Commentary

Ambition versus mediocrity

July 9, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

With the rush for AI to do everything for us, and us to give up our own skills while sparing our children the effort of developing theirs because of the paucity of their education, it seems that there is a trend to stop excellence at mediocre.

Read it however you like, but humans have been given everything they ever needed to live, survive extremely well, and without doing any harm, create, invent and establish habitats and transportation, including, I dare say, flying.

Scientists agree that Earth is unique, in this solar system for sure, as the only perfect planet to give life at all. It has been a fascinating multi-million-year journey from the ruminations of single-cell organisms developing through the millennia into aquatic animals, from which we ourselves have evolved.

Who knows what lives deep in the oceans that have evolved differently to stay there? Exploration to those depths (not as honest discovery but as a project to see what the mining possibilities are) has found creatures never seen before. all part of the marvels of our home world, to the powerhouse of our own potential intelligence and capabilities.

It is as though we were built to excel, to be the guardians of all this grandeur and opulence – such wealth of food, resources for building, absolutely the exact right distance from the sun for its healing powers, its ideal warmth and light source to grow the plant population to feed and protect us.

Even the weather between heat and cold of this planet was perfectly balanced.

None of this was easy: the formation of it all, culminating in the eventual development of ourselves, is longer than accuracy can guess and yet in large part, we have neglected to show our understanding and gratitude for all these gifts, including our own marvellous bodies and outstanding brains.

In our curiosity about our own history, we have truly sought answers to the many mysteries and conundrums that are a big part of who we are and who we have been. How is it that thousands of years ago, humans built large constructions with such accurate connections to the other worlds in this universe, including our own sun, but that confounds us now? Who left markings on the land in places around the world, seemingly at random, that might direct eyes looking down on us?

These couple of questions are only the beginnings of very long and complicated lists about humans in the past, to which there apparently are no satisfactory answers.

Most notably, though, amid all this wonder and mystery, we are not perfect. We are wondrously made, to be sure, and our big brains can invent almost anything. Yet what we were building, thinking and creating thousands of years ago remains relevant today, reminding us of the extraordinary capabilities we once demonstrated.

How did we lose that ancient level of excellence? Could it be our obsession with war, the ground floor of our passion for violence, not only against our fellow humans and the other species living here, but on this perfect planet too?

We keep a close watch on scientists to see whether what they are discovering and inventing could strengthen our access to bigger and better instruments of war.

Certainly, our recent trend to build maybe unsafe hundred-plus-storey buildings cannot be called excellent,, but the recent call not to bother with excellence in favour of mediocrity is a slippery slope, and we need to be very wary of it.

For the last few years, the debate over how mediocrity, the so-called “quiet quitting,” is an emotional safeguard against the angst of overachieving, of putting pressure on oneself to get to a given goal faster, better, bigger.

Humans have a problem with balance. Perhaps it is our progressive divorce from nature. What makes this a perfect planet is how nature is perfectly balanced, and we have lost our focus on the idea of it.

The danger of dumbing down our children’s natural needs in their education, their creativity and critical thinking, giving them machines to do their thinking for them – the rot began when calculators were allowed in the classroom, I believe.

The modern push to introduce technology too early, by teaching coding in kindergarten, for example, while taking away cursive writing, basic math, and language skills like phonics in a simple march to steal basic skills from our kids, is ruinous.

How many times have you offered a cash payment at a store and the young cashier absolutely could not figure out the change for lack of training? This loss is not a fair treatment of the brilliant minds that come with every birth.

We should be wondering why mediocre has become popular, and we should be cautious about embracing it. While the frenetic impulses of the workaholic are not healthy, actually putting aside the desire to excel is too soft a road.

Whereas we back off, back down, making less of ourselves, we also risk relinquishing our watchfulness on by whom and how our country is governed. The domino effect of diminished education and ambition in our work lives might well result in a misplaced complacency.

We need to pay more attention than that.

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