The Most Radical Thing You Can Be Is Boring

I mean, how do you even mourn a life that hasn’t ended—just never went viral?

There’s a fear that clings like dust. Too small to notice, too stubborn to shake. You know this fear, hell, you’ve named it. It creeps into your dreams and jolts you awake. Not failure. Not death. It’s something quieter, your tombstone reading ‘Tried Hard, Mostly’ because you never left a dent. The quiet horror of realizing you didn’t give anyone anything to remember.

Mediocrity doesn’t wear a villain’s cape. It wears khakis. It’s the shrug you give when someone asks what you’re passionate about.

It’s realizing you’re a wallpaper. Nice wallpaper. Functional wallpaper. Wallpaper that absolutely, definitely doesn’t scream into its pillow at night.

If mediocrity were a person, it’d be Lila. Not the Lila who daydreams of writing novels that crack open the world, but the Lila who lies awake at 2:37 a.m. staring at her toaster. She fears the toaster. Not the appliance itself, but the way it sits on her counter—dutiful, unassuming, destined to be replaced in five years without ceremony. That’s the fear: becoming a toaster. Functional. Disposable. Fine.

You know this girl, she’s you when you delete your third Instagram caption. She’s you at 3:07 a.m., dissecting your life like a poem you’d written drunk. “Is my existence a metaphor?” you ask. The ceiling fan replies: No. You’re a run-on sentence.

Lila had all the makings of someone remarkable or so her grandmother insisted.

It lives in her ribs, this thing. Not a monster, not a muse. A pebble in her shoe while she marches toward some invisible finish line. Society calls it “ambition.” She calls it the itch. The itch to matter so badly she’d trade seven lifetimes of contentment for one flash of brilliance, even if it burns her to ash.

Mediocrity isn’t lazy. It’s exhausted. Lila works harder than anyone, ten hours at the office, five hours pretending to “hustle,” forty-five minutes doomscrolling resumes of people half her age. She grinds her molars to dust. For what? A 401(k) that’ll outlive her? A LinkedIn post that gets seven likes, three from bots?

The fear isn’t in failing. It’s in succeeding exactly enough to realize you’ve built a life that fits in a Notes app.

If you pressed her, she’d say she’s fine. Fine, that slippery word that means “I haven’t cried in a Target parking lot this week.” But the fear isn’t in the crying. It’s in the seven minutes she spends scrolling LinkedIn before work, comparing her life to classmates who climbed mount Everest and cure diseases. She types “Congrats!! 😊” then slams her laptop shut.

Oh, Lila, Lila, Lila. You think Van Gogh didn’t want to curate his suffering into TikTok threads? He just painted sunflowers and mailed his ear to a girlfriend. Read the room, Lila.

What’s funny, of course, is that Mediocrity hates its own name. It’s the uninvited guest who crashes on your couch, eats your leftovers, and sighs “Is this all you have?” while scrolling your Netflix queue. It doesn’t mock you outright, it hums along to your shower singing, then asks why you never auditioned for The Voice.

But Lila’s ears are intact. Her rebellion is subtler. She once stole a pen from a bank, not for the pen (a cheap plastic relic of capitalism) but for the fleeting rush of agency. A microscopic fuck you to the script she’d been handed: Work. Consume. Repeat. For three glorious seconds, she wasn’t Lila the cog. She was Lila the outlaw, mastermind of a heist so insignificant even the security cameras yawned.

The thrill lasted until she got home. The pen wrote in the same shaky cursive as her raise request letter, still unsent.

The fear isn’t just about being ordinary. It’s the certainty that everyone else is faking their greatness better than she is. The girl knows this. She also knows her ceiling fan will outlast her, yet she keeps rearranging the furniture, as if greatness might tumble out of the couch cushions.

Mediocrity, you see, isn’t her enemy. It’s her alibi. It’s the airtight excuse she stuffs into the cracks of her ambition. Why chase lightning when you can blame the weather? She’ll write the novel tomorrow. Learn French next year.

But tonight, she’s scribbling a haiku on a pizza box:

Toaster hums its hymn / I am more than what I serve / (But what if I’m not?)

The pen dries. The fear hums on. Lila orders another pizza, extra cheese—a small, greasy monument to the things we do to outrun the void.

Oh, Lila. You think the Everest climbers aren’t also crying in their tents? That the TED Talkers don’t rehearse their “authenticity” in bathroom mirrors? You’ve mistaken their highlight reels for freedom. Their passion is just better taxidermy, stuffed and posed, hashtag blessed, hearts sold by the algorithm. No one’s curing diseases on LinkedIn. They’re just better at cropping out the Target parking lots.

Society’s a bad therapist. It says “be yourself,” as if you aren’t already a discount photocopy of every ancestor, influencer, and middle manager who came before you.

Lila’s fear isn’t hers, it’s a hand-me-down, like her aunt’s mothballed prom dress. She wears it anyway.

The system had figured her out before she was born, promising her uniqueness while mass-producing her dreams. Nine-to-five, mortgage, retirement plan, cremation. Congratulations, you've completed the human experience. Please exit through the gift shop.

A cosmic joke played on the gullible. Her parents wanted her safe, her boss wanted her productive, her friends wanted her normal enough to validate their own mundane choices. Nobody asked what Lila wanted because wanting was dangerous. And dangerous people change things. So instead, she collected participation medals in the Olympics of existence—gold-plated symbols for showing up and staying quiet. The hamster wheel didn't care if the hamster was happy, just that it kept running.

Her father had wanted to be a musician. Now he sold insurance and played guitar in the garage when he thought no one was listening. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, but it bruises just the same when it hits the ground.

Take the phrase “Follow your passion.” Lila’s passion at fourteen was drawing wolves howling at moons. At twenty-four, it’s Googling “Can existential dread be monetized?” She’s not chasing greatness; she’s dodging the shame of a life unlisticled. Her to-do app says “Write novel, learn French, meditate.” Her browser history says “How to disappear completely.”

She knows the world worships two kinds of people: those who summit Everest, and those who quit their jobs to teach others how to summit Everest. So, she’s stuck in the valley, side-eyeing both. She buys a self-help book titled Unleash Your Inner Thunder. It becomes a coaster.

Mediocrity isn’t real. It’s just someone else’s yardstick. Lila knows this. She also knows her father’s golf clubs are rusting in the garage, relics of his own unwritten songs. The fear isn’t in failing, it’s in inheriting the script.

The haiku returns, scrawled on the letter she’ll never send:
They sold me a crown / Too heavy to wear, too cheap to pawn / My head aches. Chop wood?

Mediocrity was never the enemy. The enemy is the chorus in her head chanting “More, better, faster” to the tune of capitalism’s greatest hits.

There’s a special kind of hell reserved for people who aren’t special. You know the one. It’s got Wi-Fi. Lila’s phone buzzes. Twitter serves a Tweet of a woman her age launching a new startup called ‘Clarity’. The caption: “If your dreams don’t scare you, you’re doing it wrong.” Lila’s dreams mostly involve remembering her Netflix password.

Ordinary isn’t a fact anymore. It’s a failure. You don’t live, you curate. You don’t work, you hustle. You don’t cry, you post a tasteful black-and-white selfie with the caption “Healing era 💔✨.” Lila once tried this. She got three likes, one from her dentist.

Mediocrity used to be cozy. Forgettable, sure, but at least you could ugly-cry into a pint of ice cream without someone asking, “Is this part of your brand?” Now? Now it’s a war. The trenches are brunch tables where everyone’s “launching something soon,” and the artillery is your ex-classmate’s post about “disrupting the mindfulness space.” Lila eats her avocado toast and wonders when being became less important than documenting.

Oh Lila, the dread isn’t in being ordinary. It’s in realizing ordinary is a myth, a carnival prize they dangle to keep you reaching.

The horror isn’t that Lila’s life is small. It’s that small has been redefined. Once, it meant a quiet house, a good book, a garden. Now it means your TikTok analytics. Now it means your life can be summarized in three hashtags and a Spotify Wrapped. Lila’s Wrapped? “Your top genre is ‘sounds to cry to.’”

She tries. Oh god, she tries. She buys the planner, joins the 5 AM club, meditates until her legs go numb. She writes goals in all caps: “FIND PURPOSE (OR AT LEAST A NICHE).” But here’s the secret no one mentions about self-optimization: You can’t outrun your own DNA.

Mediocrity was a decoy. The real villain is Time, that unflinching thief who’ll pocket her childhood piano recitals, her first kiss, the exact blue of her grandmother’s eyes, and leave behind… what? A name on a plaque? A toaster in a landfill? A haiku on a pizza box, dissolving under pepperoni grease?

At 10 p.m, Lila’s father calls. He doesn’t mention the garage guitar. She doesn’t mention the cracks. They discuss the weather—weird lately, yeah—and when she hangs up, she presses the phone to her chest like a talisman. This is how it happens. Not with a bang, but with a series of goodbyes so quiet you mistake them for static.

The real tragedy? Lila’s life is fine. Not “fine” as in tragic, but “fine” as in actually okay. She has friends who remember her birthday. A job that pays for the toaster. A cat that tolerates her. But “fine” is the new “failed,” because the world only applauds extremes—suffering or spectacle, trauma or triumph. No one claps for enough.

The fear isn’t that she’ll never matter. It’s that mattering was a lie sold to her at a markup. A distraction from the real question: How do you live when you know you’ll vanish?

She writes another haiku in the steam of her shower:
I am here, I am / Here, Iamhereiamhere— / Drain swallows the proof.

Lila tried greatness once. She bought a leather-bound journal, the kind poets use in black-and-white biopics, and wrote three pages before realizing her handwriting looked like a drunk spider’s obituary. She burned sage. She quoted Rilke at parties.

Six months later, she “won”. Got the promotion, the byline, the flood of LinkedIn notifications. For three days, she felt like a god holding a sparkler. Then the dread returned, sharper. Is this all?

Greatness, it turned out, smelled like her grandmother’s burnt toast. The old woman had taught her to char bread “just enough to scare the devil out,” laughing as Lila winced at the bitter crunch.

Char builds character.

But the devil stayed.

They never tell you about the after. After the poem goes viral, after the gallery show, after the TED Talk, what then? You’re still you. Just you with a tighter smile and a therapist who charges $250 an hour to say “And how does that make you feel?” in seven languages.

Lila’s ex-boss won a “Top 40 Under 40” award. Now he takes Xanax and cries during Zoom meetings. Brilliance is mediocrity with better PR. A pyramid scheme for the soul. Those overnight successes? Ten years of showing up. Those geniuses? Lucky bastards with good timing and better connections. Van Gogh died broke. Kafka wanted his work burned. And here's Lila, chasing ghosts, drinking overpriced coffee to fuel dreams that taste like someone else's leftovers.

She'd spent years believing greatness would save her from herself. That if she could just crack that bestseller list, land that promotion, get retweeted by someone with a blue checkmark then the noise would stop. The voice that whispered not enough while she brushed her teeth would finally shut the fuck up.

“I thought I’d be special,” she told her bathroom mirror, its edges fogged with the steam of another lukewarm shower. The mirror didn’t answer. It had seen her naked. It knew better.

“What if I already peaked? What if this is as interesting as I get?”

She’d rather die than admit it, but part of her—the part that couldn't sleep—was relieved. Because greatness demands sacrifice. It eats friendship. Swallows peace. Shits out anxiety. And for what? To be remembered after you're worm food? Her neighbor won a Pulitzer. Still takes his trash out Tuesday nights like everybody else.

Greatness is a con, sold to the desperate by those who never caught it. The carrot on the stick. The thing always just beyond reach. While you're straining for it, they're picking your pocket, selling you seminars on how to strain harder.

The day Lila stopped giving a fuck, she didn't mark it on her calendar. She was scrolling through Instagram, double-tapping photos of people she'd never meet eating food she couldn't afford, when her thumb just… stopped. Not dramatically. Not with purpose. Just stopped, mid-scroll, hovering over some influencer’s fourth vacation that year.

She cancels the podcasts she’d started out of obligation. Buys a six-pack instead. Sits on the fire escape as the city hums below, all its would-be Shakespeares and Curies and Kardashians clawing at the same greased ladder. She laughs. Not the cute, Instagrammable laugh. The kind that sounds like a dying engine.

The rules were rigged anyway. Sell your angst, monetize your trauma, turn your joy into content. No thanks. She keeps her rage small and sacred. Starts saying “no” to things that taste like obligation. Says “yes” to a 3 a.m. walk with no destination, her footsteps echoing like middle fingers against the pavement.

She didn't become a monk. Didn't move to Bali to "find herself." Didn’t rage-quit her job. Didn’t announce her exodus with a manifesto. She just quietly stopped playing a game she never signed up for.

The weight was gone. That constant pressure to be extraordinary. She started writing again. Not to be published. Not to be praised. Just to get the words out of her head. Some days they were good. Most days they weren't. It didn't matter.

Her father calls. She asks about the garage guitar. He hesitated, then played her a chord over the phone. It’s rusty. It’s perfect.

Greatness, she decides, is a carnival barker. Liberation is walking past the tent.

She writes her final haiku on a napkin, stains it with coffee:

Fuck your Everest. / I’m blooming in the parking lot. / Watch me.

Lila isn’t remarkable. Isn’t mediocre. Isn’t a brand, a meme, or a cautionary tale. She’s a ghost in the machine, slipping through the cracks of a system that never saw her coming. Because the most radical thing you can be today is boring.

And radicalism is exhausting, and the toaster needs cleaning, and the cat is out of food, and tomorrow’s another day of trying not to drown in a world that rewards those who can sell their own oxygen.

I mean, how do you even mourn a life that hasn’t ended—just never went viral?

Lila doesn’t know. Right now, she’s just a girl on a fire escape, flicking a cigarette into the dark like a tiny, defiant comet— her t-shirt reads: “Let someone else save the world. Mine’s already here.”

The fear doesn’t vanish. It just loses its teeth. Some nights, she still wonders if she’s wasting potential. If she’ll die unknown. But now, she answers: “So fucking what?” Then she orders pizza, reads Bukowski, and falls asleep on the couch. The toaster keeps vigil.

Mediocrity was never her enemy. The real trap was believing she needed saving in the first place.

On her thirtieth birthday, Lila buys herself a toaster. Top of the line. The kind that browns evenly every time. She places it on the counter like a sacrament, then posts the LinkedIn draft she wrote at 2 a.m.:“10 Reasons to Quit Your Dream.”

Then she makes toast. Slathered it with butter and cheap strawberry jam.

It tastes like morning. Like a middle finger dipped in jam.

Lila licks butter from her thumb, humming a song her father once choked out on a garage guitar—off-key, alive, gloriously unrecorded.

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