My parents warned me about one type of bad influences in life, which are the people who waste away their life in aimless hedonism (drugs, partying, sex, etc.), but another type of bad influences they didn't warn me about are what we could call time-wasting friends, people you aren't particularly close to, who don't pressure you into doing things which are harmful to you, but where the whole relationship is this rather apathetic and polite implicit agreement to both remain mediocre and not call out one another on it.
If the first type is a negative, the second type is a long drawn-out zero. Nothing really happens, people don't get close, no one really strives for anything, everyone remains the same, it's kind of like being in a comfortable zoo your entire life, always denying the call to adventure, or rather like being in a sitcom your entire life and always making the same jokes, the same references, except that you are getting older, such that a 14 year old making teenager jokes is expected, whereas a 30 year old making the same jokes is just depressing. Likewise the office very much kills my soul, like a drawn out suffocation of your inner flame by a soft pillow. It's an offense against the type of joyous and meaningful life that someone could live as a human being, and as such I suggest to take all of this very seriously.
In general, people can waste our time even while being polite, even with very good intentions, in fact a lot more than if they were rude. Rudeness puts us in contact with what we care and honor, and those we do not like make us reflect on what we like, whereas politeness can end up wasting away our life little by little without us realizing, because there is never any big event that makes us want to stand up for ourselves.
I think this is largely the type of life that modern people end up living, a life of quiet (and comfortable) misery, where they never want to rock the boat and strive for anything beyond the enclosures that they grew up in. What we could call polite misery, fitting in with others who are just as miserable (or simply bored) as you.
All of this is far more harmful than it looks like because it grows apathy, the opposite of passion, which then invites all sorts of depravity into our life, without us caring much about doing anything about it. This is how people can end up spending thousands of hours on video games, through a general sense of apathy, because anyone who is truly in touch with something important to do in their life would never allow such a massive amount of time spent on inane activities of this type.
Apathy doesn't sound like a big problem because it leads to unrealized potential, which we cannot observe, whereas other things like violence, catastrophic incompetence and selfishness lead to much more obvious results. By and large, the system prevents observable problems from happening, the kind of catastrophes that lead someone to lose their house in a fire, or lead a man to beat their wife, but the system doesn't do much when it comes to longer term problems with less visible effects, such as the decline of care, the falling birth rates, and in this case, the death of passion.
But it is in fact a major problem to think about if you care about living consciously. Most of us know about the midlife crisis, the way in which many look back at their life and only feel disappointment, and yet very few people think much about the type of life that leads to regret, especially the kind that you feel on your deathbed. This is because very few people actually know, not just as an idea but in their guts and in their bones, that they are going to die. They sort of assume that they are going to live forever, which is why they come up with justifications any time that they are not living the life they truly want.
And yet, here we are, with the one and only life that we have, beamed in the present, the only thing we will ever experience, because the future is a sort of trick that our mind plays, since it is always going to come, and yet it only exists in your mind. Why worry about it, and make long plans for the future if you cannot live in the present? This is not a suggestion for reckless living of course. As Schopenhauer tells us 1, "another important element in the wise conduct of life is to preserve a proper proportion between our thought for the present and our thought for the future; in order not to spoil the one by paying over-great attention to the other."
However, the toxicity of mediocrity cannot even be described as leaning too much into one or the other, because most people are neither very present nor are they planning very intelligently for the future. It's really a problem of living in a fantasy: the fantasy that you have all the time in the world and can simply keep on waiting forever, or the fantasy that you can live a "happy" life without a great deal of effort of some kind, or the fantasy that worrying about things in the future will actually do anything about them.
Most people waste their life because they are driven by momentum rather than consciousness, the latter then manifests in feelings (rather than emotions, see also this piece, or in action, appropriate to the situation. Unconscious momentum leads to the perpetual cycle of emotions or thoughts that keeps most people trapped, particularly those who are stuck to their screen. But constant busy-ness is not a solution either, because by itself, it can become hollow, like getting yourself to do things without any larger vision to justify it, caring about the process of being (and appearing) productive as a distraction, rather than out of a burning passion, or a need to solve practical problems.
Thus the remedy to the time-wasting friends, activities and habits is to embody those two poles of consciousness: firstly to learn to be still and feel the qualities in the moment, the way that doing nothing but being conscious is more delightful than hollow "entertainment", and secondly to be fueled by passion and act accordingly, to express beauty through artistic work, or to master a craft and solve meaningful problems, or to simply do what is right in the moment, even if it is scary, because to love much also means to risk much.
Mediocre people are neither particularly loving or sensitive, which is why they are so bored (and thus boring) in whatever situation they find themselves in, nor are they burning with passion and ambition, which is why they remain largely the same year and year, because they do not have the courage to leave their cage.
I find such a life far more insulting to the human potential than a life of degenerate hedonism, because the latter is easy to recognize and keep away from, whereas the former becomes normalized, becomes the mass of unconscious "normal" people who end up ruling the world through their number, and who extinguish the unique, the mysterious, and the extraordinary in everything they get a hold of. Hence, tourism, fast food, mass media, modern politics, and the torrent of slop that is flooding the internet.
1 In his Counsels and Maxims, section 5 namely.
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Mediocrity Relationships Apathy Cowardice Momentum Habits Unconsciousness Seriousness
2026-04-01