Culture of “Meh”

I’ve been thinking about disappointment lately. Not the dramatic kind that makes for good therapy sessions, but the slow-drip erosion of basic competence that’s become the background noise of modern life. It’s everywhere, and we’ve gotten so used to it that we’ve created a whole vocabulary around our lowered expectations. We call it “disruption” when a service gets worse. We call it “innovation” when basic features stop working. We call it “the new normal” when nothing works the way it’s supposed to.

Our Great Unraveling

There are very few places today where we as consumers can get quality services, products and support. I don’t want to go as far as saying “no place” but it is much more likely that you get a poor experience over a good one. Part of this has to do with the nameless, faceless and automated transactions but some of this has to do with the culture of “meh.”

The culture of “meh” is where we are in our evolution of both digital transactions and a lack of accountability for companies. Beyond the decreasing quality in products and service, the frictionless lack of humanity and expectations from the sell side make it very challenging for customer satisfaction beyond apathy.

I used to think this was just about customer service getting worse. But it’s deeper than that. It’s about the fundamental social contract between maker and buyer, seller and customer, institution and citizen. That contract has been shredded and fed into the algorithm optimization machine.

When the Basics Aren’t Basic

The food isn’t safe; there is no accountability. The water isn’t safe. Years ago, I wrote about trust and discussed how we trust the people putting water in our water bottles more than we trust each other. Now, we learn or discover through testing that many of our food and water sources are unsafe. The very basics are not safe. The very basics are of issue.

Think about that for a moment. We’ve created a society where you can’t trust the water or the food – the two things’ humans have needed to survive for literally thousands of years. We have normalized this. We turned basic survival into a consumer research project where you need to become your own quality control department just to feed your family safely.

Our expectation is that our government is setting standards to protect us in food, medicine and business but we have come to learn this is not true. The only way to partially protect yourself and your family is to learn on your own, make the best decisions based on data and information you can gather and test this information for accuracy. Although, the data is also tainted. Go online and look into health and parasites. You’ll get hundreds of “reels” but what is real? Hard if not practically impossible to know.

The Illusion of Choice in a Consolidated World

Whether we are talking about safety or just simple transactions for products, goods, or services, it seems messed up across the board. While I don’t write about politics, I’d like to address, call out or prove one thing this recent administration taught us and this is that change can happen quickly with the right pushing, poking and prodding. What this means to me is that we can find ways to hold companies accountable and whether it is about removing yellow #5 or microplastics and/or just doing business in a fair, reasonable and respectful manner, it CAN be done.

But here’s the thing: change requires actual choice, not the illusion of choice. We find ourselves in the same situation with airlines, food choices, grocery stores, clothing automotive, etc. We have choices but they lead us to the same conclusion. If you wanted to eat healthy and on your street was McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and White Castle, you have a choice but which of these gets you to the healthiest outcome?

This is the great consolidation shell game. Different logos, same parent companies. Different marketing messages, same underlying mediocrity. Different price points, same fundamental disregard for quality or customer satisfaction.

The Emotional Economics of Lowered Expectations

Far too often, we have found ourselves in the category of victim. Victim mentality and behavior historically created successful outcomes, but this approach takes a toll on both the victim and the victimizer. The best way to turn this situation around is to create more opportunities with more choices through better competition. The current challenge is that we don’t have many good choices today.

In the meantime, for the sake of our stress, emotional well-being, and our general disposition, it makes a lot of sense to me to reset expectations. I’ll share an example or two.

Last year I bought a truck, this truck had many great features and no “poverty buttons.” I tested the functions and features and found that a number of them didn’t work properly. Years before, I had similar issues with my 4Runner. I scratched my head and said, “how could they ship this thing, without it working?” Doesn’t make sense right? This is our reality. Cars ship in Alpha / Beta, the feature and function is a prototype or a great idea that almost works 50% of the time.

With my newer truck, after watching many videos, speaking with the dealer, looking on other forums, it is true, the self-parking doesn’t work consistently. To date, it never worked for me. I was frustrated, upset, angry about it. Now? Not so much, because I have now come to expect this kind of thing and decided that I will not allow it to harm me.

The Survival Strategy: Expect Shit, Fight Anyway

If I spend a dollar and I choose to spend it, I’ll estimate 20-50% more that I will most likely spend given my expectation that everything is shit. To be clear, I still am looking to hold them accountable. I am addressing and managing my emotional state.

Have you been on a flight recently? If I go on the flight with the same expectations I had years ago, I’d be miserable. If I reset my expectations and still seek to hold them accountable, I feel better.

This isn’t cynicism – it’s emotional risk management. It’s acknowledging that the game has changed while refusing to stop playing. It’s the difference between being naive and being strategic about your disappointment.

What I’ve Learned About Fighting Systems

After years of being professionally frustrated by broken processes, failed implementations, and organizations that seemed allergic to their own success, I’ve developed what you might call a “productive pessimism.” Expect the worst, document everything, fight for better, protect your sanity.

This approach has served me well in consulting, in leadership roles, and in life. You can simultaneously believe that things should work better AND accept that they probably won’t. You can hold companies accountable while budgeting emotional energy for the inevitable disappointments. More than one thing can be true at the same time.

The alternative – maintaining high expectations in a low-performance world – is a recipe for constant frustration and eventual burnout. Better to be pleasantly surprised by competence than constantly disappointed by mediocrity.

The Long Game

The culture of “meh” didn’t happen overnight, and it won’t be fixed overnight. But the recent years have shown us that entrenched systems can shift faster than we thought possible when there’s enough pressure applied in the right places.

The question is whether we have the patience and persistence to keep applying that pressure while maintaining our emotional equilibrium. Whether we can stay engaged in the fight for better while protecting ourselves from the toll that fight inevitably takes.

I think we can. But it requires a different kind of maturity than we’re used to – one that can hold disappointment and hope in the same breath, that can accept current reality while working to change it.

We can change the world, some magic, some persistence, some understanding, some love, some acceptance, and some universe intervention.