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Doing What Everyone Else Does Is a Reliable Route to Average. Here's What Average Actually Looks Like.

The numbers behind where most Americans end up financially, physically, and in their relationships are worth knowing before you decide how much weight to put on fitting in.

Max Stephens

7/19/20263 min read

I came across a great quote from Chris Williamson on Modern Wisdom:

"The average American adult is obese, likely to be divorced, and has less than $1,000 in the bank. Doing what everyone else does sounds like a great idea but it's actually a reliable route to a life that you're probably not looking for."

Turns out he wasn't exaggerating.

The obesity number

According to CDC data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the prevalence of obesity among American adults reached 40.3 percent between August 2021 and August 2023. Another 32 percent of American adults are overweight but not yet meeting the clinical threshold for obesity.

That means roughly 72 percent of American adults are carrying excess weight by clinical definition. Researchers project that almost half of US adults will be living with obesity by 2035, based on data reviewed across more than 11 million Americans. The trajectory doesn't seem to be improving currently.

The divorce number

Everyone seems to think 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. The real number is closer to one in three.

According to a 2025 Pew Research Center analysis, approximately one third of Americans who have ever been married have also experienced a divorce. That's the most accurate current figure available. It's lower than 50 percent, but one in three people experiencing divorce for one of the most significant decisions of their lives is still a serious number.

The crude divorce rate from the CDC currently sits at 2.4 per thousand people annually, which is near historic lows. But that figure reflects a population where fewer people are getting married in the first place, particularly among younger generations, which affects how the rate is calculated.

The savings number

This is where the data is hardest to look at.

A 2025 Federal Reserve survey found that 37 percent of American adults could not cover a $400 emergency expense without borrowing money or selling something.

The median American household savings account balance sits around $8,000 according to Federal Reserve data, but median figures hide an enormous amount. The distribution is heavily skewed by a relatively small number of people with significant savings, which pulls the average up well above what most households actually have accessible.

Why average is a specific outcome

The numbers don't suggest that most Americans are making a series of obviously bad decisions. They suggest something more uncomfortable. The default choices available in American life, the food environment, the financial system, the social norms around spending, the healthcare system's orientation toward treatment rather than prevention, are producing these outcomes at scale.

Average isn't neutral. It's the aggregate result of a specific set of conditions, and those conditions are currently producing obesity rates above 40 percent, a third of marriages ending in divorce, and more than a third of adults unable to handle a minor financial emergency.

The trap isn't that people set out to be average. It's that each individual choice along the way feels normal because everyone around them is making the same one. Eating whatever's convenient because that's what's available. Going into debt because everyone around them is in debt. Letting their health slide because that's just what getting older looks like in the environment they're in.

Normal and average aren't the same thing as optimal. They're just what happens when you go with the current rather than deciding where you're trying to go.

The thousands of small decisions

The gap between where most people end up and where they had wanted to end up doesn't come down to one big decision they got wrong.

It comes down to thousands of small ones where they went with the default. The easier meal. The purchase they couldn't really afford. The workout they skipped. The sleep they sacrificed. Each individual choice is defensible in isolation. The accumulation is what produces the outcome.

What makes this hard is that defaulting feels comfortable in the moment. It feels like living your life rather than failing at it. Comfort and direction are two different things though, and over a long enough timeline they produce completely different results.

The people who end up somewhere different from average aren't consistently smarter or more talented. They decided at some point to stop treating average as the baseline and start treating it as the warning sign. And then they started making decisions accordingly, one at a time, in the small moments where the default was available and they chose something else instead.

The statistics describe what happens when most people don't make that decision.

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