Practicing Mediocrity

Wu Wensdei

Sunset by Félix Vallotton

Wu Wensdei

Hi, welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. I’m you’re host, Paul Logan. Today is Wu Wensdei. If you’re new to the blog, that means that on Wednesday we talk about the Wu Wei, or “action without intention.” Today we’re going to talk about mediocrity

Exceptionalism isn’t exceptional

Have you ever been called “mediocre?”

Think about how that experience made you feel. Probably not so good, right? It strikes me as odd that there’s so much hate — including a lot of self hate — implied in a term that means “medium, moderate, ordinary, common, average, everyday, middling.” The only time that average is a bad thing is if you’ve got an expectation of being exceptional.

I recently came across a 3 year old r/applyingtocollege post about a particularly over the top interviewer had insane expectations:

He asked me about what I want to do when I’m older. I told him I want to start a company. He responded “there’s no evidence you can do this. You have no evidence. You’re 17,18, why haven’t you built a successful company already?”

I have family responsibilities and don’t even know which area I love most to start a company in. What does he expect from me? He then told me “real passion and evidence” is like this example of a girl who did debating since she was 9.

Societal filters don’t just want to know you’ve got goals. They want to know that you’ve got goals you’ve been actively pursuing for decades. The focus is on taking the elite and making them more elite. Every program is the next tier up in a pyramid of filters attempting to find John Galt. I say find because they aren’t interested in making one unless they start with the best materials.

Everyone wants the best of the best. I’m reminded of a comedy bit from the late aughts about buying things on Amazon, it went something like:

“When did we become convinced we deserve the best of everything? I wasted 2 hours the other day comparison shopping to find the best toaster; as if one would produce better quality burned bread than the others. How is half of a star rating going to change that? Who am I, the King of France?”

This is a star-ranked world where everyone expects the best of everything all the time. This is a meritocratic nightmare where your moral value is determined by your ability to pass through an admissions pyramid.

In an environment that expects exceptionalism, it paradoxically becomes the norm. In a world that settles for nothing but excellence, you quickly understand the implication that “mediocre” is an insult.

The Middle Way

Mediocrity isn’t something to be ashamed of. In fact, it’s something that many cultures celebrate. Buddhism specifically has at its center “The Middle Way.”

The Middle Way speaks to two principles of Buddhist, both forms of moderation:

• The first is a practical application: to follow the Middle Way is to indulge excesses of both self-denial and self-indulgence. Instead of asceticism, instead of hedonism, a happy medium.

• The second is a philosophical application: to follow the Middle Way is to refuse belief in both eternalism— the belief your soul is immortal — and annihilationism— the belief you cease to exist upon death.

This concept is repeated in Taoism as jian, 儉 - which is normally translated as “moderation” or “frugality.” It is one of the “Three Treasures,” the three central pillars or values of Taoist philosophy.

Buddhist and Taoist thought both stress the acceptance of the natural way of things, and caution against striving for excellence or dominance in anything. In Taoism, the celebration of moderation comes from a recognition of the importance of balance. In Buddhism, their is a distinct belief that to hoard exceptional material wealth is to doom others to exceptional material want and the social woes that accompany it:

Hearing about this, people thought: “Now let us get sharp swords made for us, and then we can take from anybody what is not given, we will make an end of them, finish them off once and for all and cut off their heads.” So, having procured some sharp swords, they launched murderous assaults on villages, towns and cities, and went in for highway robbery, killing their victims by cutting off their heads.

Thus, from the not giving of property to the needy, poverty became widespread, from the growth of poverty, the taking of what was not given increased, from the increase of theft, the use of weapons increased, from the increased use of weapons, the taking of life increased . . .

(Digha-Nikaya iii 65)

Exceptionalism defines itself by distance from the mean. In order to have a “the best” we must have “the rest.” This brings up a frequently asked question of Ivy League admissions processes: “With such giant endowments, why not just admit more people?” It makes sense from a societal perspective— if the educations are as transformatively superior as they are touted to be, would the whole world not benefit from a doubling or tripling of the übermenschen exiting those hallowed halls?

Of course, as I addressed in “The Eye of Jabaari,” the product being sold by elite institutions is not education, but prestige. As I mentioned in “Stop saying neurodivergent,” the rates of acceptance have actually been going down. When our institutions buy into exceptionalism the level of inequity in our society grows. If we check in with reality, it’s impossible for everyone to be exceptional- it’s expected that everyone be mediocre.

Exceptionalism creates the opposite of a balanced world. We inhabit a world already mid-nosedive into a repeat of the hard lessons of the gilded age, but this time everyone is on fire or drowning. The solution, according to ancient teachings, is to give more and want less. Peace and prosperity lie in moderation; in mediocrity.

Moneyball

It’s no wonder we’re obsessed with excellence; we’re a culture dedicated to individuals. Individuals can only achieve great things through exceptional feats. This is not so with teams.

In the first episode of HBO’s Industry, an ambitious go-getter (Harper) has a discussion about meritocracy with a seasoned industry veteran (Eric) The vibe is that the position she’s interviewing for isn’t just competitive, but elite to a degree of insanity.

Eric: Why are you here then?

Harper: Well, it's not a very political answer, but I think mediocrity is too well hidden by parents who hire private tutors. I am here on my own.

Eric: Every successful business is full of people who spent money nurturing unremarkable talent.

Harper: I think this is the closest thing to a meritocracy there is, and I only ever want to be judged on the strength of my abilities.

When I saw this conversation, I loved it so much that I knew it would make it into an article. The two are talking past one another. Eric literally tells Harper that skill isn’t the foundation of a successful business. One more time for the folks in the back:

Every successful business is full of people who spent money nurturing unremarkable talent.

Let’s talk about one of my favorite stories of unremarkable talent: Moneyball.

I really like the story of Moneyball because it’s about winning with intentionality and solidarity rather than excellence. Instead of relying on the collective unconscious to label player value by salary, Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta used sabermetrics (a fancy word for Baseball statistics) to find the most undervalued players in the league to sign to the Oakland A’s.

The players who had been selected for the 2002 team were, by all traditional accounts, mediocre. This approach was panned by established industry voices and old-timers on team management. Those voices were promptly silenced when the strategy created a 20-game winning streak and took the A’s to the playoffs two years in a row, in 2002 and 2003 despite being the third-to-last in the league for team salary.

“But wait!” you might say, “Didn’t this approach just change one standard of excellence for another?” And you’d be right! It exchanged individual exceptionalism for group exceptionalism. One of the tenants of EoSV is that solidarity will beat skill 9 times out of 10. It’s a no brainer why I like Moneyball: they put together a winning team with losing players. Individual performance only matters in the context of the collective. A team of winners fails together in the same way a team of losers wins together.

This is one of the biggest reasons I’m so down on meritocratic culture: it’s got a narrow minded, reductionist view of team building— one in which every candidate stands on their own to be measured for excellence. Though hiring and admissions bureaucracies may claim to select for “culture fit” and a “well rounded class,” there’s no real metrics by which these things can be evaluated. They’re so subjective as to be meaningless or so reductive as to be offensive.

If YoUr lOvEd OnE wAs GeTtInG SuRgEry, wouldn’t you want them to be operated on by the best surgeon?

….. I hate this meme, and yes, it’s a meme. Here’s my counter-meme:

If you had to decide between the only surgeon in the hospital operating to save your loved one or to save the next Einstein, which would you choose?

The quiet part that no one says out loud when they pose the best surgeon question is the implication that the best, most important people deserve the best surgeons. This is the root rot of exceptionalism— that there must always be a choice between saving the next Einstein and saving a crackhead.

The way we avoid having to choose between saving two people is to create a system equitable enough to produce enough medical personnel to meet demand— which is literally the opposite of the what the current system does. Medical School is one of the most difficult and exclusive secondary educations to obtain in the nation, largely due to an idiotic moratorium on enrollment from 1980 2005.

As a result of this shortage MD’s have become increasingly prestigious. If you meet an actual doctor, it means that they had to beat out a lot of other applicants to get where they are.

My answer to the best surgeon question has always been an emphatic NO. I want my loved one to have their surgery unit staffed with the correct team as mandated by triage procedure. Unless they are undergoing the riskiest, most skill intensive surgery in the hospital at that moment, I don’t think they need the best surgeon.

The mentality that you deserve the best is an artifact of a culture recklessly bent on individualism that’s ready to disregard any negative externalities at the cost of self. No one deserves the best. Searching for the best leads us to situations like the active physician shortage. We all deserve the same, and we’ll get it by practicing mediocrity.

Practicing Mediocrity; Practicing Moderation

Wasteyrselfkid on Instagram

As I mentioned in The Tiger Keeper, I’m not great at moderation. I’ve always been a person of absolutes. I don’t often go hiking for a weekend, but I quit my job to hike the PCT. When I lost 80 pounds, I did it through fasting, not moderating my diet. I didn’t really publish much writing at all until I decided to go on this 84 day publishing streak.

I’m currently applying to MBA programs. It is a lot of writing. Every school wants to know what your goals are and the impact you’ve had in pursuing them up to now. When I say impact, I mean they want to know how many teams you’ve led, hours you’ve saved, dollars you’ve raised- business metrics that reflect your value as a human being.

I have a very wise former mentor who I asked to serve as a recommender in the admissions process. While we were speaking, I brought up my recent focus on interactive storytelling and emergent narrative. He responded by mentioning that he was around 70 hours into Elden Ring and that the stories he encountered were fantastic, and enhanced by the player’s role in drawing them out.

“That’s lovely,” I said. “That game has been at the top of my list for months but I can’t find the time to play it. Since I started publishing an article a day I haven’t been able to play games at all.”

Sage and casual as always, he said:

You can’t produce 100% of the time. You need to take time to consume, or you’ll run out of things to write about.

I’ve been thinking on his words for the past few weeks. He’s correct, as always. I pour all the knowledge and experience I can bring to bear into my writing. With every article I publish, I feel the well run closer to dry. If I don’t take time to refresh it, I won’t have many interesting things to say.

With MBA applications, I can’t really afford to let that well run dry. I need to give myself time to both write and draft admissions material, and to relax and consume enough interesting content to have interesting thoughts to share. The conclusion I’ve come to is such: I need to practice mediocrity.

When I say I want to practice mediocrity, I mean I need to reduce the amount of time and effort I pour into EoSV. So I can either decide to sacrifice quality, and still post every day, or sacrifice frequency, and post every other day.

My argument to be mediocre isn’t an argument against self improvement. On the contrary, it’s an argument for a realistic self image. Try to be the person you want to be, but accept that very, very few of us will change the world. Just because I’m not going to be the next Joseph Heller, doesn’t mean I can’t try my darndest to deliver articles I’m proud of. With that in mind, I’m taking EoSV to an every-other-day posting schedule from now until I’m finished with applications in the late fall. That means there won’t be a post tomorrow.

Conclusion

The Taoist concept of Wu-wei, 無為, is translated as “effortless action” or “action without intention.” I’d say the closest concept in western thinking is Flow. It’s a combination radical acceptance of one’s situation and action according to that situation. Posting less often here is me striving for improvement in moderation, something I think we all need to do. It will push me to work on goals both personal and professional, but do so through the Middle Way.

I can rail against meritocracy as much as I want, but in the end I really believe the stuff I’m saying: passing societal filters is a mark that it’s ok to pay you well, and the more exclusive the filter, the better the pay. I wish I lived in a world where everyone strived for cooperation and mediocrity, not excellence. I don’t. In fact, that world sits at odds with my need to eat.

Until next time, stay in touch on twitter, and I’ll see you in two days.