Average

“The truth is, I’m… I’m not an exceptional person, you know? Nothing interesting really ever happens to me. I’m… I’m massively flawed, and I think I’m quite forgettable, if I’m being 100% honest.”

Randy Feltface ends his comedic storytelling in Randy Writes a Novel with this poignant bit at the end of his act.

“But must we leave a legacy? Must we make an impact? Do we have to leave a footprint? Is it okay to just settle? Seek safety? Nest, you know? Or must we constantly shake our lives up, or suffer the indiscriminate cruelty of having it shaken against our will?“

I grew up considering myself quite average. I still do, honestly. I was never the best hockey player but I wasn’t the worst. I wasn’t the best bowler but I wasn’t the worst. Even to this day, amongst my friends, I’m not the best Warzone player, but I’m not the worst. If I were in The Simpsons, I’d be in the Second Best Band. [n.b. from my favourite Simpsons episode.]

That’s not to downplay any of my successes over the years. Looking back on what has transpired in my life, it feels rather surreal and an un-average life.

“They say you die twice. Once when you stop breathing and the second, a bit later on, when somebody mentions your name for the last time.”

I don’t have any expectation to be remembered or honoured beyond my circle of friends and family. The time between my first and second deaths will be short, I imagine, and I have no problem with this. After all, once I die the first time, it won’t matter one way or the other to me how long the memory of me lives on.

I bring this up not in a woe-is-me or a sense of nihilism where nothing matters. I bring it up as for me, personally, I’m okay with settling. I’m okay with enough. My footprint has been made and is already disappearing into the sands of time as the waves of progress wash upon the shore.

For the billionaires of this world, however, it never seems to be enough. For many in the tech industry, there’s a culture of growth at all costs. When I was at Shopify, it was easy to fall into it. We’d have discussions about how to expand into various markets and then work to execute on those ideas. Move up-market, move down-market, move into foreign markets. It feels almost antithetical to even consider just refining a product without needing to hire more people to sell to more people. There is a fear that if you don’t continue growing, there will be somebody else who will and eventually you’ll die.

The idea of running a lifestyle business—one small enough to maintain a comfortable living—seems to have disappeared. Perhaps because those lifestyle businesses eventually got sold off to growth businesses.

Like a cancer, rapid growth eventually consumes a stable environment.

In much the same way that I have hoped that the enshittification of social media may lead to a resurgence of blogging, I hope that we see a wave of small, independent app creators, web or native.

While I don’t buy the hype of AI in its current form, if the expectation is that it’ll drive the speed at which we can develop, perhaps there is an opportunity for some to create their own little islands instead of heaping all creation into some mega-corporation just for the sake of growth.