Photo illustration by Seth Perry
Hey, you! Yeah, you! What if I told you that in zero easy steps you could become a completely average version of yourself. Imagine if being more physically fit, eating better, reading more, learning more, being more organized, and meeting new people didn’t matter because you embraced being a completely unremarkable human being. What if you walked down the street after reading this article and looked at the people that passed by and realized that you were just as ordinary as all of them. If you’re ready to embrace being 100% commonplace, then you are ready for my complete guide to mediocrity! Buckle up… or don’t… it doesn’t matter, because you won’t need to brace yourself since you really aren’t going anywhere. It’s time to unlock the mediocrity within.
You see, six months ago I tried to change everything. Inundated with personal development YouTube videos and books, I thought I would try a wholesale overhaul. In January 2025, I attempted to make small changes every day for an entire year. I developed my own system of self-improvement by borrowing bits and pieces of popular trends. The one catch with me is that I live with a major psychiatric disorder: Bipolar 1. When I began the self-improvement process, in the back of my mind I thought that it was a long shot for me to implement a rigid system of development given my mental health condition. Guess what? I failed.
Have you ever heard of the term “failing upward?” Well, that is what happened to me. The entire project unraveled at the 30-day mark. After that, I barely followed my self-improvement regimen and stumbled upon something better. Instead of becoming someone who has a regimented routine of daily reading, exercise, meditation, diet, journaling, habit tracking, and productivity… I embraced mediocrity. Guess what? I still got stuff done.
Chasing mediocrity is a perfect solution for your life.If anyone is selling you a comprehensive plan to overhaul your life in a set period of time, know that there are more people like me, who have experienced a complete personal development collapse, than there are people who live remarkable lives akin to the fabricated façade of your average self-help influencer. You cannot escape the sales pitches for greatness in this day and age. On Sunday morning, many Americans are continuously promised a variety of flavors of prosperity and abundance from the pulpit. Marketing algorithms target the demographic you represent, and any digital snake oil salesman can spend enough money to pitch you their new course while exploiting the most vulnerable aspects of yourself. Around eight new podcasts are released every minute, with 5–10 percent of all podcasts falling under personal development. This means a mountain of unvetted content — overwhelming and impossible to consume — is waiting to induce your next panic attack. All of these points should overwhelm you, which is why chasing mediocrity is a perfect solution for your life.
If you don’t believe that the personal development genre is full of a swath of unoriginal hacks shilling a carbon copy of someone else’s intellectual property, take a close look at the main image of this article. In the background you’ll see a collage of YouTube video thumbnails created in the last year for videos promising you a plan to change your life in six months. Through a casual 20 minutes of YouTube research, I was able to find twelve identical thumbnails that all have the same title: “Become Unrecognizable.” The irony is that these twelve content creators have all just hopped on the most recognizable personal development video trend of the past year. In an attempt to get views, these creators have sold their plan for greatness by simply replicating their competitors. Before clicking on any trending personal development video, ask yourself this: Why would anyone get life advice from a person who has no desire to be their true self? This proves that even content creators are essentially mediocre humans behind their smokescreen of wellness and presentability.
So, what is my surefire plan for mediocrity? To be clear, I am not telling you to simply abandon all routines, schedules, and of course medical or psychiatric suggestions from professionals. Mediocrity is all about giving yourself permission. You have the ability to give yourself permission to sleep in on a weekday, eat a bag of Doritos while wiping your orange fingers on your shirt, leave a book half-read for six weeks because Chapter 4 was uninteresting, take a lower-paying, less stressful job for your own mental health, weigh the cost of your ambitions if you ever actually achieved your loftiest goals, and even miss an entire week of exercise because you’re dealing with anxiety. Allow the high-octane and never-ceasing personal development marketing to retreat into the background like the dull roar of soothing white noise. Embrace mediocrity, knowing you can’t be everything to everyone — you can only be a few real things to the small circle of people whose names you actually remember.
In closing, here is how mediocrity played out for me in the last six months. I work a lot, and I am professionally mediocre, not a perfectionist. If I were a perfectionist, I would not have gotten the following list done:
- I completed a six-episode documentary podcast series
- I preached at over eight funerals (three of them in one week)
- I organized an educational panel on the opioid crisis
- I promoted a large-scale mental health event
- I attended two conferences
- I conducted seven press interviews
- I celebrated my father’s 80th birthday in an extravagant three-day celebration.
What I haven’t listed here are the countless naps, the deviations from my diet, my grumpiness, and my disorganized method of getting things done. I achieved my goals by being mediocre, giving myself permission to be ordinary, and by not “Becoming Unrecognizable.”
I want to be recognized as the pastor with the Doritos Spicy Sweet Chili-flavored crumbs on my shirt. I’m proud to be a faith leader who folds out the cot in his office and takes a two-hour nap on a Sunday afternoon, complete with noisy snoring. A highlight of my vocation is how I embrace the fact that 80 percent of the time at work I wear drawstring khakis, a T-shirt, Vans, and a baseball hat because it looks average. So, if you think you aren’t living to your fullest potential, and you’ve tried a few personal development schemes only to end up worse off than when you started… try my plan. Embrace mediocrity because being good enough is great.
Seth Perry (he/him/his) is an ELCA pastor, mental health advocate, and creator of the documentary podcast miniseries Our Stigma, available on all platforms. Living well with Bipolar I, he speaks and writes about the intersection of faith, mental health, and recovery. Seth currently serves Elim Lutheran Church in Scandia, MN. More at www.ourstigma.com.
