Transcription
It's your birthday again. You got a few texts from people you care about. Wish there were more, but it's fine. You're done celebrating it, however that looked.
But now it's 2:00 a.m. and you're lying awake doing math in your head. How old are you now? How old you'll be in 5 years? How old your parents were when they had their lives together? How much time you've already let slip by? And how much time you might have left?
Someone you went to high school with just started a business. Someone else bought a house. Someone else got promoted again. Another got engaged. While you, you're still in the same place you were last birthday, and you can't even remember what you've been doing all this time. You've been busy, exhausted, stressed, overwhelmed. But when you actually look back, it feels like you've done nothing. You thought by now you'd be somewhere, not rich or famous necessarily, but further along. You don't even know where exactly, but not here. Not still figuring basic things out, not still getting ready to start.
Everyone around you seems to have it figured out. They're buying houses, getting married, building careers, creating things, traveling the world, living actual lives, and you're just existing, going through motions, surviving. Every accomplishment you do manage feels tiny when you see what others are doing. Sunday night dread isn't about Monday anymore. It's about all the Mondays, all the weeks that blur together into months you can't tell apart. Time is passing, but you're not moving with it.
You keep telling yourself, "I'll start soon, next month, maybe next year, when things settle down, when I'm ready." But years pass and you're still saying the same thing. It feels like you're wasting your one chance at a life. Like you'll get older more and more and realize you spent it distracting yourself into letting the years vanish. Like you're doomed to live a mediocre life.
Now, mediocrity by definition just means averageness, moderate quality, or being at the center of the curve, which on its own doesn't sound terrible. It just means normal. But if someone rated your life or any aspect of it almost 5 out of 10, or described it as mid, you'd feel like you wasted it, you failed, because nobody wants to be called mediocre. And this fear, the fear of living a normal, mundane, ordinary, forgettable life, is stronger now than it's ever been.
And so, we spend our entire lives trying to prove we're more than average. We use up what little time we have trying to break above this invisible line, trying to earn proof that our lives are mounted to something more than just mediocrity. But what even is this fear? Technically, there's nothing inherently wrong with living a normal average life. By definition, most people throughout all of history have lived normal lives. Most of us come from average people living average lives. We need average people to keep the world running. That's why almost everything about humans follows a bell curve. Height, intelligence, income, athleticism, happiness, wealth, even how interesting a life looks from the outside. The curve is thin at both ends. Very few exceptionally good and very few exceptionally bad. The vast majority or about 68% fall right in the middle. That's average. That's where most of us actually are in most areas of life. That's just the truth.
But the issue is that we're told we should be exceptional at everything. That being average is failure. Every area of life became a competition. Your career, your body, your relationships, your hobbies, your entire existence. And in each area, you're measured, compared, and ranked. Social media shows you the top 0.1% of every category all day, every day. The richest, fittest, happiest, most successful, most attractive people. Your brain doesn't process this as rare exceptions. It processes it as this is normal and you're falling short.
Research on social comparison theory shows the more time people spend on social media, the more they feel like everyone else is happier, more successful, living better lives. Psychologists call this relative deprivation. You don't measure your life by absolute standards. You measure it by comparison to the people around you. And when "around you" includes every successful person online, you'll always feel behind in every single domain. You're not fit enough, not successful enough, not interesting enough, not happy enough. Even when you're objectively doing fine, maybe even above average in reality, it feels like you're failing because you're comparing yourself to extremes all the time. Our baseline for normal warped completely. Exceptional became expected.
Even when you do accomplish something, it doesn't satisfy. It does feel good for a moment and then you rebuild an even higher baseline. The mathematical reality we ignore is that for every 100 people trying to be in the top 1%, only one will make it. That's what 1% means. The other 99 will fail by definition. Because no one can ever be exceptional at everything. To become truly great at one thing, you need enormous time and energy. Years, maybe decades. And since none of us have infinite time, being exceptional at one thing almost always means being average or below average at everything else. Look at anyone truly exceptional. Olympic athletes whose personal lives are disasters. Brilliant CEOs who are terrible parents. Famous artists who can barely function socially. Academics who never left their university town. Everyone sacrifices something. The 10 richest men in the world have been divorced 13 times combined. That's not coincidence. Becoming exceptional in one domain requires sacrificing others.
Yet, we've been sold this lie that exceptionalism should be standard. That being better than 99% is what's expected. We created this tyranny where you must constantly prove you're special. We forget that better than 99% is by definition rare. Being average used to be fine. For most of history, most people were average, and that was acceptable. You worked, had family, lived in your community, died, and that was a complete life. But now, average feels like you wasted your existence.
The fear isn't just "I'm average." It's "I'm average, which means invisible, which means my life is meaningless, which means I'll die like I never existed." What scares us isn't being statistically average. It's living a life that feels meaningless to you. A life lacking personal purpose. A life where you're just going through motions, surviving day-to-day, never choosing anything for yourself. It's reaching the end and realizing you never tried to live the life you wanted. That you spent your one existence building someone else's dream. That you wasted your shot. That's the mediocrity we try to avoid. A life you don't care about, chosen by default, not intention.
Psychologists Ryan and Deci distinguish between intrinsic goals, things you genuinely want, and extrinsic goals, things you think you should want. And most people spend their lives chasing extrinsic goals. Get the degree, get the job, get the house, get married, have kids, climb the ladder. And when you do get them, if you're lucky enough, their charm doesn't last. So you feel like you wasted your life, even when you've succeeded by every conventional measure. Because success in a life you didn't choose still feels like failure.
Meanwhile, time itself is working against you. When you were a kid, summers felt endless. The year felt like forever. But now, entire years disappear in what feels like weeks. Time feels like it's speeding up more and more. Previous generations had clear milestones. Graduate at 22, married by 25, house and kids by 30. Today, those milestones are delayed, impossible, or culturally optional. Without them, you always feel like you're falling behind because there's no clear standard for "enough," and that scares you.
This fear isn't about productivity. It's about mortality. Ernest Becker's denial of death argues that humans are the only animal that knows it will die. We can't handle that knowledge. We create immortality projects, accomplishments, legacies, things that will outlast us. When you say, "I've done nothing," you mean, "I will leave no trace." The fear is that you won't matter. That when you're gone, it will be as if you never existed. Achievements become symbolic immortality. If you build something, create something, accomplish something, maybe you'll be remembered. Maybe your life will have meant something.
Victor Frankl wrote Man's Search for Meaning. His central insight was that meaning doesn't come from accomplishment. It comes from experience, from connection, from how you respond to suffering. You can achieve everything and still feel empty. You're not experiencing your life. You're trying to create a life that will look good when you look back on it. Living for the highlight reel that will play when you're 80 or at your funeral. That moment is hypothetical. It might never come. Even if it does, you won't care then. You'll be dead or too old to care. The only moment that exists is this one. You're wasting it trying to make sure every other one feels okay. The irony is that you will waste your life if you spend it trying not to waste it.
The fear of mediocrity is the fear of being human. You want to be special, exceptional, remarkable. Most people are average. That's what average means. Most lives are ordinary. Most people don't do anything historically significant. They work, love, struggle, laugh, suffer, die. That's it. So if your life doesn't matter in some grand measurable way, what's the point? Maybe the question is wrong. Maybe the point isn't to be exceptional. Maybe the point is just to be.
David Foster Wallace says, "The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and effort and being able truly to care about other people. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing." When people feel this way, some double down on productivity, work harder, optimize more, achieve faster. Some chase increasingly extreme experiences like skydiving or adventuring. It might work for a moment, then they come home and those feelings return.
You can tell yourself, "When I graduate, then I'll feel okay. When I lose the weight, then I'll feel confident. When I find the relationship, then I'll feel complete. When I make enough money, then I'll feel secure." That moment comes and goes in days. The problem isn't your circumstances. It's how you relate to your life. Always deferring satisfaction. Always one achievement away from feeling okay. Always living in the future. And when you aren't, you're being upset over your past. You're so focused on the life you didn't live or that you're yet to live that you're not living the life you have. The fear of wasting your life causes you to waste your life.
So stop measuring. You can't optimize your way into meaning. You can't achieve your way into peace. Recognize the moments that made you the happiest, that made you forget about your problems and cherish them. The only antidote to the feeling of wasted time is to be fully present, not planning the next thing, not ruminating on the last thing. That's harder than any achievement and more valuable.
Accept that you might always feel behind. The goalpost will always move. You'll always be able to find someone doing more, achieving more, living better. That feeling might be permanent. The question becomes, can you live a meaningful life while feeling behind? Because most people will reach the end and realize they spent their whole lives comparing themselves to people who don't exist, chasing goals they didn't even want, performing for an audience that wasn't watching. You don't have to be one of them. You can't control whether you'll be remembered, whether you'll matter in some grand historical sense, whether you'll ever feel exceptional. But you can control whether you're present, whether you choose something that matters to you, even if it doesn't look impressive to anyone else. That might not feel like enough, but it's all there is. And maybe that's okay.