Leave it to Scott Alexander to write the most epic Scott Adams obituary. Adding to the confusion, Scott Adams and Alexander share the same first name and initials, and I will leave it to the reader to infer which Scott I am referring to.
Scott writes:
But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams’ comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful.
I somewhat think Scott is overreading or reaching to find a deeper meaning to Dilbert, where there is none. It’s like trying to psychoanalyze Garfield. Jon exists to be tormented by Garfield, and that torment is the joke. It’s funny. End of analysis.
Dilbert was always understood as tongue-in-cheek rather than a serious artistic critique of workplace conditions. Many of the same people who pinned Dilbert cartoons to their cubicle walls would gladly crawl back to the same jobs if they were fired and later rehired. Moreover, people are working longer than ever. The idea of quitting the ‘rat race,’ save for the tiny/niche ‘FIRE movement’, never really caught on. Even Dilbert’s creator didn’t stop working until the very end, literally until the day he passed.
Another theme is coping with mediocrity:
It’s not just nerds. Everyone has to crash into reality. The guitar player who starts a garage band in order to become a rockstar. The varsity athlete who wants to make the big leagues. They all eventually realize, no, I’m mediocre. Even the ones who aren’t mediocre, the ones with some special talent, only have one special talent (let’s say cartooning) and no more.
and
For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work.
Truly talented people remind us of our mediocrity. It’s like we’re flotsam by comparison. I felt this way reading Scott’s essay. I agree Scott was motivated to create a legacy that would outlive his cartoon, and worked tirelessly at that. But I disagree with Scott’s assessment that Mr. Adams habitually failed or was a one-trick pony.
Except for obvious failures like the ‘Dilberito’, his half-successes were still fruitful. Although his TV show was quickly canceled, people still speak fondly of it. His podcast/livestream, social media presence and book sales were objectively successful, and some of his concepts (e.g. the Dilbert Principle, a reformulation Peter Principle) entered the common lexicon. But perhaps he fell short of rising to the level famed management guru Peter Drucker. But if this constitutes being mediocre, I hope to be mediocre too.
Some have argued, callously, similar to Steve Jobs, that Scott brought his death upon himself by refusing conventional healthcare. This assumes the counterfactual that his cancer was curable, which we don’t know. In may 2025 he announced he had terminal prostate cancer. A prostate cancer diagnosis at an early age (60s) tends to be more aggressive than in older people, like 80s.
I am guessing he already knew it was fatal and tried different things, but given that it had already spread and was an aggressive cancer, there was nothing he could have done. Joe Biden for example was diagnosed with terminal metastatic prostate cancer despite having top medical care and preventive care. Sometimes it’s just the bad luck of the draw. Him taking ivermectin likely made no difference when it was already terminal.
Scott had so much to live for, that his premature death hit especially hard. There are other people who check out in their 50s, but not him. Being unmarried without kids afforded him abundant free time, which he never squandered, whether it was his social media presence, his livestream/podcast, cartooning, and writing, in order to create this legacy. He was always doing something. There’s something inspiring in that.