On Mediocrity

“He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.”

― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Our society has very little tolerance for mediocrity. For ages the mediocres have been disdained, despised, denigrated. Society only ever celebrates the genius, the madness, the extraordinary in the sea of ordinary, quite justifiably so. Mediocres are forced to live in their shadows, without the clamour and glamour.

But fear not, the mediocres, if you are reading this then let me invigorate your soul with some much needed positivity. You deserve better; an acknowledgement is long due.

So, what is mediocrity? It is being average, ordinary, normal. The word has invariably attained a negative connotation with it but that must change. Why? To answer that we must first look at a Bell-curve.

The bell-shaped curve is associated with Gaussian distribution or Normal distribution. In that curve, somewhat ironically, the most mediocres occupy the peak, while the extraordinaries lie at the both ends, well away from the crowd of commoners. As normal distribution depicts most of our everyday phenomena, quite aphoristically, the universe does revolve around the central axis of mediocres.

Why must there be shame in being normal? Normalcy is the most prevalent state of our world and its constant attempt is to concentrate everything around that normalcy or mediocrity. Perhaps there is no glory in being mediocre but glory is the mirage that draws one further and further away from the oasis of peace and happiness. Being mediocre is seeing happiness in small things, having appreciation for what is in our possession rather than what is beyond our reach. They are free from the delusion of grand destinies, the never-ending pursuit of seeking more and more meaning in a jungle of nonsense. To believe that humans are born to fulfill glorious purposes has plagued our mind for eons. But in the grander scheme of things, Nature has no appetite for either glory or purpose. Just a collection of normal creatures doing their normal jobs to survive in a normal world, their fate being mostly driven by the natural forces and the occasional chance factors. As Evolution has it, today's extraordinaries are the mediocres of tomorrow.

And do not forget how mediocres play a pivotal role in our society. Mediocres provide the platform for the geniuses to thrive and develop. They offer their shoulders, like a collective Atlas, for the giants to stand on. The much sought after glories of the extraordinaries can shine only against the backdrop of the shadowy mediocres. A population full of geniuses after all, is a population of mediocrity.

Statue of Atlas holding the celestial sphere (Farnese Atlas). Source: ancientrome.ru