On Mediocrity, and the Freedom I Am Finding In It

There was a version of me who wore exhaustion like a credential. Who answered emails at midnight not because it was necessary, but because being needed felt like proof. Personal relationships and rest — these were things I deferred — for a career that promised, somewhere just ahead, to finally feel like enough. I was not unusual in this. I was, by every measure, doing exactly what I was supposed to do.

I am not her anymore. The shift was not a single moment — it rarely is. It was a slow accumulation of evidence that the bargain I had made was not going to pay out the way I had been promised. What helped me name it, finally, was Jamie Ducharme's 2023 TIME essay, "The Case for Mediocrity." I return to it whenever the old pull comes back. Which it still does. Probably always will.

The Game Was Designed Before You Arrived

In her essay, Ducharme traces American hustle culture back to its Puritan roots, where labor wasn't just practical — it was theological, inseparable from salvation. That inheritance mutated over centuries into the secular mythology of the American Dream: the promise that effort and excellence are always rewarded and that rest is something you have to earn.

And then, for many of us, reality arrived.

I remember the moment it crystallized for me. A woman I respected — sharp, prepared, the kind of person who made every room around her better — was passed over for a role she had been methodically building toward for years. The person who got it was a man who had never once made me think he was paying attention. He was comfortable. He belonged, in some unspoken way that had nothing to do with merit, and everything to do with the particular ease of those who have never been made to feel that they need to prove themselves. She was told she wasn't quite ready. He was told congratulations.

I stood in that moment and understood, with a clarity I couldn't unlearn, that the game I was playing had different rules for different players.

Ducharme captures this through Amil Niazi, who spent decades striving as an immigrant woman of color, only to watch promotions go to less-qualified men who simply fit the room in ways she never could. The promise of meritocracy, it turns out, was always more available to some than others. For many of us, the hustle was never going to be enough. The goalposts were never going to stop moving. And the people holding them were never going to tell us.

The Body Keeps Score

Part of what makes that realization so slow to arrive is that women are almost structurally designed to push through. We are socialized from early on to override discomfort, to smile through the pain, to treat our own depletion as a minor inconvenience, to keep going until the work is done and then keep going some more.

The body, though, keeps score.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that accumulates when you spend years ignoring what your body is trying to tell you — not dramatic collapse, but a slow dimming, a growing distance between yourself and any real sense of joy or presence. For a long time, I mistook that dimming for focus. I told myself I was building something. What I was actually doing was disappearing, incrementally, into a version of myself that existed almost entirely for work.

The personal cost of that is something I am still reckoning with. Some relationships did not survive the years I was unavailable. Not from any single dramatic failure, but from the quieter erosion of showing up distracted, of canceling one too many times, of always having something more urgent. Those losses are real and some of them are permanent. What I can say is that other things are slowly rebuilding — and that the quality of my presence now, in the relationships that remain and the ones I'm tending more carefully, is something the previous version of me simply could not have offered. She was too busy being impressive.

A Generation That Refuses to Pretend

Something else is happening alongside the personal reckoning, and it would be dishonest not to name it. There is a generational shift underway that is changing the texture of work — and making some older managers deeply uncomfortable.

Younger workers are not playing the game the way it was handed to them. They talk openly about mental health. They protect their time off. They work from home and do not apologize for it. They take breaks without guilt, set boundaries without flinching, and log off without performing regret. For those of us who were conditioned to treat availability as devotion, watching this can feel disorienting. For the managers who built entire identities around the old rules, it is apparently enraging.

You can see it in the language. In the casual comments that slip out in meetings — about work ethic, about commitment, about who is and isn't "hungry" enough. These managers believe they are speaking plainly. What they are actually doing is revealing, without realizing it, how much of their own sense of worth was tied to the suffering they normalized.

What I Know Now

There are a few things I've learned, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, that I keep returning to.

One: people spend enormous energy trying to develop themselves when they would be better served finding environments that already allow their existing strengths to breathe. Self-improvement is not nothing, but it is often a distraction from the more useful question — am I in the right room?

Two: your work matters, and your work says nothing about your worth as a person. Both of those things are true simultaneously. Confuse them, and you will spend your entire career on an emotional rollercoaster, soaring when things go well and collapsing when they don't, always one bad quarter or missed promotion away from crisis.

Three: productivity is far more about energy management than time management. Having time does not mean you should fill it. This sounds obvious until you try to actually live it — until you sit with an open afternoon and resist the pull to convert it into output. Rest that is earned, scheduled, or justified is not really rest. It is recovery. Real rest is rest you take simply because you are a person, and persons need it.

On Unglamorous Work, and Why It Might Be the Point

There is a through line connecting all of this to a choice I made that I once felt strangely apologetic about: I work in public service, and I like it. It does not carry the same cultural currency as a startup, a corner office, or a title that requires explanation. It is not alluring. It is rarely exciting in the ways that get written about. Nowadays, it can even be demonized.

And yet.

It took me years to fully appreciate what I had actually chosen — or perhaps what had chosen me. Public service offers something the glossy, fast-moving professional world quietly cannot guarantee: steadiness. Excellent health benefits (though we now find ourselves having to fight for them in ways that would have once seemed unthinkable.) A sense of longevity that is genuinely rare. The knowledge that the work connects, however indirectly, to something larger than a quarterly earnings report. These are not small things. I spent a long time treating them as consolation prizes. I no longer do.

There is a particular irony in the current moment. We are living through a period of extraordinary professional disruption — AI moving faster than most industries can absorb, entire job categories being quietly restructured or eliminated, a pervasive low-grade anxiety about what work will even look like in ten years. The tech sector, which spent a decade presenting itself as the only serious place to build a future, has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs in recent years.

Meanwhile, government work — unglamorous and often maligned — continues. Will it outlast the disruption? I don't know. But I think that question deserves more serious consideration than most people are currently giving it.

What I do know is that stability, once dismissed as the refuge of the unambitious, is beginning to look like a form of wisdom. Choosing an environment where your nervous system is not constantly on fire, where your benefits don't just evaporate, where longevity is built into the structure rather than something you have to claw for — that is not settling. That is, in its own way, exactly the kind of choice this essay is about.

The Quieter, Clearer Place

Kathleen Newman-Bremang, one of the women Ducharme profiles in her essay, describes the realization that her worth was not measured by her weariness — that being professionally unremarkable could still leave room for being a whole, good person. For women especially, choosing mediocrity carries a specific charge. It is not a settling. It is a refusal. A refusal to keep being extracted from by a system that was never going to fairly compensate what it took.

Ducharme's essay is generous in not dressing this up. She doesn't rebrand mediocrity as "intentional living" or smooth it into something more palatably aspirational. She uses the word plainly and lets the reader's discomfort do its work. That discomfort is the whole point.

I have arrived somewhere quieter. Not finished — I'm not sure this kind of recalibration ever fully finishes — but clearer. Clear enough to know that the version of me who confused weariness with worth was not my best self. She was just my most available one.

Everyone talks about quality of life. It appears in mission statements and wellness newsletters and conversations at dinner parties where everyone nods along. But there is a difference between saying it and actually reorganizing your days around it — actually tolerating the discomfort of doing less, of being seen to do less, of sitting with the strange guilt of rest when you have been trained since childhood to equate stillness with failure. You don't know what quality of life means until you've lived on the other side of that guilt. Until the gym class on your calendar feels like self-respect instead of an apology.

That is where I am. It took longer than it should have. It cost more than I wish it had. And I would not trade it.