Why Are We So Mediocre at What We Do?
We love to blame technology for stealing our potential: if there were no evil products monetizing inattention, we tell ourselves, we would have achieved great things with all the time on our hands. The harsh truth, however, is that most of us are mediocre or worse, and our digital escapes are merely symptoms of an inherently unexciting life.
I've lived this reality myself—still do, to a degree. When I shelved my phone and laptop, I was convinced I'd unleash my supposedly caged potential. But there was nothing there. Just silence. The endless scrolling hadn't been suppressing some hidden genius; it had been filling a void I couldn't face. It was easier to blame inanimate objects than admit the painful truth: I thoroughly sucked at everything I tried—which explained my constant escape to the screen.
A fascinating cycle that happened to me and everyone else who fell into the trap of believing that technology was the culprit in stealing their attention and wasting their potential is as follows:
Man feels guilty about "wasting time" on devices
He believes in his "untapped potential" (reinforced by cultural narratives)
He quits device usage to "unlock" this potential
He attempts something productive (gym, writing, reading, programming, chess, etc.)
He immediately encounters the reality of his ignorance and incompetence
Rather than accepting the need to start from zero and learn from the ground up, he retreats
Always returning to devices, but now with added anger, external blaming, and a sense of surrender
Observing this cycle made me realize that my inattention stemmed from deeper personal issues that technology merely brought to the surface. Chief among these is the truth that I’m not special in any way. Like lab mice, I can be easily manipulated in controlled environments. The popular narratives of 'digital detox' and 'attention economy' offer comfortable excuses: it's not your fault—some evil corporations are stealing what could have been. But real attention must be generated from within. That's why we all struggle when trying to focus on anything demanding for an extended period, phones or no phones.
The sense of nothingness and lethargy most of us feel and falsely attribute to technology was perfectly captured 135 years ago. William James wasn’t aware of the activity of scrolling when he wrote this in The Principles of Psychology:
Most people probably fall several times a day into a fit of something like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start; the pensée de derrière la tête fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state about.
So none of this is new. Before the advent of screens, humans were arguably more ignorant, more superstitious, and more disconnected than we are today. We tend to romanticize the past as an era of deep focus and self-discipline, but people were simply distracted differently—through gossip, idle chatter, and religious dogma. The human mind has always sought escape from the cognitive efforts that distinguish us from animals. Here’s another banger from The Principles of Psychology:
It is a well-known fact that persons striving to keep their attention on a difficult subject will resort to movements of various unmeaning kinds, such as pacing the room, drumming with the fingers, playing with keys or watch-chain, scratching head, pulling mustache, vibrating foot, or what not, according to the individual.
A key difference now is that digital distractions expose this tendency in a more measurable way: for the first time in history, our distractions have receipts.
The growing emphasis on individuality has brought many benefits, but it's also created a toxic obsession with self-aggrandizement. We now prioritize feeling good about ourselves above all else—even when we haven't earned it, even when it contradicts the reality of our modest capabilities.
I discovered that YouTube Shorts, my default distraction, wasn't preventing me from doing meaningful things—it was just a convenient scapegoat for the harder truth: real achievement requires starting from a place of incompetence and methodically building knowledge over time. I'd often show up expecting to somehow intuitively know what to do, only to get overwhelmed by my ignorance and retreat rather than accept the humbling process of learning basics. There's a deep discomfort with being a beginner that we conveniently blame on technology. It soothes our ego to believe in some shadowy attention economy that 'steals' our focus—after all, this suggests that without external interference, we'd naturally be disciplined and successful. But distraction isn’t forced upon us; it’s something we actively seek.
Maybe our heavy device usage isn't preventing achievement but rather shielding us from confronting the real barriers: the need to start from zero, accept our incompetence, and build knowledge systematically from the ground up. Most people won’t engage in this excoriating process.
The real issue is that we have an ego problem. Technology just makes it easier to avoid admitting it.