How Freedom Has Locked Us in The Chains of Mediocrity

In this article, I explore the connection between freedom and mediocrity. I argue that mediocrity is neutral at best, and often causes us to live lives we find meaningless and unfulfilling. I delve into what part death has to play in the mediocre life, and offer a solution to how we can free ourselves from the chains of mediocrity to live lives of greatness.

The Decision We Have No Decision In Making

From birth to when we graduate into the real world, we are guided through the chaos of this life by parents, teachers, and mentors. A lot of us who live more privileged lives in more developed countries follow the same predetermined life: go to preschool, then kindergarten, then primary school, then secondary school, then college, and then "the world is yours". We are told what to do, what to think, who to talk to, and where to go for the first 18-22 years of our lives. It's all provided to us in a simple package. All we have to do is follow the trajectory, follow the motions. The future has been set, we just have to get there.

Take a look at the trends in tertiary education by Our World in Data for context.

Suddenly, we are thrust into the world and all its chaos, like a fledgling pushed out of its nest. Some may not be able to fly, but most of us are able to. The real test is where we fly to. In our interconnected world, we have access to opportunities all across the world. We get to scan every professional and academic opportunity available. We can apply to the largest corporations or the fastest growing startups across several industries. Or perhaps we opt to work on our own personal projects. Maybe we decide to do charity work. We have the most freedom on how we lead our lives we've ever had in human history. The world is our oyster, but that just makes it so much harder to find the pearl.

For most of human civilization, we didn't have much choice in what we "wanted" to do. If our father was a carpenter, we would be one too. If our mother was a farmer, we'd be one too. It was too risky, often meaning life or death, to stray from the path set out for you. Without an education, all you really knew how to do was what your parents knew how to do. For the vast majority of the population, there was no free time to acquire new skills or pick up a "hobby". If the crops were not irrigated in time or the seeds not sown in time, it would mean a starving family for the next harvesting season.

Once the Industrial Revolution came along and exponentially increased agricultural output, it meant fewer farmers were needed to feed the townspeople. With less labor designated to agriculture, it meant more labor could be designated elsewhere. That required educational institutions to train these new laborers in various fields of knowledge. Over time, these educational institutions that were originally reserved for the nobles, were now accessible to the middleclass. We slowly began to send our kids to these institutions at younger ages, now known as schools, preparing them to compete with other kids for the most reputable universities. The better the education you received, the better the job, and the better the job, the better your pay, and the better your pay, the better your life (supposedly). This brings us to good ol' capitalism, where the success of our lives is determined by our return on investment made in the first 22 years (let's not even talk about the insurmountable costs of tertiary education).

Thanks to great advancements in agricultural technology and supply chain efficiencies, we can now face the overwhelming anxieties of a question only the privileged can ask: what do I want to do with my life? At first glance, this may seem to be an easy question. Who doesn't know what they want in life? Want to work as a consultant? Go for it. Want to become a basketball player? Go for it. Want to be a programmer? Go for it. You have the freedom to do so.

But don't fail, because that would be a waste of all the money and time of your first 22 years. Plus, you've probably got 10 years' salary worth of student debt (don't worry, it's only increasing). You can do whatever you want, but pragmatically, you can only choose once. If you do decide to change your life trajectory (such as being a 4th year medical student to wanting a bachelor's in business), be ready to incur a few more years of your life and a lot more debt.

Some of us get lucky and align ourselves with ikigai right off the bat, but many of us don't. And so, we are left with the looming question: of the thousands upon thousands of possible ways I can carry out my life, which one shall I choose? Often, we choose the easiest, and that is when we turn the key, locking ourselves in the chains of mediocrity.

The Chains of Mediocrity

Mediocrity is an elusive trait. Mediocrity persists in most things, so we can only tell when something is not mediocre (on both extremes of good and bad). Mediocrity is doing something the same way as it has been done time and time again despite changes in circumstance and context. Mediocrity is the path of least resistance. Mediocrity is "just the way things are done". It requires no forethought nor planning, just execution.

We fall back to mediocrity because we've been molded to execute in our formative years. Of course we have been, children often make impulsive and short-sighted decisions. It would be foolish to have children decide such an important decision such as whether or not they want to get a formal education. So our hands are held throughout life, and without realizing it, we grow into adults that are still on execute mode, never forming our own paths of living. We often live lives that are meaningless, directionless, and unfulfilling because they are safe, true and tested, mediocre. We live the prototypical life.

The opposite of mediocrity would be greatness. Not necessarily the greatness of kings and star athletes and Nobel Prize winners, but more of what the Greeks called "eudaimonia," roughly translated as human flourishing. I use greatness with it's description of size, depth, complexity, and quality. We cannot start out great, we must become great, and thus human greatness inherently connotates growth.

Growth is the pain point. Growth requires change, and change is risky. We risk failing, and failing is just another reminder of our incompetence. Failure hurts. So we often find ourselves in cycles of stagnancy, never risking our comfort. We make excuses as to why we cannot do this or be that and carry on our mediocre lives, despite being deeply discontent. Again, mediocrity is dangerous in that it sneaks in the shadows of our greatest fears and anxieties. Only when we address our fears and anxieties can we see the mediocrity, bare in the sunlight.

On the Nature of Fear

The following section is derived heavily from Robert M. Sapolsky's fascinatingly comprehensive and readable Behave.

Fear has governed our behavior since the dawn of humankind. It is perhaps the strongest driver of action. The amygdala, the portion of our brain responsible for our flight-or-flight responses, is primitive yet important to our survival. Unlike the human's frontal cortex (where logic, reasoning, and social behavior reside) which is abnormally large compared to other mammals, the amygdala is what ties the featherless biped to animals. The amygdala is what made our ancestors run from lions just as it made the lion run from the flaming torch. Having such strong, body-controlling responses were favorable back when situations were life or death, but we almost never encounter those situations nowadays.

Despite the changes in environment driven by technology, our brains and bodies have not adapted fast enough. Our amygdala still fires signals to act when we are taking an important test, or when we present in front of a large crowd, or when we get an email from our boss called "Emergency Meeting". Our minds still believe that these are life or death situations, and so we act in irrational ways. We blow things out of proportion and get fidgety, begin to sweat, and adrenaline courses through our bodies shouting at us to "FIGHT!" or "RUN!". What am I going to do? Punch my monitor?

Of course not, the answer is to overcome our fears, especially our "learned fears", i.e. fears that we have not feared from birth. These learned fears can be attributed to the basolateral amygdala (BLA), which "learns fear and then sends the news to the central amygdala". Examples of learned fears include dogs (if you were previously bitten), letters from a tax agency (if you are broke), and skeletons (if it's Halloween). Learned fears can also be specific to a traumatic event, if a soldier from WWII sees the opposing side's logo on someone's (now vintage and edgy) shirt in the grocery store, their amygdala would start firing signals despite being in the safety of the canned food aisle. These fears become learned through repeated pain upon exposure to stimuli. Every time you see a dog, your memory replays the time you were bitten, so you run away, strengthening that connection of dog = pain.

Here is a study by Joseph LeDoux at New York University to illustrate how fears can be learned, despite the underlying cause of pain no longer being there:

"Expose a rat to an innate trigger of fear -- a shock. When this "unconditioned stimulus" occurs, the central amygdala activates, stress hormones are secreted, the sympathetic nervous system mobilizes, and, as a clear end point, the rat freezes in place-- "What was that? What do I do?" Now some conditioning. Before each shock, expose the rat to a stimulus that normally does not evoke fear, such as a tone. And with repeated coupling of the tone (the conditioned stimulus) with the shock (the unconditioned one), fear conditioning occurs-- the sound of the tone alone elicits freezing, stress hormone release, and so on." (pg. 36-37, Behave)

The good new is this, we can unlearn these fears. With enough repeated exposure to the stimuli (the tone) without the pain (the shock), we can override our BLA through our frontal cortex. "Hey, I'm not getting shocked anymore. This tone can't hurt me!" Ralph the rat exclaimed. Just like Ralph, we too can unlearn the learned fears that hold us back through systematic exposure to the things that threaten our identity the most (more on this on the last section).

Perhaps the most debilitating aspect of fear in our lives is that we have learned to fear fear. Feeling fearful is natural and can push us to our potential, but fearing fear itself doesn't allow us to even try being fearful. We have been told "don't be afraid" instead of "accept that you are afraid" and so we've avoided situations that make us afraid. But the situations that make you afraid are the exact situations needed to grow. We often fear things we don't understand because we don't know if or how they can hurt us. Doesn't that mean we should gravitate the most towards things we fear in order to understand the portions of the world we understand the least?

What is the basis of all this fear? Perhaps it is all stemmed from the greatest unknown, death.

Death As the Source of All Fear

Death spares no one. We all know it's coming, but we like to pretend like it's not. We like to sweep it under the rug because a conversation of death leads to sheer unknowing. Religion is the primary way humans tend to suppress these fears, specifically with promises of an afterlife. Descriptions of the afterlife offer us comfort so that we can move on with our lives and not get stuck in cycles of existential despair. Even with religion, we cannot be certain that we know what comes after death. We choose to believe in a narrative, and that belief is called faith.

Yet even faith does not protect us from death. Death signals the end of this worldly life, where you have been tested to be the best person you could possibly be. Were you kind enough? Were you charitable enough? Did you treat every day as a blessing? Did you take care of your body? Did you follow through with your religious obligations? Did you make the world a better place? Were you good enough? That's where the fear kicks in again. Perhaps you were waiting until you had "enough money" to give to charity. Perhaps you were too bitter to notice your blessings. Perhaps you opted for short-term indulgences instead of taking care of your health. Perhaps you made too many excuses as to why you didn't carry out your obligations. Perhaps you weren't a good person. Perhaps you failed the test. The same fears that death brings come circling around, even when religion gives the afterlife as an explanation.

For those folks who don't follow a religious doctrine of death and the afterlife, the fear of death is in its inconceivability. The mind simply cannot wrap its head around what death is. It is a futile experiment to think of what happens after death, and so this life is all there is. Life becomes what you make of it. Some may say its a game, others may say it is an adventure, but it's your decision in the end of the day-- and to decide the purpose of your life is no simple task. At that point, every decision you make is based on what you believe life to be. The infinite decisions you did not make become the infinite lives you sacrifice to live in this one. That's where the fear kicks in again. Am I really making the best decisions I can? Is this the life I want to live? Is there a way I can be happier? What is the point? Is there a point? We seldom reach conclusions to these questions that we are content with, so we often never dispel the fundamental fear of death.

At the core of death is the notion of time. Our life spans from the time we are born to the time we die (duh). Because death spares no one, time is limited for all living things. Every action has a cost in time that you can never get back. No matter if you choose to do something or not to do something, it will cost you time. Thus, the fear of death taints our time, and instead of facing it head on, we distract ourselves with the comfort of nonconfrontation. Instead of paving our own path for our lives and carrying the responsibilities of our own lives, we live the mediocre life because it is the easiest way out of trying to reason with our own decisions; we live the mediocre life because it helps us avoid confronting death. The defense of why the life you've followed is worth living is pointing towards everyone else's and saying "because theirs seems to be".

Why Greatness Instead of Mediocrity?

Mediocrity is passive replication, and so it cannot be actively bettering the world. If everything was done mediocrely for the next 1000 years, our world would continue to have the same levels of suffering it has today. Don't we want to at least be a force of good in this world? What is good anyway? First, let me lay out what is bad.

I think what is bad is what causes the most suffering. I think what causes the most suffering is ignorance. Ignorance is similar to mediocrity, in that it is a passive trait. You cannot choose to be ignorant of something, because you cannot know that that something exists if you are ignorant of it. I use ignorance not with its negative, judgmental connotation (a racist may be attributed as ignorant), but more to describe simply not knowing something. I am ignorant of many things in this world. Not knowing how to manage your finances, not knowing how to resolve conflict, not knowing how to take care of your health, not knowing how to love, not knowing how to do your work, etc. These aren't inherently malicious things, but they still contribute to how much we suffer.

Furthermore, ignorance allows for fear to take over your behavior. We fear the unknown, and so our fear increases the less we know. With so much fear, the amygdala takes over our decision making, and our behavior often becomes irrational and extreme. We become more aggressive, opting for more zero-sum outcomes instead of mutually beneficial ones. One example is how fear of the "other" can lead to wars, invasions, and genocide. The less the nation's people know about the other, the easier it is to create false realities by adding labels onto the "other". A few lucid examples include the Rwandan genocide where Tutsis were called cockroaches who needed extermination, the Nazi's who labeled the Jewish people as rats, or how slavery of African people across the British colonies was rationalized to be permissible because they were deemed to be racially inferior to Europeans. The same ignorance of the "other" (at a less extreme level) is growing to be palatable between the Democrats and Republicans in the United States, often to the level where civil discourse is not possible.

If ignorance is the bad of this world, then knowing is the good of this world. Like ignorance, knowing is a state of being and not a behavior. However, unlike ignorance, knowing requires action. Knowing requires you to face the infinite unknowns of this life, including death. The unknown is what we fear, and so knowing is to stand in front of death, to challenge death, to stare it in the eyes, fearfully, and proclaim that it cannot control you. Your life shall not be governed by death, but by life itself. Only then can you move from a life of mediocrity to a life of greatness.

The knowing person does not know everything, that is impossible. Rather, the knowing person knows that there is more to life than death. They aren't afraid to truly live; they aren't afraid to learn or to change or to risk or to find the beauty of this life. They grow in every avenue possible, never stagnant. They realize their fallibility, but continue to try despite it. They understand that time will pass without their consent, and so they use it to bring joy and prosperity. But this still isn't enough. The knowing person must also carry these proclamations into their behavior, to really take the risk; to put the theory to the test. It's this struggle against all odds that makes it a life of greatness. The belief that you can really accomplish what you put your mind to. The faith that if you put in the work, the rest will fall into place, whether it be due to the will of God or the nature of Nature.

We revere the greatest intellectuals, leaders, athletes, and artists because they are able to commit themselves to a cause that required utmost dedication and sacrifice to a purpose. They have the faith in themselves and in the world to put in the work, to learn, to risk, to fail, and to grow in the face of fear, in the face of death, and they have the courage to do it. They become the manifestation of hope in a world that often destroys our own, and so we admire their greatness. Don't get me wrong, greatness does not have to be socially recognized. Greatness dwells in the every day, in every action. We all have the potential to live lives of greatness, we just need to overcome our fears through consistent learning, failure, patience, courage, and have faith that we really are capable of leading our own life of greatness.

How Can I Live A Life of Greatness?

Since this has been pretty abstract, here are a list of practices on how to begin living a life of greatness (if you aren't already). Each practice listed requires its own due diligence, these are not commonly done because they are difficult (but definitely worthwhile). I am not as aligned in my own life as I want to be, so this is for me as much as it is for you:

1. Find ways to have honest reflection. This may be through journaling, art, talking to loved ones, prayer, meditation, exercise, etc. Try to look for gaps between where you are and where you want to be.

2. Figure out what is stopping you from being where you are. Look internally, don't outsource your problems to external factors. What are your deepest rooted fears and how do they manifest in your life? Where do you find the most resistance in life? This is uncomfortable and often painful, but necessary. I highly recommend trying out some "inner child" work (read Teal Swan's Anatomy of Loneliness if this interests you).

3. Cultivate a culture of support within your social network. Finding what your specific life of greatness entails requires exploration, change, failure, and risk. You will need people to turn to when things are difficult. Share your goals with them, and have them hold you accountable.

4. Be patient with yourself. You won't see results right away, and sometimes you'll fall back to your old habits of mediocrity. Don't get frustrated. Accept that it happened and move on.

5. Assume nothing and ask questions. Get in the habit of questioning why you've said something or thought something. If there is an assumption in there, ask why that assumption exists. We usually take mental shortcuts (the frontal cortex takes a lot of energy to use compared to the amygdala), and sometimes they aren't constructive.

6. Take care of your body. Stress and fear are more easily succumbed to when we are sleep deprived and lack proper nutrition. We want our frontal cortex to be functioning as often as possible instead of the amygdala.

7. Learn as much as you can about anything and everything. Prioritize learning about things you vehemently disagree with. Those are usually the things that you strongly identify with, and identity can often be confining. Growth cannot happen without the capacity to change.

Andy from Shawshank Redemption said it best, "It comes down to a simple choice really. Get busy living or get busy dying."