A Collapsing Culture of Excellence

We can do better

It was Oscar night of 2025 and I was very excited.

I love Oscar night. For all my annoyance with Hollywood, for all my disdain over the politics, the smugness, and the disregard for true art, I still love the awards season. I like watching the Best Picture nominees. I enjoy the elevation of that overlooked indy film. I enjoy being annoyed by the snubs, watching as the technical categories and short films pull ordinary folk onto a stage in front of millions. I enjoy making my predictions and being wrong.

I enjoy sharing this with my kids. It’s a strange family tradition to watch the Oscars because it has been inaccessible to us for most of their lives. Through a variety of circumstances and the inconsistency of licensing for streaming live TV, it’s has always been a mess trying to watch the Oscars live. But this year, we had a simple solution. Hulu had been advertising their live stream of the Oscars. Just pull up the Hulu app and you’ll be watching the best stream of the Oscars. Simple, easy, no fuss.

With the pre-show red carpet interviews running in our media room, I tried to sign up for Hulu. I would happily pay a month subscription for just these 3 (or 4 or 5) hours of television. But the sign-up screen didn’t seem to work. I wasn’t getting the confirmation email. Going back to my TV, I tried to sign up through the app but it had similar failures. The show was starting. My kids are disappointed and I was showing signs of frustration. My son said “Oh no, it’s just like Mike Tyson”

My son remembers the last Mike Tyson fight. It was on Netflix, a huge event for Netflix to move into live-streaming with Paul Logan / Mike Tyson fight, almost certainly the last boxing match Mike Tyson would ever fight. We had watched it a few months before and the stream was a disaster. When the action wasn’t stuttering, it was pixelated so badly that it was hard to tell what was happening. As someone who has worked in digital media streaming, I had the joy of explaining to my kids some of the technical reasons of why we were having trouble watching TV.

These seem like small things. A broken website or a bad streaming event aren’t life-changing problems. If it were just me experiencing this, I’m not sure I’d be writing about it. But my kids can see this. They get excited for an event like the Oscars and then the website breaks. They sit down for their first boxing match with daddy and the TV doesn’t work.

I hate blaming Covid for everything but it has been a dividing line in my kids’ lives. Since Covid, my kids don’t really expect things to work. Even when a half-trillion dollar company streams a main event that they’ve hyped for weeks, that company, with seemingly unlimited resources, can’t deliver on their promises. My kids see this. They are growing up into a world where they expect things just don’t work most of the time. They expect things to be fragile, broken, and inconsistent, even when those things are coming from big companies and important names.

They have no expectation of excellence, not even at the biggest companies, not even in the most important events.

The worries me a lot. I don’t want my kids to think that excellence is impossible. I want them to have high expectations both for themselves and for the people, culture, and institutions surrounding them. I beam with pride when I see my daughters work hard at their sport to become better, make the team, and contribute to making the team better. I want them to hold high standards. I’m trying to foster a social and cultural environment that reinforces this expectation of high standards.

But I’m not getting a lot of help on that from the larger American culture.

Accepting the Decline

This piece might seem tangential to my thesis, but there is something about it that sticks in my craw. John McWhorter wrote in the New York Times about the anti-social practice of playing personal music as loud as possible in confined public, calling it “the quintessence of obnoxiousness.” He expresses his frustration and dismay in this practice but he ends up talking himself into accepting it as a part of the rich tapestry of diversity. It’s clear through his writing that he has not fully convinced himself to embrace this diversity, but he is trying hard to do so.

I’m not well impressed with this approach. McWhorter isn’t advocating for the world he wishes he could live in. He’s making peace with a practice he despises but cannot control. He’s not expecting excellence from his surroundings, his neighbors, his city. He’s making peace with the decline.

Fleeing the Decline

It is easier to make peace with this cultural decline in excellence and high expectations if you’re not raising kids into it. I’m almost delighted to see the recent declines in public school enrollment because it means that parents feel empowered to vote against a decline in standards by taking their kids out of that environment.

In a survey investigating why students are fleeing New York City public schools, the most common answer was that parents “want a more rigorous education than is possible in NYCPS”. Parents want more and better for their kids. They want to see their children excel and will change up their own lives in order to make this happen.

Fighting the Decline

At the end of it, we can’t accept or flee expectations of excellence. We have to fight for it. We have to insist upon it and admire those who strive for it.