Positive Change Starts When Mediocrity Ends

Have you ever thought about why you exist? I know I have. 

I try to ask myself that question on a fairly regular basis. There was a time in each of our lives when we gained self-awareness, around the age of four or five. 

Clearly, we all know we exist. I don’t want to kickstart someone’s existential crisis in writing this, but it’s important that we at least entertain the idea that we have some purpose. 

I’m not trying to push people toward a particular religion or faith, but I would like to steer people away from something that has plagued our society for decades (or even centuries): mediocrity. 

Society tolerates mediocrity too much. In my view, that stems directly from an avoidance of discomfort. Everyone is guilty of this, especially myself, but this seems to be more prevalent in our society and culture than ever before.

I find it terrifying that I could live my entire life not doing as much as I could do. I don’t want to sit and think about everything that I didn’t accomplish and now I couldn’t. Even scarier is the idea that I would be okay with mediocrity. 

I’m not saying that some people are failures, far from it. It’s easy to get bogged down in day-to-day life. Making things better, even in our personal lives, can be extremely difficult.

If we’re going to make things better, we need something that we can aim at. This is partially why religions exist. They provide some goal at the top of the pyramid that we can aim for and miss, but perhaps preferable to aiming in the dirt. I’ll let you decide what goal you want to aim at.

It’s not about falling down, but rather about getting back up. Perhaps in pondering why we exist, we can be reminded of the ways that we can get back up. 

For example, a goal of daily exercise seems reasonable. Most of us will inevitably miss a day of exercise, but that’s much better than never exercising. Even going from exercising zero times a week to two times a week is infinitely more amount of weekly exercise. 

A lot of us have grand plans and ambitions once we get out of here. However, none of us will change the world if we can’t change ourselves.

Sometimes I struggle to answer the question of why I exist and why I’m at USD, but I’m much closer to an answer when I keep it in the back of my mind.