Our Obsession with Mediocrity

I don't know what to write about anymore.

There are so many creators nowadays.

I think it's great that so many people consider themselves creators nowadays. I think it's fantastic that there are so many people out there with true talent and potential. They're working on every type of art imaginable. There are authors. Musicians. DJs, designers, models, influencers.

For artists to be noticed before - musicians, especially - they had to be signed to a record label.

How do you even do that now? Walk up to a representative from Def Jam and hand them a CD? Someone from the label would have to listen to the entire CD, enjoy it, and reach back out to the person who made it.

As if that agent has the time for that? Not with ten thousand other hopefuls wanting their music heard as well.

It isn't like that anymore, though. Now, with the internet being a thing, anyone can put content out. That person has the same chance to make it big as anyone else does who's also trying for the same outcome.

Since so many aspiring creators are trying at the same time, though, they each, respectively, have almost no chance at all to make it.

In a way, it's almost overwhelming. It almost makes me not want to create art anymore.

Almost.

I have a confession. I've developed a sort of untold jealousy. The type of jealousy that most wouldn't speak of.

If you tell anyone about how your work didn't get enough likes, or you get slightly annoyed because some 12 year old kid on Instagram got 400 thousand views for a video of a dog licking a mailbox or something - and your song, on the other hand, that you worked on for 6 years, got just 108 views - you're automatically jealous of the other creator in everyone else's eyes.

Your work is then noticed less than some random kid's.

Even if all he did was use his mom's iPhone to record a video of a Labradoodle running face first into a glass door, or sticking his tongue in a mailbox, or scaring a squirrel, or whatever.

Still, you're not jealous. You've been working on your art for almost as long as this kid has been alive.

Still, yet, no one looks at anything you've made. Seven million people are watching some dumb pointless video of a frog scaring a cat.

The three people who looked at YOUR video loved it, though.

You are jealous. It's a sick kind of jealousy.

It's sick because it's a justified jealousy. Who cares about a 12 year old kid recording a video of a Labradoodle running face first into a glass door? Of a cat jumping into the air after a cucumber was surreptitiously placed behind her dish of food? Of someone falling off a bed because they were startled by an air horn? Of some girl trying to twerk upside down against a wall and failing miserably, kicking a candle, and starting something on fire by accident?

When there are ACTUAL talented creators out there, why are we as a society so obsessed with this mediocrity that everyone has somehow deemed art?

Why do we admire people who record videos on their phones of stupid shit that doesn't matter? Videos of their kid running toward their ridiculously large mansion that those people shouldn't be able to afford in the first place? The mansion they only can afford because some algorithm deemed their videos worthy of being seen by people who are also bored, with nothing else to do but stare at screens, drink, pass out, and fall asleep?

Not to mention, there are people in this world who can't even afford phones. Let alone mansions. Let alone even a place to live, or a meal to eat that day.

Those people might be the most talented artists alive today. We'll never know, because we, collectively, never gave them a chance.

I await the day society returns to its admiration of real art, instead of cheap laughs.

And dumb stories like this one. Stories like this, that literally anyone could write.