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In Praise of Laziness and Mediocrity

Moses E. Ochonu

I’ve been thinking. Is mediocrity the greatest sin in the world? Why are badness and laziness vilified in such unforgiving terms in most societies? I mean, everybody can’t be an overachieving hard worker in a world of zero sum equations, can they? It’s a matter of simple logic. Badness sustains the value of excellence. Without mediocrity, achievement would be diminished in worth and the world would be a bland, undifferentiated playground of overachievers. Without badness, we would not recognize goodness. Although the opposite proposition is also true, badness and mediocrity are not normative aspirational standards, so they are not the paradigms that need to be reinforced or defended.

Please follow my logic carefully. The Protestant work ethic has socialized us into thinking that work and achievement constitute the only markers of noble humanity. Don’t get me wrong; I like my work as an academic. No, I love my work. If I didn’t work, I would suffocate from boredom. But as I reflect on it, I am not entirely sure if that’s what nature intended or if I am simply an unwitting victim of the capitalist denunciation of laziness, badness, and mediocrity and its simultaneous recommendation of work, excellence, and achievement. Those who are fanatical campaigners against mediocrity ought to pause and temper their intolerance with a sober acknowledgement of how their intolerance may have been formed by forces outside them—by the work-obsessed capitalist system.

A graduate school professor of mine patented a phrase of critique that was stinging or entertaining, depending on whether you were a spectator or a target. He would examine a piece of writing or presentation and conclude that the product had two, three, four, five, or six “levels of badness.” That phrase was magical. It caught on among graduate students of our cohort who were familiar with its inventor. We used it to entertain ourselves, to laugh at our work, and to preempt and laugh off critiques of our papers. It was therapy in the harsh, depressing world of graduate school. We even invented our own variation on the phrase. A piece of writing, art, film, musical production, or theatre might have three major levels of badness and/or two minor ones. That was our self-consolatory take on it.

As we made our way through graduate school, and as I reflected on the “levels of badness” thesis, it occurred to me that the phrase encapsulated a mindset that does not tolerate mediocrity, however defined—a mindset that refuses to recognize how mediocrity is ultimately constitutive of and indispensible to excellence. Without mediocre engineers, we cannot recognize or appreciate engineering excellence; in fact we would not have the category of “engineering excellence” to begin with. If all engineering is excellent, then “excellent” loses its function as an adjective of value.

Capitalism is partly to blame for our obsession with excellence and our disdain for mediocrity. The stigmatization of mediocrity is a product of the culture of obsessive work, which is itself the culture of capitalism. Disciplined work has a history, which is intertwined with the history of capitalism. Capitalists, socialists, and everyone in between make it seem as though work is natural to humans. It is not. Scavenging, harvesting, and consumption are. The transition from scavenging and other consumption-based modes of existence to capitalist work discipline was not a “natural” evolutionary progression as modern social science claims. It took the conscious, contested, chaotic, and unevenly successful effort of shrewd, self-interested groups to institute the culture of regimented work and accumulation and to normalize it as the standard of success.

The notion that everyone has to be a worker and producer, and that this should be the central defining feature of human progress is neither natural nor is it even upheld by capitalism itself. That’s the ultimate contradiction. Capitalism is supposedly about working and producing but it depends for its survival on a non-productive activity that requires little or no work: consumption. Consumption is not a capitalist activity. Yet it helps sustains the entire edifice of capitalism – work, profits, pursuits of excellence, and other idioms of capitalist ascent.

Some sectors of our capitalist economic superstructure in fact depend on laziness and mediocrity for their survival. There is a branch of our capitalist, industrial economy that one might call the Laziness Industrial Complex (LIC), a vast sector catering to the base indulgencies and lifestyles of the lazy and the mediocre – lifestyles that we simultaneously deride and subsidize. In the United States, the lazy man is a butt of jokes and snide remarks and is projected as a cautionary tale. He is alternately called bum, slob, and loser, among other derogatory names, and children are coached to work hard so as not to end up as a couch potato. The slob’s perceived failures supply visual and textual materials for instructing our wards away from his choices.

The couch potato is theorized as being useless to society, an unproductive, lazy burden on the capitalist system. But how would the chip making industry survive without the couch potato – the one who sits on a couch all day eating chips and watching TV and movies? Speaking of TV and movie watching, how would TV shows get their ratings without the vain patronage of couch potatoes and lazy bums who reject the tyranny of hard work and prefer to engage in the vain pleasures enabled by modern capitalist inventions? The multi-billion dollar video rental industry depends largely on the patronage of people who society would define as slobs. Who consumes the junk programming that has become the staple of daytime TV in America? How can mass hard work coexist with daytime TV? In this universe of contradictory impulses something has to give, and what usually gives is that which gives no pleasure and exerts mental and physical energy: work.

In a world without the couch potato, perhaps the worst hit capitalist sector would be the soft drink industry. Where would fizz makers find a market to sustain them? The alcohol industry is the quintessential bum industry. There is a symbiotic connection between the bum and alcohol. The industry sustains the 24-hour party industry, which is itself dependent on a vast army of underachieving fun lovers. The industry sustains circuits of socialization that are populated mostly by people we would characterize as lazy bums. The beer brewing industry is especially beholden to the large population of slobs and couch potatoes.

This is the age of multitasking and people can snack and work at the same time. But would they snack as much and consume as much soda as they do if they worked as hard as society would want them to? In the juggling game of life something always gives. We can’t have people working all the time and pursuing successive goals and still get all the comfort foods we produce consumed. Let’s face it: idleness, along with its indulgences, is a complement to, and sustainer of, hard work and obsessive productivity. I am not sure the snack industry would survive if all we did was overwork and overachieve.

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