I have a distaste for mediocrity.
More precisely, I have a distaste for the moral defense of mediocrity.
Struggle is not the problem. Limitation is not the problem. Bad luck is not the problem. The thing I can’t stand is when people freeze at a certain point in their development, then rename that stopping wisdom, virtue, or enlightenment.
Humans are born with some amount of agency, but whether that agency flourishes or dissolves depends enormously on environment, feedback, standards, and luck. Of course this creates variance. Some people keep expanding their range of action. Some atrophy early. That part is tragic, but not offensive.
What becomes offensive is what happens next. People moralize from their position, not from truth. They do not just accept where they stopped. They build a worldview that makes stopping look noble and continued striving look corrupt.
This is the split in Nietzsche that always gripped me. Not the cartoon version about domination, but the deeper one about self-overcoming. Everyone is constantly interpreting themselves and the world. Some people keep revising those interpretations against reality. Others freeze them, then defend the frozen version as if it were final truth. What Nietzsche called master and slave morality is, among other things, a story about what happens after that freeze.
Deutsch and Popper sharpen this for me. A good explanation survives criticism. It is hard to vary. It keeps contact with reality. So the real divide is not between successful and unsuccessful people. It is between people still willing to subject their self-explanation to criticism and people who have begun protecting it from criticism.
That is where mediocrity becomes cultural poison. Stagnation rarely presents itself as stagnation. It speaks in the language of moral insight.
“Ambition is toxic.”
“Success is a privilege.”
“Contentment is enlightenment.”
Sometimes those sentences contain partial truths. Often they are just rationalizations that protect a person from having to ask whether they quit too early. The point is not that everyone should become a titan. The point is that once self-protection starts masquerading as wisdom, honest inquiry collapses.
My distaste is not for ordinary people, and it is not for people who are tired, wounded, unlucky, or constrained. My distaste is for the move where someone turns their refusal to keep growing into a moral standard and then uses that standard to sneer at anyone still trying to become more.
Strip away the rationalization and the split is simple. Some people keep iterating their explanation of themselves and reality. Most people stop somewhere, then defend the place where they froze.
That second move is what I mean by mediocrity.
P/S: This was written out of spite of having to study for my finals in Fall 2025.