The first question you tend to get asked when you meet someone at a party is
“So what do you do?”
And according to how impressive your answer is, people are either keen to get to know
you better, or swiftly leave you behind by the nuts.
We’re anxious because we live in a world of snobs, people who take a tiny part of us
- our professional identities - and use these to come to a complete verdict about how valuable
we are as humans.
The opposite of a snob is your mother. She doesn’t care about your status, she cares
about your soul. Yet most people aren’t our mothers - and that’s why we worry so
much about judgement and humiliation.
It’s said we live in materialistic times. But it’s more poignant than that. We live
in times where emotional rewards have been pegged to the acquisition of material things.
What people want when they go after money, big jobs or fancy cars is rarely these things
in themselves, so much as the attention and respect - if you like “the love” - that
are given to those who have them.
Next time you see a guy driving by in a Ferrari, don’t think it’s someone unusually greedy;
think it’s someone with a particularly intense vulnerability and need for love.
We’re also anxious because we’re constantly told we could become anything. We hear it
from our earliest days.
It should be great that there’s so much opportunity. But what if we fail in such a
world - what if you don’t manage to get to the top when there was said to be every
chance?
The self-help shelves of bookstores are filled with two kinds of books that capture the modern
anxious condition. The first have titles like
‘How to make it big in 15 minutes’ and ‘Be an overnight millionaire.’
The second have titles like: ‘How to cope with low self-esteem.’
The two genres are related. A society that tells people they could have everything, but
where in fact only a tiny minority can, will end up with a lot of dissatisfaction and grief.
There’s a related problem: our societies are - to a large extent - deemed to be “fair”.
Back in the olden days, you knew the system was rigged. It wasn’t your fault if you
were a peasant and not to your credit if you were the lord. But now we’re told our societies
are meritocracies, places where rewards go to those who merit them; the hardworking clever
among us.
[word MERITOCRACY appears typed up]
It sounds lovely - but there’s a nasty sting in the tail.
If you really believe in a society where those at the top deserve to get there, that has
to mean those at the bottom deserve to be there too.
Meritocracies make poverty seem not just unpleasant, but also somehow deserved.
In Medieval England, people used to call the poor ‘unfortunates’.
Literally, people who had not been blessed by the Goddess of fortune.
Nowadays, especially in the US (where meritocracy is big), they call them - rather tellingly - ‘losers’.
We scarcely believe in “luck” nowadays as something that explains where we end up.
No one will believe you if you say you were fired because of “bad luck”. Your professional
position has become the central verdict on your character. No wonder suicide rates rise
exponentially the moment a society joins the so-called ‘modern world’.
How can we cope?
First off, by refusing to believe that any society really can be meritocratic: luck or
accident continue to determine a critical share of where people end up in the hierarchy.
Treat no one - not least yourself - as though they entirely deserve to be where they are.
Secondly, make up your own definition of success instead of uncritically leaning on society’s.
There are so many ways to succeed, and many of them have nothing to do with status as
its currently defined within the value system of industrial capitalism. Those who succeed
at making money rarely succeed at empathy or family life.
Thirdly, and most importantly, we should refuse to let our outer achievements define our sense
of self entirely. There remain so many vital sides of us that will never appear on our
business cards, that do not stand a chance of being captured by that maddeningly blunt
and unimaginative question, ‘So what do you do?’