Fortuitous Mediocrity

Everyone wanted to be average. This was a society composed entirely of outliers. The average of all these outliers summed to a rather unremarkable person, your average everyday human. The average was something greatly sought after though because as stated, there were only outliers. The freakishly tall lived amongst the freakishly short. The devilishly handsome among, well, the devilishly unhandsome. People were either full blown comedians in terms of their amiability, or they were rather removed from society. I could go on but you get the point. Because nobody had it, the average traits were always calculated in the latest beauty magazines so that people could be in a perpetual state of wishing for plainness, hoping that the next edition of numbers would yield a better result in their favor. They stayed rather constant actually, nothing special to note other than updating these statistics to be exactly the same every edition was a 200 billion dollar industry for a few very lucky applied mathematicians.

           For years, in vitro clinicians worked tirelessly to attain the perfect mixture of genetics in order to then hopefully create a normal, average person. Surprisingly, the most average person to ever be born was Wes, he was born as a completely freak accident between his parents. Wes was the third born child of two rather petite people who had given birth to two previously gargantuan children. The doctors were astonished when Wes was born and made sure to get him into the newspapers as soon as they could, what a great opportunity! Wes was quite famous for a very long time, about 3 years, which happened to be purely chance since every news story alternated between a 30 second and a 3 year news cycle. Wes traveled the world as a baby, the most average person ever born in nearly 1000 years! Wes’ parents were smart though and understood the alternating news cycles and that Wes’ would be done before he could ever realize just what the hell was so special about him, which in reality was nothing. They made their money that could from the story, traveled the globe, and then in due time began to bury the story so Wes would hopefully be sublimely ignorant of his incredible stature in this society.

           They were quite successful. Wes grew up as a perfectly average child. He was none the wiser to everything so perfectly special about him because everyone always told how plain and average he was. He was just totally unremarkable. Where things started to go wrong was when Wes could think on his own and wanted to not be average. He wanted to be great. He was doomed.

The children at school always made fun of Wes because of how plain he was. He was just so average. Wes was unfairly put up against a wall because the only people he was able interact with in High School were the hyper-intelligent people that attended classes. This was everyone though because the alternate outcome usually had to be taken care of in a state run hospital. As a result Wes was also last in his class. Dead last. He was 802^nd out 802. The main reason for this was the fact that there was 801 way tie for first since everyone felt that the drivel of high school was beyond them. Wes struggled all the way through and no matter how hard or little he tried he was always able to get a C. Ironically, these classmates were also the people that were so hyperconscious about themselves that they were incredibly jealous of Wes because upon further investigation, Wes perfectly matched all the favorite average statistics that were published in several magazines and even in academic journals.

Despite his seemingly unimportant mind, this was even more why everyone completely detested Wes. His very peculiar wisdom. Nearly every word that Wes uttered was always usually so trite and devoid of any and all originality that there was almost a completely poetic beauty to it. Due to the enormously intelligent brains of his peers, they often were able to overthink pretty much everything about 6 times in their heads in real time, which happened to cause quite frequent breakdowns. So often and catastrophic were these mental breakdowns that the average life expectancy was constantly on the decline, except for Wes whose life expectancy maintained his same 103 years. This was the only thing that Wes was far above average on. He never knew this though until some would point this out to him on his death bed. His only reply at this point was a resolute smile and finally statistically being above average on paper. Beyond this, another thing that Wes wanted desperately was to be special. He wanted to do something great and he had no idea how, just that he wanted to. Interestingly, nearly all of his peers spent countless hours of research on just the opposite thing, everyone just wanted to have a normal life. In fact, everyone went to great lengths in order to pursue passions and extracurricular activities in order to get into college. They were all greatly cynical, a rather unfortunate byproduct of their intelligence, and actually had no interests. The interests were a ploy to get to college and check off the box of college for a normal life.

Again, Wes wanted desperately to make a difference in the world. He tried so hard and had no idea how to be anything other than completely average. In fact, his average knowledge of the history of humanity meant that he simply wasn’t able to think of any problems he wanted to solve. He did try his best. He always did. His determination was one of Wes’ great strengths. At one point after seeing an old issue of a National Geographic, he decided to solve world hunger. In his research though he was able to find that there was already a solution to the problem constructed almost 89 years ago which elated Wes that such a complex task had been completed. This was a typical pattern for Wes: an idea would lead to research, and after hours of poring over literature in chronological order, he would see that a solution already existed. His few friends that he did have would often take turns having to break the bad news that a problem he was particularly excited about had already been solved, to which Wes would inevitably say, “Well that’s good then!”.

Milo was the only person on Earth who understood Wes’ potential. Milo was always known as one of the most cynical people that you could ever run into. He was particularly good at money making schemes. It was one of his great talents. One day when talking to Wes though, he had a theory that he wanted to test. Nonchalantly he would record nearly everything that Wes would say, musings and all on all various topics. He then would transcribe these sayings and spread them among several social media platforms to see the response. Milo was unaware of the positive response that he would get from such a simple thing on social media, especially in the form of just text! This excited Milo and being an amateur anthropologist he quickly realized that the best way to capitalize was to revive the moneymaking machine of the self-help movement that overtook much of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Following in the steps of maximum profit, he held several motivational speaking events to a great flop. He blew it. He decided to go back to the drawing board and took things a step further and found that not only was it what Wes was saying, it was how he was saying it.

Milo started recruiting Wes quickly, and knew to exploit the fact that Wes was dearly searching for the problem that he could solve to change the world. Wes was almost immediately drawn to the idea of solving the mental health crisis, mainly because he didn’t know there was one. The genius in Milo shown in the fact that Milo was very careful to make Wes think he was able to come up with everything on his own. Once Milo had felt that Wes was up to speed on the whole situation they were off.

Wes gave motivational speeches across the country and Milo as his manager in tow. Next it was the world they embarked on. They were a hit sensation. Wes became a household name. Milo didn’t really care about this limelight, mainly just the profits, of which Wes always got a solid 20 percent. In a couple years Wes was a millionaire.