I want to be a mediocre artist. You might hear that and think “Why would anyone aim for mediocrity?” You might even abhor the idea of mediocrity. You might think that it would be better to never have tried than to end up a mediocre artist. I used to think these things until I realized that this was just my social conditioning speaking. Like many others, I had been indoctrinated into the cult of success and productivity by our capitalist world.

I want to write a more detailed essay on this topic in the future but in short, we are conditioned, through media and culture, to over-value success. We equate success with happiness and think that if we’re unhappy, it’s because we aren’t successful enough. And that’s because we aren’t working hard enough. The end result of this conditioning is that we join the miserable self-activated worker drones of this capitalist world.

The truth is that happiness is not the same as success; success is not completely in your control; and moreover, success by definition can only be achieved by a few. And if success is the secret to happiness then are only the few who drive themselves to work 100 hour weeks and get lucky, deserving of happiness? Are the majority of mediocre people doomed to suffer unhappiness and live meaningless lives?

This line of enquiry got me to think about mediocrity in a positive way. If I’m going to develop a philosophy, it has to work for the average mediocre person. Otherwise, I’ll consider it a waste of time and not worth sharing. This topic of mediocrity is another essay that I’m working on, but in this post I just want to talk about what it means to me in my own life.

I want to be a mediocre artist because I’ve been stuck at an amateur/beginner stage for a long time. Whenever, I try to pursue success as an artist, it paralyzes me. I draw something and think it’s shit and that I need to spend thousands of hours practicing drawing before I can start creating something worth sharing with people. But when I try to develop a disciplined drawing practice, I struggle with consistency. The pressure of wanting to achieve a very high level of skill makes it very hard to face failure, even in practice drawings. The amount of time required to reach that level further makes it hard to keep going. And things are worsened when I remember that I’d also like to be a musician, writer and philosopher.

Pursuing success in one of those domains is hard enough, but wanting it in all of them together is just delusional. So I try to choose one main thing to pursue and reduce the others to just hobbies but then I start doubting if I picked wrong. I suddenly start getting ideas for projects in the things I made hobbies and I’m totally blank in the field I chose to pursue. The end result is that I don’t produce much output and have been stuck in learning and preparation stage ever since I quit sailing to pursue my passions in 2012. God it’s been 14 years! (In my defense I was depressed for a good chunk of it and I’ve healed my depression so that’s something.)

Also, I’ve realized that in the modern world, many people, including me, use success as a replacement for meaning. Pursuing success, especially when it’s tied to happiness, gives people a sense of purpose and a goal to pursue. But I now believe that it is important to remain lucid of the fact that life is meaningless and not try to let anything replace the void of nihilism. Figuring out how to live without any substitute for meaning, is the aim of my philosophy.

So, I’ve decided to first pursue mediocrity. I want to become a mediocre multi-disciplinary artist. That means that I want to start producing stuff, even if it’s mediocre. At this point, I’d much rather be a mediocre artist, than a forever student.

To be fair to myself, I have produced enough mediocre songs to call myself a mediocre musician. Here’s one of them that I recorded with my college band that I’m pretty happy about.

I’ve written enough stories and self-published a couple of books in the past but I haven’t been able to finish a novel or get a story published in a magazine or website. I don’t know if that makes me a mediocre writer or not. Here’s a novella that’s my best work so far.

I haven’t done any significant drawing or illustration projects so I’m definitely a beginner in drawing. Check the cover for my latest graphite drawing drawn from reference.

I guess, I can call myself a mediocre philosopher as well since I finished my first philosophical essay. You can read it here.

Side note: Yes, I’m counting philosophy as an artform. What I’m doing is definitely not science or truthseeking. It’s much closer to a musician jamming than a scientist researching. I’m riffing on ideas. I’m producing intellectual art.

To this end, I’ve created my own calendar (another post to write) that divides the year into 28 periods of 13 days each. Each 13 day period I’m going to pick one project to work on and the idea will be to finish it and produce something at the end of it, even if I don’t like it. As long as I produce some output, that project will be a success. Success will be measured in finishing things, rather than the quality of the thing.

Neil Gaiman once gave a speech where he insisted that everyone should ‘make good art‘. I think we can go a step further and say, ‘make mediocre art‘. Make shit art, if you must, but make something. Shit art is better than no art. There might even be no such thing as shit art. Art not made because you felt it wasn’t good enough, is shit art. Every other art that’s made is either good art or mediocre art. Start by making mediocre art, and who knows, you might slowly get good at it.