prompt: must, title: when not being stupid is not enough in misc. flash fiction

It used to mean something to be pretty-good at something. It really did. To be a three-sport high school star, a county beauty queen, to be in the best band in your valley. It often meant a life or a living or at least a path toward that end. The human race needed a whole lot of people who were pretty-good at things because the reach of most peoples’ lives rarely extended beyond one-day’s horse-drawn cart ride from the place they were born. Every settlement needed at least one bard, every family a priest, every tavern a singer of songs. For our first few hundred thousand years, we collectively evolved to generate a certain number of people for these roles. Considering the slow movement of recombination via sexual reproduction, we can’t have changed that much in the six hundred years since the printing press. But the world on kept changing, faster and faster since then, and our tendency to be born into those roles couldn’t keep up with technology.

Even a hundred years after that, every London still needed a Shakespeare and at least a Chris Marlowe to keep the masses entertained, recycling the old tales that still couldn’t be saved on digital files or magnetic tape yet. And both needed whole troupes of actors and musicians to make them happen every single night. Some people born with the spark of that pretty good started to fall through history’s cracks but the most of them still found their lives.

These days, eight billion people only need maybe two dozen Shakespeares or Marlowes for the whole bloody mess on this rock because dense information at the speed of a twinkling is cheap and functions with cut-throat economy of scale. Who cares about the ten million county beauty queens in the world when the computer can show the whole world the ten within ten million it can render logarithmically perfect? A million Bill Shakespeares working in dollar stores and wig shops because the world only needs two dozen, the rest all cut off from the purpose that has been in their genes, their very bones since we first came down from the trees to carve rocks and make fire. Adrift, burdened with skills rendered useless by satellites and wires. What the hell do we do with all of these people, born to be pretty-good for hundreds when we now only need a handful of supernova freaks to entertain and enrapture the whole damned human race?

I’m not asking this because I have the answer, I’m one of those lost pretty-goods myself, only a Mega-Shakespeare could come up with the solution and I must imagine she or he wouldn’t tell because being a Mega-Shakespeare is so veryvery lucrative.

I’m asking because I worry human society is about to collapse under the suffocating weight of all these people gone fallow from purpose gone unneeded. I’m asking because I’d like to know what the hell I’m supposed to do with the back-nine of my life.