Embrace your mediocrity

Greatness is overrated. Being awesome, epic, or whichever other adjective you want to use to describe superiority, is not worth it. It’s too much effort, spurred by exaggerated accounts of others who will fail to recognize your achievements. We’ve spent our entire lives being indoctrinated to aim high and attempt to emulate great people, to reach success in any way we can measure it. Whether you want to be a skilled scientist, a powerful politician or a respected artist, you have to work hard for a long time and invest a lot of resources to achieve your goals.

And for what? Immortality? Wealth? What are you exactly going for? Do you want to become the next Churchill, the next Newton, the next Picasso? Good luck with that. The Nobel prize is widely regarded as the highest achievement in the fields it rewards; and yet, how many winners can you recall apart from the obvious ones? Hundreds have been awarded the prize, but most are only remembered by specialists in their sector and Wikipedia articles.

But even if you do manage to become the next Big Thing, eternal glory is not something you’ll achieve. Even if your name goes down in history along with the other great ones, there will be a day when all of what you have achieved is as relevant as the professional life of the gas station attendant down the road.. Nothing lasts forever, if I’m allowed a cliché, and the human race makes no exception.

Do you do it for the wealth and benefits that greatness entails? Maybe I’m speaking only for myself, but I worked hard at school to get into a good university, where I’m working even harder to get a good PhD placement, where I’ll work to get a good job, where difficulty will go hand-in-hand with achievement, and so on. We live in a society that rewards hard work with the possibility of more, harder work. Any material gains are mostly accidental, and always conditional on your ability to keep up with the fruits of your labour. If you have a magnum opus, any future effort will always be overshadowed by your previous one; if you’re establishing an excellent track record, you’re setting ever increasing high standards for yourself, and you can’t afford to slip.

Besides, who said that you’re going to succeed? There’s always someone better than you, and this is true for all but one person on earth. If you think that your skills alone are going to carry you to the top, you’re probably mistaken. You’ll need a healthy dose of luck, which is, by definition, uncontrollable. Knowing the right people, being at the right place, catching the right opportunity. How much of this can you influence? “Making your own luck” is all well and dandy, but after a certain point fate might just be ignoring you.

You keep working harder and you get all the lucky breaks, and you finally make it to whatever personal parameter of greatness you have. Now you can wallow in your awesomeness as you are barely rewarded for the monumental quantities of effort you put into it, carefully avoiding the fact that it will, inevitably, amount to nothing. Was it worth it?

So I urge you, be lazy. Be satisfied with your simplicity. Be average. Be mediocre. Ignore your potential for greatness, and be one in the amorphous mob of society. Pleasure yourself with vicarious joy, be it in the so-called achievement of eleven strangers on a football pitch or the foibles of self-proclaimed celebrities. Never mind that you’d be little more than an animal with some intellect, caving in to your basest desires! Never mind that there’d be nothing to distinguish you from virtually any other human being on the planet! Be mediocre, for it’s too hard to be great.