The World's Most Typical Person

CNN Headline - 3/18/11

Chicago, IL – The long search is over. After months of scouring cities, farms, deserts, and coves from Maine to San Diego, from Miami to Portland, the most typical person in the entire world was found yesterday in Chicago. He is middle-aged, white, a software analyst, and has a typical Irish-American name: Sean Carrlson.

Carrlson, 34, whose interests include sports and music, is the eleventh consecutive American to be given the title of World’s Most Typical Person. Only 4.5% of the world’s population resides in America, but that hasn’t stopped our country from producing what we consider to be incredibly normal, average human beings.

The panelists who determine the recipient of the title usually sort large groups of people into one all-encompassing set. Explains panelist Steven Baer, “We try to view the large groups, like the people in the slums in India, or the entire country of China, as one whole, instead of millions of individuals.” This line of logic doesn’t just work when analyzing a massive amount of people packed tightly together in a ridiculously small area; it can also be applied to people who live almost exactly like Americans. Says Baer, “Why try to study a typical German or Italian, a typical Turk or Ukrainian when you can simply classify them as Western or Eastern European? When you break it down like that and begin to see people in other countries as slightly less than people, it’s easy to see that America really does produce the most typical people, especially someone like Sean, who certainly embodies everything typical in a human being in 2011.”

Carrlson brings this recognition back to white people after a two year span that saw the title go twice to a black person. “With Obama being elected President and everything,” says Baer, “we thought it an appropriate time to say it was normal to be black. But the Obama buzz has died down considerably this past year, and as a result we feel white people are back to being more typical now.”

Carrlson, whose parents are divorced, remarried to different spouses, and remain good friends with each other for the benefit of the family, first began to realize how completely normal he was in the fifth grade when he was moved from the accelerated math class to the regular fifth grade class. “I wasn’t smart enough for the accelerated class, that was obvious almost right away, and especially obvious when they told me. But I was also much smarter than the slow class, so I think it’s a good thing they put me where they did. If I had stayed in the advanced class I would have been out of place my whole life, trying and probably failing to achieve goals that would have most likely been out of my reach. And if they had put me in the slow class, well, I wouldn’t be here today,” Carrlson said with a laugh.

After high school Carrlson attended the state university, State Tech, where he majored in business and graduated in four and a half years. While at State, Carrlson met his wife-to-be, Claire, whose parents are still married and atypically well-off.

Soon after he graduated from college, the politically-correct Carrlson, who has a few traffic charges on his record, but no felony, found a job in sales for a software engineering company located in Chicago. “It was outside the field I studied in school,” says Carrlson, “but I hear that’s pretty normal. Besides, I was excited to be offered a job so soon after graduation, so I just took it and never looked back. I got promoted within a few years and just slowly climbed to where I am today: the assistant regional software analyst for Macindows Computers. I’m not exactly sure how it all happened, but it did.”

Carrlson currently lives with his decent looking second wife (a 6, maybe a 7 if she’s really trying), Lindsey, and their 1.5 kids, Sean Jr. and Rebec-, in a quaint 2.5 bedroom house just outside Chicago. He is working on a novel.

-Pete Higgins