Fear
You know, my biggest fear is mediocrity.
Waking up one day and realising that I embody all the traits that I dislike in other people.
Whether in mind – watching television, not reading, conducting conversations that revolve around inane interpersonal relationship bullshit.
Or in body – eating crap, binge drinking, not exercising.
Fear is healthy. Fear is a huge motivator.
It’d be easy to construct this as some huge deal, a struggle, a rage against mediocrity. But it’s not. Instead, it’s kind of easy.
One simple question, asked over and over: who do you want to be?
We think about alot of the same things (and read a lot of the same blogs). The main thing that worries me is that the number of people who do these things seems to increase ten-fold after the age of about 25. I reckon if I can just stick it out until I’m 30 then things should be OK.
Did you find that Ryan post to be kind of harsh? Not a bad thing, effective. Smart kid for his age.
There’s a place for being harsh, and that post was deservedly so. I see little point in sustaining the glad-handing, self-congratulating community that he called out.
My biggest fear is… ignorance, closely followed by mediocrity. That post raised some interesting points, even though some of the descriptions he uses to address the readers are a bit rich, eg “if you’re a piddly fucking loser”, but I can see where he’s coming from. Evidently I don’t fall into the category of people who are likely to read all these 30 books before they’re 30 despite “Siddhartha” being the one I live by. Let’s hope I’m not going to become a “plain, uninspired English teacher”…
mediocrity has been the victim of my most extended and vocal rants since the beginning of forever. people think i am arrogant and annoying because i do not accept or encourage mediocrity in anyone (self included).
As humans, we fear about a number of things that may, or will, befall to us (such as dying, getting cancer, looking old, being old, being alone) and we fear ample things we have to do (such as making a public speech, learning thow o drive, passing those exams, making decisions, sticking up for ourselves). These fears, whatever they may be, may all appear to be very different. But in reality, they aren’t. The casual theme which links these separate fears is a fear of rejection, disapproval, failure and, rather more commonly than you might think, a fear of success. And the underlying fear behind all these emotions is the simple fear of not being able to deal with things – of not being able to cope with rejection, with disapproval, with failure or with success. It is that – the fear of not being able to cope – which is the basic fear which affects us all. We are anxious about things which may (or may not) happen because we worry that we will not be able to cope with the consequences.