proxies for trust
Maybe it's a hot take, but meritocracy isn't real.
We have to use proxies for trust. Proxies for value. Nobody has the time to see how good you are at what you do, to see how hard you work, to see what your values are. These things have to be shown over time. They're typically just felt.
There's no fair system—and of course there's always a bias. We're all the heroes of our own story. It takes a certain disposition to look at yourself and say, Hey, wait a second, maybe I have some room to improve.
But in terms of the world giving you something because of how good you are or how hard you work? It's not that it doesn't have any effect. It's just not enough.
Working hard, being good, excellence—the whole myth of "be so good they can't ignore you." Yeah, beautiful, absolutely. But there are greater forces than that: the school you went to, how much money your family has, what caste you came from, where you grew up, how well you speak the language of your country.
People judge based on these proxies.
If you have an accent or talk a certain way, they won't tell you they think you're dumb. They may not even know they think you're dumb. But they might. Same thing with schools—go to a great school, and people will think of you differently if they've heard of it or respect it.
All these little micro-impressions add up to some image of who you are. In someone's life. In the workplace. In society. Your merit can't cut through those things.
It's not all doom and gloom, though. I think it's simply useful to know.
Trust, reputation, value—they just take longer than those other things. There are plenty of people I know who didn't go to the best school but are smarter than the people I've seen at the best schools. People who impressed me with other qualities. People without all that privilege who still found a way to make it.
For me, the art is in recognizing that these forces exist instead of pretending they don't. Instead of thinking we live in some fair, just society where we'll make it if we work hard enough—knowing the rules of the game and deciding to work hard and be meritorious not for a guaranteed reward, but for the probability of it. The chance of it.
And perhaps even more importantly: accepting the way things are rather than fighting them.
You can't fight a tidal wave. You can't fight a mountain. As individuals, we have limited power against forces greater than ourselves—and some of those forces are social, institutional, baked into hundreds or thousands of years of ways of being as a society.
Seeing how they are is step one. Learning how to relate to them and maneuver them is the next step. Deciding how you want to be in all of that—I suppose that's the wisdom.
