The Noble Pursuit of Mediocrity

In recent years a common factor among the people that I meet is the dissatisfaction with their respective lives. A whole lot of people I know are quitting the comfortable jobs after working for a couple of years. Some of them are planning to do so in sometime. The strange part is that some of them are pursuing their unconventional dream jobs so to say, with handsome salary packages and this fact comes as a surprise to someone like me who is more or less unemployed trying to find a way to break in to a world which is still a distant dream.

This disillusionment of perpetual tedium of office life isn’t a new phenomenon but the apparent nature of its occurrence is something that was missing from our earlier generations. During a discussion, the primary response of my parents on this topic was that, “today’s people are unappreciative of the things they have so easily”. Maybe it is one of the factors; another one could be the unrealistic desire of some alien happiness aroused from the “meme culture” of social media. This constant overload of information and opinion forming machinery is causing a mass-numbing of sensory and presenting a regulated picture of “Happiness”.

In my opinion this magical happiness doesn’t exist. Happiness is truly the by-product of a productive day, with productivity being a new thought produced or a new experience cultivated through affection and stimulation. Now by this statement I don’t want to induce the philosophical mumbo-jumbo like work productivity isn’t productivity, a new thought produced in fact forms the basis of work productivity, but when this thought is repeated for mass production, it isn’t actually a new product anymore, rather just a perpetual cycle of the initial igniting process.  So even in traditional work culture the productivity is kept alive by constantly improving an existing product, making upgrades and tackling with upcoming problems.

The biggest victim of this disenchantment with the “present scenario” is the young middle class population. The middle class today is very different from the middle class a few decades ago. Today the fight is not for the basics. The biggest travesty of the middle class today is that they work their whole lives to be the first copy of the elite. They want to struggle and hustle their whole life working mindlessly towards getting closer to the things which are available to the elite by default. It really is a sad position to be in when a person is willing to work whole life with the only motif of increasing the “buying capacity”. In the popular media, this fight is portrayed as righteous and just. This mind-set is the fodder for the ruling class, be it political ruling class or the big giants corporate. The power lies with the powerful by keeping people smart enough to be efficient workers and dumb enough to be a mindless customer.

This pursuit of mediocrity is what makes it easy to churn huge profits. After decades of TV and advertisement intake everything that is popular is highly mediocre. Be it music, food, cinema, writing, Television, poetry, people, jobs. 

This doesn’t mean that earning a decent living isn’t a noble pursuit, it surely is. It is a prerequisite that one should be able to have a shelter, three square meals, clothing, education and a proper healthcare for themselves and their families. But once you are at that financial milestone maybe it’s time to think beyond that and beyond that isn’t just the up-gradation of shelter, clothes or car.

So maybe this unrest is the good thing. Something new might come up with the unrest of our generation. All those feeling dissatisfied with their lives are probably at the threshold of arising self-esteem not letting them living a life of disbelief, which might one day take them to self-actualization as per Maslow’s hierarchy.

Getting a job or making money is a necessity but not with the consequence of living life as a person living in a shell, too formulated to stimulate thought process,

 But what do I know? I am just jobless person.