It could be argued hustling is mediocrity in itself. A life spent chasing some base dragon: money, fame, prestige, what-have-you. Something that has been done countless times before. Instead, why not do something no one has done before? The very antithesis of mediocrity!

Though I don't disagree that "lying flat" is any better.

I think it often even promotes actual incorrectness or at least imperfections. People are so eager to move up or gain control or power or be the smartest person in the room that rarely does a group of workers seek truth. It's usually some mutated version of truth that makes everyone feel like they were the one who came up with it.

It seems it's just really hard to get honest discussions out of people when no one wants to be wrong and everyone wants to be the right one. I don't think people mean this in a very conscious way, it's just an emergent property of the hustle culture and capitalism.

One sees this when a person asks a sequence of seemingly simple questions which elicit responses of dismissal until the sequence ends where the question asker basically realizes no one actually knows the answer despite all the answers given.

Yes. Why care about the factual accuracy/level of insight/caliber of the content I put out when the only thing that matters is that it gets seen?