.
Here’s where I’ve landed: romanticizing life is wonderful — in doses. But if you’re constantly curating your own existence, you aren’t living inside your life. You’re performing it. And performance is exhausting.
Eventually, I burned out on my own performance. And that’s when I started to understand that unremarkable days serve a purpose. They give your brain a break. They’re the scaffolding — the part that holds the rest of your life together, quietly doing the work of keeping you upright. They let you rot in peace.
And rotting, I’ve decided, is just rest without the branding.
I don’t mean the respectable kind of rest — the kind with herbal tea and soft linen and light filtering perfectly through your window like you live inside a Nancy Meyers film. I mean the kind of rest that looks suspiciously like quitting. Wearing the same sweatshirt three days straight because who’s going to stop you? Eating pretzels in bed while watching a show you actively hate. Lying on the floor, not meditating, not reflecting, just there, like a human paperweight.
This is not failure. This is maintenance.
Because rest isn’t a luxury. It’s not something you unlock after you’ve performed enough suffering. It’s the thing that lets you stay human. And the unremarkable days—the ones that don’t need a theme or a climax—are where you get to practice being okay with that.
Not every day needs to be productive. Not every hour needs to justify itself. Some days, you just exist quietly in the background of your own life, and that’s not a mistake. That’s just being a person.
And honestly? Some of my happiest memories come from days I thought I’d wasted. Turns out, they were never wasted at all — they were just doing their job. Holding up the roof of my life so the rest of it could happen underneath.
The Sliver days
If unremarkable days are the scaffolding, slivers are the hairline cracks where the light gets in — small, almost accidental moments that remind you life is still happening, even if you’re not paying attention.
A stranger says good morning like they actually mean it, and for a second, you believe them.
You catch the train just as the doors close, without running, without stress — as if the universe finally decided to throw you a bone.
It’s the text you weren’t expecting — not life-changing, not dramatic, just a “thinking of you” from someone who usually forgets to think of you at all.
The sun comes out after what feels like fifty days of grey, and you stand there like a plant someone forgot to water, trying to photosynthesize your way back to hope.
They’re tiny things. Too small to build a story around. And for a long time, I treated them like background noise — barely worth noticing because they didn’t “count.” They didn’t fix anything. They didn’t prove anything. They were just there.
And that was the problem — I wanted every day to mean something. I wanted my life to declare itself in clear terms. I wanted closure and plot points and evidence that I was doing something right. Slivers aren’t evidence. They’re interruptions. Small ones. And I didn’t trust them.
But then came the seasons where every day felt like wet cement, where even getting out of bed felt vaguely heroic. And in those seasons, the slivers stopped being background noise. They became the only evidence that I was still in here — that life was still happening, even if I couldn’t fully participate.
But when you’re living inside the fog of grief, or depression, or just one of those stretches where everything feels beige and slightly wrong, slivers are sometimes the only thing that cut through. They’re the smallest reminders that you’re still a person in the world, even when you feel like a vague concept at best. They don’t redeem the day. They don’t turn it into something profound. But they keep you here.
The slivers didn’t save me. They didn’t cure the grief, or the exhaustion, or the general what the hell am I doing here of it all. But they did keep me inside my life long enough to remember that nothing stays awful forever.
And for the record, slivers aren’t always tender little moments of beauty. Sometimes they’re fleeting — a good song at the exact right moment, a text from someone you thought forgot you existed, the way your dog sighs dramatically like he’s carrying the weight of modern society on his tiny shoulders. And sometimes, they’re aggressively stupid — a toddler swearing in public, a seagull stealing someone’s lunch, or an email that starts “Per my last email,” confirming — with full body certainty — that you were right the whole time.
I used to think slivers weren’t enough. That if they couldn’t hold up an entire day, they didn’t matter. But slivers aren’t here to hold up the day — they’re here to hold up you. They’re the smallest proof that even inside the nothingness, something gets through. And maybe that’s the only point.
The Good Days
Not every day has to be a good day.
But every once in a while, you get one — and it’s the window.
The view. The moment you finally see out of the life you’ve been building from the inside. Not because the bad days redeemed themselves, or the unremarkable days suddenly mattered more. But because together — the foundation, the scaffolding, the cracks and the light — they made space for this.
The good days don’t arrive because you suffered gracefully or kept your inbox at zero. They arrive because you stayed long enough to see what all those other days were holding up.
Without the bad days, there’s no foundation. Without the unremarkable days, no walls. Without the slivers, no light. The good days only matter because of the structure they sit inside — a life you didn’t design to be perfect, but one you decided to stay in anyway.
And maybe that’s the point. Not to build something remarkable. Not to make every day count. But to build something strong enough to hold you, no matter what kind of day it is.
It turns out — despite what I confidently declared earlier — the nothing days, the awful days, the days you’d rather forget? They were never just filler. They were the bones. The part holding you together when you were too tired (or too dramatic) to hold yourself.
And so, no — not every day has to be good.
But when the good days do come? They sit inside a life you’ve already built — messy, uneven, but somehow still standing.
And that’s enough.
Which is good, because frankly, I’m out of energy… and metaphors.
File Under: ‘Proof that Doing Nothing is Still Doing Something.’
—The Ash Files—Where life’s unexpected moments get filed away—sometimes neatly, sometimes under “figure it out later.” From writer/creator ASH, expect weekly musings, honest stories, and a reminder that no one has life entirely figured out [least of all me].✨
I'm a therapist and this is a topic that comes up time and time again, you have written some really insightful and important notes. Thank you for sharing and I hope I can share some of your wisdom with my clients.
I also love your writing style and your understanding of the human experience. I feel quite seen when I peruse your reading.
This moved me. Most of my days are unremarkable but I couldn’t part with them either. My romanticising is always simple things because like you said, performing isn’t living. Loved this so much❤️