Mediocrity has turned modern culture into a sniveling apologetic cadaver that lacks daring. Everywhere you look, mediocrity is strangling our culture.
Its bland, pasty tentacles are wrapped around all disciplines and art forms. It squeezes out anything daring or brilliant until all left is an uninspired, focus-grouped pablum made to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Movies and TV are an endless barrage of underwhelming superhero/true-story snoozefests. How many dull, bloated CGI fests can audiences be expected to tolerate? The big platforms ensure that we have a steady supply of soulless reboots mining the same nostalgic IP wells, and braindead reality shows celebrating the worst impulses of a slimy bunch of vapid, self-absorbed attention seekers. Occasionally one comes across the glimmer of a promise – quickly smothered by conformity to some idea or trope.
Creativity and artistry are seemingly outsourced to the indies, and indies are always banal.
The music world is just as creatively bankrupt, utterly devoid of renegade voices and new styles. The top of the charts is a graveyard of sugary, mass-produced pop ditties engineered by giant corporate hit factories to be as inoffensive and earwormy as possible. We’re drowning in cheap, plasticine imitations of genuine musical brilliance.
Even science has succumbed to this pandemic of mediocrity. There are no more bold forays into uncharted territories – our scientists dance at the lucrative (and well-worn) line between theory and poetry in slick YouTube videos. Big ideas and bold new frontiers have given way to the safest, surest bets for publishing papers and securing tenure, or a podcast episode. Talking about which, podcasting is generally a torrent of noise (usually about ET), or diluted and tired discussions on the safest trends in politics, science, or thought.
The modern novel is deader than vaudeville. Mass-market fiction has become an endless loop of recycled tropes and half-baked plot twists, cynically published to copycat the latest bestseller list entry. Creative writing has been reduced to ghostwritten celebrity memoirs and lukewarm YA dystopian series indistinguishable from one another. Few books are worth replacing one’s toilet paper.
From top to bottom, modern popular culture has been stripped of its daring, edginess, dazzling creativity, and innovation. There’s no differentiation, no spine. We’re drowning in a sea of bland, market-tested inoffensiveness designed to appeal to the widest possible demographics without ruffling any feathers or challenging anyone’s assumptions.
It’s all just so…mediocre.
Where are the provocateurs? There are a few polarizing figures, which is great, but we need more if we are to combat the tsunamis of mediocrity that get churned out every hour in popular culture. Everything has to be pre-masticated into easy-to-digest flavorless pap before being squirted into the gaping mouths of the complacent masses.
Art is meant to elevate, transform, and transfigure. Not just mindlessly distract.
But that’s become too much of a risk in these sad, times of rabid mediocrity, where the path has been permanently paved for the safest, surest route to mass-market profits. It’s a dull existence.
But why does this happen? And what exactly is mediocrity?
In a word, it’s insincerity. A pose.
It’s also laziness and shallow living. the ego surface-grazing on muddied puddles. It keeps its possessor safe within the electric wire of their mind’s periphery. Being mediocre is your best bet against a random world where randomness creates opportunities and terrors too bewildering to imagine.
Mediocrity seems to be the soft nod, halfway between wakefulness and sleep, of a vulgarly well-fed civilization. Seldom does mediocrity have the opportunity to blossom and thrive in a place of want or destitution – but it’s an invasive species of thought in the gardens of opulence.
It masquerades as some virtue at first, and then as revolt, then as freedom till finally, it attains a lukewarm sensibility and gets accepted as culture.
Its progress is predictable – it appeals to the heart, and with the heart’s permission, proceeds to lock the head up in a basement.
Every generation mixes its clichés with the absurdities of the previous generation, and what wins in the battle of clichés, prevails. We live in an age where the embarrassing perversions of thought and habit (which were sufficiently masked in “those good old days”) are now paraded with light and sound for the whole world to see.
You really cannot blame them because mediocrity is indeed in great demand. Unearth some earth-shattering cliché or platitude and you can almost be certain of getting an audience.
Maybe I’m just getting old and jaded (I’m 35)? But I can’t help but feel we’ve fallen into an uninspired rut of creative stagnation, of dialing everything back to the middle to maximize corporate profits and mass appeal rather than pursuing anything daring or original. The loudest, brashest and glossiest gets the most limelight – perhaps this has always been the way. Culture should be about pushing boundaries, not racing to find the blandest, most unobjectionable common denominator.
