An average can describe a crowd that contains nobody average.

An average is a summary and sometimes a fiction. The average of a group where half earn very little and half earn a great deal describes nobody in it. Any figure that collapses a spread into a single number hides the shape of the thing it claims to describe.

When you meet an average that matters, ask for the spread. What is the range, where do most people actually sit, is it clustered or split. Two very different realities can produce identical averages, and the difference between them is usually the thing you needed to know.