No one cares about anything ever. This is what I’ve found to be true as I’ve grown into adulthood. Everyone just wants to get the bare minimum done and move on with life. No one is striving to make the world better. No one is trying to make the code better. No one is seeking to understand their peers to improve their interactions with each other.
Everyone will just continue to live the same lives they’ve always lived. The world will continue to repeat the same mistakes. The code won’t get better, and the same bugs will appear again and again. The ways we act towards each other won’t ever change, once you get old you get stuck in your ways and stop trying to change yourself for the better.
Once people reach a state of comfort, of normalcy, they decide that they’re done moving up in the world. They’ve reached the pinnacle of their small existence, now, they’ve internally decided without realizing, we must stay this way until our deaths. And then their children shall grow into the same mistakes, want to make things better at first, but then in adulthood their dreams from childhood will wither away, and they’ll grow to accept their mediocre new lives as fully formed, properly socialized, normal adult members of society, and all the broken parts will remain for the next 50 generations to come, and all 50 generations will grow to accept and become a part of the general mediocrity of society, where things never work as they ought to because of——well, I’m not 100% sure why.
This might sound really negative, but I don’t think it has to be this way. I don’t think we need to become mediocre people to survive in today’s world.
Back in school, there were plenty of people who were just done with it all. They wanted to move up to the next step of their lives——school, jobs, marriage, whatever. So what would they do? They’d squander their day-to-day life as they sat around, waiting for time to move forward and get them to the place they desired to go.
It doesn’t have to be like this. The future is coming at a constant speed——the passing of time. Better to make the most out of your current stage in life——that calculus class, those pointless exchanges in the hallways with the people you see everyday, the times before and after school——than wishing it all away.
When people get into higher schooling, they just become fed up with school altogether. “Just give me my piece of paper so I can get my job.” And so, these people come out of school accomplishing nothing more than the bare minimum required to get their degree. Interesting experiences and encounters, things to be learned in classes beyond the bare minimum required, and the cultivation of interest in the subject learned are all discarded and thrown away.
The train of mediocrity doesn’t end. Once you become a mediocre person who does the bare minimum to get by rather than trying to get the most out of life, you’re stuck that way unless you can somehow become consciously aware that you are a mediocre person and that it’s a bad thing to stay that way. Only then can you escape from your habitual mediocrity.
Most people never escape.
In my brief time in the software industry I’ve encountered a lot of people like this. People who don’t know why things work, don’t care why they work, and just want the stuff to work so they can get paid and move on in life. I guess they want to retire, and then? People who allow mediocrity to become apart of them are rushing to their deaths.
But anyway, the mediocrity of a software developer leads to a number of things such as worse software, worse understanding of how to improve that software, and compounding levels of contagious mediocrity.
You see, when someone writes really shitty code——maybe the formatting is screwed up or maybe the actual functionality is screwed up, but in a way that nobody cares enough to fix it——other people will someday have to work with that code. If the shitty part of the code is large enough, there is simply no way that any individual person can de-shitify it. So, the new person becomes apart of the enshittification. Unable to fix the mistakes their predecessors have made, they might try to make things subtly better. However, they can’t fix everything because that would mean a full re-write, and management or non-technical people cannot fully understand the shit their company’s livelihood is standing on top of. So when the company requires a new feature, that software developer who once tried to make things better is forced to write shitty code to get things done, because escaping from mediocrity is hard and takes time.
Technical debt can compound due to mediocre, shitty people to such a massive degree that companies can go out of business, and people can be left unemployed.
This mediocrity hurts all parts of human society. The mediocre person is one who litters on the side of the road, fails to signal before changing lanes, etc.. Mediocre people are those who do not make the effort to carry out their current tasks to the best of their abilities.
So, in 2025, I want to be better. I want to be better than I already am. I want to instill this desire for improvement in my coworkers, friends, and family. I want everyone to do the same.
People do not have to be mediocre. We must reject this constant encroachment of mediocrity into our lives, and remain vigilant in our detection of it. It’s far too easy to slip into a mediocre, substandard lifestyle. Always apply effort, and do things that might not necessarily be the easiest thing. I just wanted to remind myself of this for the coming year.
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