If you only know mediocrity, you will live better.
Simple example: Mediocre food. Say that you don't know that food better than a simple burrito at Chipotle exists. A Chipotle burrito is fine - it's right about in the center of the bell curve for delicious food. It's cheap, it's plentiful. You don't have to wait in hour long lines or pay massive amounts to eat one. And if you don't know any better, than a Chipotle burrito will be the best thing you've ever had.
Let's investigate the many advantages of mediocre art (art here being a generic term encompassing food, music, laptops, etc).
1. It's cheap. Fast food burritos are cheaper than fine dining. Dell laptops are cheaper than Macbooks.
2. It's plentiful. The great thing about mediocrity is that lots of people can do it, by definition[1]. There is lots of music that sounds mediocre these days. Great music is harder to come by.
3. Your life is not actually improved by partaking in things of greater quality. This is going to be the hardest one for me to argue.
Before I get too deep into this argument, let me point out that there are edge cases when this is not the case. A great example: ergonomic keyboards. For some people using normal keyboards can actually induce wrist pain and even RSI. The reason this is an edge case is because standard keyboards can actually lead to physical pain. This is not the case with most art like music, where even listening to really bad music will not physically hurt you[4].
Let's say that you appreciate art primarily in the pursuit of greater happiness[5]. Say further that you've only ever listened to average music your entire life, and then someone hands you a copy of the greatest album that you will ever hear in your life[7]. For the sake of this discussion, it's OK Computer[6]. You'll be happier, for a time - but I think you'll have a hard time justifying that you'll be happier forever. Why? Well, some research has shown [8][9] that we each have something called baseline happiness.
The idea behind baseline happiness is that your happiness is essentially a constant line, occasionally being disrupted by spikes up (when something great happens) or spikes down (for tragedies), but always eventually returning to the same value. Discovering the greatest album ever will certainly be an upwards spike, but I don't think that anyone would believe that the greatest album ever could continue to improve their lives 5 or 10 years after its discovery. After a certain point, it loses its novelty.
But Grant, you say. If you partake in great art all the time, your life will be full of these positive upward spikes, and you will be happier on average, even if you haven't changed your baseline rate! An interesting point, I say. That leads me into my final point.
4. Appreciating great art diminishes your appreciation of mediocre art.
Think back to before you owned that nice fancy Macbook, or before you started appreciating good food. Were you really less happy? If newer, better technology really does make you happier, than we can preform a reductio ad absurdium and say that people who used punch cards (the ancient way of writing programs for computers) in the days before personal computers must have been truly miserable. They must have wept every day, imagining how much better their lives could be, if only they had better technology, and as we developed better tech they must have gotten slightly happier every time. But that's obviously not the case - people who used punch cards thought it was awesome, and were excited to be using this awesome new technology. Newer technology only diminished their opinion on the older technology. It never permanently raised their happiness.
This data is also supported by studies[10]. Getting more money does not make you more happy after the point where you can meet your basic needs. You might be happier for a while after buying that new fancy car, but eventually you're going to fall back to your baseline happiness like normal.
So, the conclusion?
Embrace mediocrity.
Footnotes
[1]: This might not be immediately obvious, so let's do a thought experiment. Say we ask a thousand random people to create some sort of art. I think it's a fair assumption to say that the results will be shaped on a bell curve[2][3]. Most of the art created will fall in the middle of the bell curve just by simple statistical properties.
[2]: Sometimes this won't be the case. A simple example: If you ask 1000 people to open a door, they all will be able to either do it or not. Sure, you can find really intricate judging criteria for door opening - and never see someone open a door the same way again - but if you ask an average person, they will report that door opening is a skill that you either have or you don't.
[3]: Prepare for massive mathematical handwaving. The following paragraph should not be thought of as true mathematics at all, but I find it a nice way to think of things. I believe that things are bell curved in general because doing art well is the combination of many different factors that are randomly assigned. To make good music you have to have a good sense for melody, a good sense for rhythm, the determination to learn an instrument and become good at it, etc. It's fair (incoming handwaving) to say that the quality of the music is sort of the average of your abilities across all these different skills. And if we're taking the average over a number of random variables, then we know from basic statistics that we get a normal distribution.
[4]: Nickelback excepted.
[5]: Another good reason: You want to be a snob. But isn't being a snob a kind of peverse pleasure?
[6]: No bias here. None at all.
[7]: Let's say that we're having this discussion after you've died and you are reflecting on your life, so that you can say with certainty that this was the greatest CD you have ever heard.
[8]: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1721954,00.html
[9]: http://toddshammer.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/the-happiness-hypothesis/
[10]: http://www.webmd.com/balance/news/20060630/study-money-wont-make-you-happy
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