7 things Nietzsche said will keep you mediocre forever

Nietzsche had a very specific idea of what mediocrity was, and it wasn’t what most people think. Mediocrity, in his framework, was the failure to become.

Nietzsche had a very specific idea of what mediocrity was, and it wasn’t what most people think. It wasn’t about being average, or lacking talent, or missing some opportunity that would have magically changed everything. Mediocrity, in his framework, was the failure to become. The slow, almost imperceptible process of settling into a version of yourself that was never really yours to begin with, and then defending that settled version like it’s something sacred. Mediocrity isn’t where you end up when you try and fail, it’s where you end up when you stop trying to become anything at all and convince yourself the stopping was a choice.

What makes his diagnosis so uncomfortable is that he wasn’t pointing at people who lack ability. He was pointing at people who have it and will never use it, because the mechanisms keeping them mediocre are disguised as virtues, or comfort, or as identity itself.

He named those mechanisms back in the 1880s, and I’m sorry to say it like this, but, they go so hard.

Here are seven of my personal favorites.

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1. Ressentiment: Building an identity out of what you oppose

Nietzsche borrowed this word from French deliberately. Not to be confused with resentment, which is an emotion that flares and fades. Ressentiment is an architecture. It’s what happens when someone who feels powerless takes that feeling and constructs an entire worldview around it.

The person living in ressentiment doesn’t just dislike what they can’t have, they redefine it as bad. The promotion they didn’t get is proof that the system is rigged. The relationship that didn’t want them is evidence that intimacy is a trap. The success they can’t replicate is confirmation that anyone who wins must be cheating. (Sound familiar?)

This is everywhere now. Entire online identities built not around what someone is creating but around what they’re against. The person whose whole personality is hating a political party, or the ex who’s been “healing” for three years but whose every post is still about the relationship, or the person who can’t name a single thing they want but can inventory everything they resent in breathtaking detail.

Ressentiment keeps you mediocre because it replaces the hard work of creation with the easy work of opposition. You never have to build anything. You just point at what other people built and explain why it doesn’t count.

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2. Herd Morality: A value system that makes mediocrity a moral good

This one is doing more work in the modern world than almost anything else Nietzsche identified, and it’s routinely misunderstood as a simple critique of conformity. But herd morality isn’t just “going along with the group,” it’s a complete value system, one that elevates equality, safety, and sameness as the highest moral goods, and treats distinction, excellence, and individual greatness as threats to be neutralized.

The herd doesn’t just prefer the average; it moralizes the average. Standing out becomes arrogance, ambition becomes selfishness, excellence becomes a form of violence against those who didn’t achieve it. The person who pushes ahead isn’t admired but resented, because their existence is an implicit accusation against everyone who stayed put.

This is the quiet engine behind a lot of contemporary moral language. When “equity” slides from meaning fairness into meaning enforced sameness of outcome, that’s herd morality. When a culture treats the desire to be exceptional as inherently suspicious, as if wanting to be great is an insult to everyone who doesn’t, that’s herd morality. When institutions flatten standards so that no one has to confront the discomfort of being outperformed, that’s the herd protecting itself from the thing it fears most: the individual who doesn’t need it.

Nietzsche’s point wasn’t that community is bad. It was that a community whose highest value is no one should stand above anyone else will produce people who can’t stand on their own at all.

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3. Slave Morality: The inversion that makes strength evil

This is Nietzsche’s most misunderstood and most inflammatory concept, so it’s worth getting the origin right. In On the Genealogy of Morals, slave morality doesn’t begin as a philosophy, it begins as a reaction. Specifically in the ressentiment of the powerless toward the powerful, toward the noble class who defined “good” simply as what they were (strong, vital, commanding, self-assured). The weak couldn’t overthrow them physically, so they overthrew them morally.

The move was a full inversion of values. Where the noble class defined “good” as strength, health, power, and vitality, slave morality redefined “good” as what alleviates suffering and protects the weak (meekness, humility, self-denial, pity). And it redefined “evil” not as cruelty or harm in the abstract, but as the strong themselves. Power became suspect, ambition became sin, and the qualities that allowed someone to rise above the group became proof of moral corruption.

This is the part that makes people uncomfortable because the inversion didn’t stay in ancient history. It’s the operating system underneath a huge amount of modern moral reasoning. When success is treated as evidence of exploitation, when competence is framed as privilege rather than development, when someone’s strength or discipline or excellence is held against them, not because they’ve done anything wrong, but because the existence of their capacity highlights someone else’s lack of it. That’s the inversion still running—making strength itself the thing that needs to be justified.

To be clear, Nietzsche didn’t think weakness was shameful. He thought building a moral system designed to prevent anyone from becoming strong was the deepest engine of mediocrity a civilization could produce.

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4. The Last Man: Optimizing for comfort until nothing is left

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche introduces the Last Man as a warning. Zarathustra describes this figure to a crowd, expecting them to recoil in horror, but instead, they cheer. They want to be the Last Man… that’s the whole point.

The Last Man has eliminated all risk, all striving, all discomfort from his life. “We have invented happiness,” he says, and then Nietzsche adds one devastating detail: he blinks. Not a speech, not a defense, not even a shrug. Just a blink. The smallest possible human gesture, and Nietzsche uses it to signal the total absence of anything behind the contentment. There’s no depth, no fire, no reaching for something more. Just the dull, satisfied reflex of an organism that has gotten everything it wants and has nothing left to want. The blink is Nietzsche’s image for a life so thoroughly optimized for comfort that the person living it has become, in every way that matters, empty.

This doesn’t require much imagination to update. The Last Man orders delivery so he never faces the inconvenience of the outside world. He curates his feed so he never encounters a thought that unsettles him. He doesn’t have ambitions, he only has preferences. He doesn’t have a life, he has an optimized setup that he autopilots through. Everything is frictionless, pleasant… and means nothing at all.

Nietzsche’s horror was never suffering. It was the elimination of everything that makes suffering worth enduring—creation, risk, transformation, the whole project of becoming. The Last Man has abandoned that project entirely, and he’s done it so thoroughly that he doesn’t even notice anything is missing. He just blinks…

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5. The Spirit of Gravity: The weight that keeps you who you’ve already been

In Zarathustra, the spirit of gravity is called the “devil and arch-enemy.” It’s not a person but a force, the thing that makes everything heavy, permanent, fixed. It’s the internal voice that says: this is who you are, this is where you belong, people like you don’t do that.

The spirit of gravity turns every identity into a life sentence. You’re “the responsible one” or “not a creative person” or “just not someone who takes risks.” The labels feel descriptive, but they’re actually prescriptive. They don’t reflect reality, they enforce it.

Nietzsche’s antidote is both specific and surprising: laughter. Not irony or cynicism, but the genuine ability to laugh at what you’ve been and hold your past self lightly enough that you can set it down. The spirit of gravity says you must. Zarathustra says I will. One is inherited weight and the other is chosen direction.

Anyone who has tried to genuinely change, whether that means leaving a career, ending a relationship, or abandoning a belief system that no longer held up, has felt this force. It’s the strange pull of remaining who you’ve been even when you know it’s no longer true. Nietzsche’s response is that the real weight isn’t the change, but the refusal to move because staying feels like loyalty to yourself.

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6. The Tarantulas: Preaching equality out of revenge

“Of the Tarantulas” is one of the most incendiary chapters in Zarathustra, and it reads like it was written for our exact political moment. Nietzsche isn’t critiquing justice here. He’s critiquing something much more specific—revenge that has been moralized into a demand for equality.

The tarantulas are those who preach radical equality not out of genuine moral conviction, but out of ressentiment toward anyone who is superior, stronger, or more accomplished. Their moral fervor is real, but its engine isn’t principle, it’s punishment. They want to bring the excellent down to the common level and call it liberation.

“Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful,” Nietzsche warns.

The tarantula never says “I’m angry and I want someone to pay,” because that would be too honest. Instead the tarantula says “I’m fighting for equality” or “I’m holding people accountable,” but the tell is always the same. They can’t forgive. They can’t move on. They can’t accept a resolution or declare the fight won. Because the point was never equality, the point was revenge against anyone who makes them feel small, wrapped in language that sounds noble enough to be unchallengeable.

This keeps you mediocre in the most insidious way because it gives you the feeling of moral purpose without any of the substance of creation. You’re not building anything. You’re tearing things down—dismantling—and calling it justice.

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7. The Camel: Carrying burdens you never chose

Nietzsche opens Zarathustra‘s most famous teaching, the three metamorphoses of the spirit, with the camel. The lion and the child get more attention, but the camel is worth understanding.

The camel is the spirit that kneels down and asks, what is heaviest? Load me up. It actively seeks the heaviest burden. It takes on every “thou shalt,” every inherited duty, every cultural expectation, every obligation that someone else defined as necessary, and carries it all into the desert. The camel’s strength is real and its endurance is admirable, but its orientation is entirely toward bearing what has been given rather than creating what hasn’t existed yet.

The modern camel wears exhaustion like a medal. Eighty-hour weeks, the “right” career path, the life that looks correct from the outside. The camel is often the hardest worker in the room, but the work is always in service of someone else’s “thou shalt.” The parent’s expectation, the culture’s definition of a good life, the institution’s requirements. The camel carries all of it while believing the carrying is a form of discipline.

Nietzsche’s point isn’t that discipline is bad or that duty is an illusion, but that the camel is only the first metamorphosis, meant to be a stage and not a destination. The lion comes next, the spirit that says “I will” instead of “thou shalt” and creates its own values rather than carrying inherited ones. But the camel never gets there, because it mistakes the weight for the purpose. It kneels, and it keeps kneeling, and it never asks whether any of what it’s carrying is actually its own.

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I’m not saying “stop doing these seven things and you’ll be great.”

That would be its own form of mediocrity—outsourcing your transformation to a dead philosopher’s framework, which is really just herd morality in a Nietzsche mask.

His actual point was bleaker and more honest than that. These mechanisms aren’t bugs, they’re features. Ressentiment feels like insight. Herd morality feels like fairness. Slave morality feels like compassion. The Last Man feels like happiness. The spirit of gravity feels like identity. The tarantulas feel like justice. The camel feels like purpose.

Every trap on this list feels like something good, which is precisely why they work.

Nietzsche didn’t think most people would escape these. He thought most people would read the diagnosis, feel a flicker of recognition, and go right back to what they were doing, because the trap is warm and familiar and the alternative demands becoming something new.

He had a name for that kind of person, remember? The Last Man. The one who sees exactly what’s happening, knows it’s happening to him… and blinks anyway.

—S

PS: If you enjoyed this, I recommend “You are what you choose” next.

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