In Praise of Mediocrity
I had a little epiphany: Before the internet, and before people lived in large cities, the circle of people we came into contact might be only a couple hundred people.Out of two or three hundred people, it's not hard to be in the top tenth percentile at something.When your circle of acquaintances is the whole internet, being in the top tenth percentile of anything takes years of determined effort.Our brains still have expectations rooted in these smaller communities: That we should be able to create something exceptional and praiseworthy for our efforts.Today, it's hard to get praise for anything we do, unless it's from our families, or unless we do something truly world class. (Case in point: The other week someone shared some generative artwork here, and it got promptly criticized for not being "gallery worthy".) In the face of that, we instinctively give up.