“If you can meet with triumph and disaster,
And treat those two imposters just the same” Rudyard Kipling
“The way your career works, you progress from one level to the next. At each level, a large number of people are culled, told they’re not good enough. One day, you will be culled. And you have to be ready for that because you’ve never had it before, and it’s going to hurt”. This is a very rough paraphrase of what a mentor once said to me. It stuck with me then, and it has been playing on my mind recently because I think I might be on borrowed time.
At the end of the first year of a PhD course, students sit their qualifying exams. These are typically designed to be difficult, to “cull” the weaker students. There is some theory that those students who are able to solve equations under pressure will somehow turn out to be better at research. Bananas, if you ask me, especially in an era where much of the skill involved in research is in de-bugging code and thinking up imaginative uses for datasets or natural experiments, and very few people actually make careers out of finding analytical solutions to models. However, the point is that based on the practice work I did for these tests, I suspect I might easily have fallen into this “weaker student” category. I dodged this bullet not by dint of my own ability, resolve, or merit, but because the university cancelled the exams due to safety concerns around COVID19. This is unalloyed excellent news. It is an immense privilege to be able to continue studying and researching things I care about, surrounded by people I respect and admire, and get paid to do it. I’m writing this two days after I got the email confirming cancellation, as my celebrations-induced hangover begins to subside.
The most important point is this: it could easily have been different. I don’t necessarily think I would fail but was not in any way confident of passing. Had I passed it would have been, to no small degree, a matter of luck. And had I failed it would not have been because I did not study effectively, or got blindsided by an unfair exam. It would undeniably have been because I am less intelligent than I thought I was a year ago. For the first time in my life, I might have been simply incapable of rising to an academic challenge. Amidst all the relief, I am fighting not to forget this.
I’ve spent a lot of foggy, insomnia-ridden nights dwelling on what failure would have meant (“catastrophising”, according to the CBT industry, through a self-prescribed melatonin-induced fog). The practical implications (I’d have to return to my parents’ house and start looking for jobs in the middle of a global recession) were an afterthought. By far my worst fears were about how I would possibly explain this to former colleagues, friends, and relatives.
“Joe will bring some intellect to the world of academia”, said my boss on my last day at my last job; my cousin once posted a picture of the two of us on facebook with the caption “this man is smarter than you”; one of my best friends once referred to me to someone else as “the cleverest guy I know”. At the time, I revelled in this kind of validation, even as I think I knew in the privacy of my own thoughts that it was not entirely warranted. But the fact is that, though there is a gap between how clever I am and how clever I thought I was, it is nothing as compared to the chasm that exists between the truth and other people’s opinions of me. Now, it stings to think about how these people’s opinion of me would have changed had they been proved wrong. In those melatonin-soaked witching hours, I began to worry that some of the people I like the most would have begun to think differently about me. When I plucked up the courage to tell people that I was worried I might fail, the worst response I got (from someone I genuinely like and respect): “well I still think you’re the smartest person I’ve ever met”. What if I wasn’t? Would you still want to talk to me?
This outcome is (undeniably) a triumph, but it could easily have been disaster. It has laid bare to me the fragility of my psychology, and many of my relationships. And therefore, I intend to treat it to some degree as the disaster it could have been. When I do get culled, I want it to hurt because of the failure in and of itself, and nothing else. I want never again to feel that my own identity, and the way other people see me, are contingent on anything outside my control. My resolutions are as follows:
Firstly, I do not want to be known, primarily, if at all, for being clever. I want to be known for being kind, understanding, brave, conscientious, for making sacrifices where necessary to do the right thing. At present some of these things are truer about me than others, and that means I have to change both the way I see the world, and the way I behave. Where I was a bit Ravenclaw, I have to become more Hufflepuff, and take pride in doing so. A healthy attitude towards these totems of status (various forms of “proof” of intelligence and ability) is to see them as purely instrumental in allowing a person to do truly valuable things for themself or other people. It also means I have to re-evaluate my relationships. Those friendships I could imagine surviving this kind of shock will turn out to be more valuable than I thought, and those acquaintances who would have wanted nothing more to do with me much, much less so.
Secondly, I need to accept that my behaviour has contributed to this problem. The fact that in many people’s minds I am a “smart guy” is not their fault. I know I have a skill, developed to survive my undergraduate degree at Oxford, of sounding more knowledgeable than I am about an issue. I have been told that my way of presenting my views is intimidating, arrogant, and even aggressive. Frankly, it works, because I have somehow managed to convince people who matter (tutors, graders, bosses, clients) to give me awards and promotions. However what undoubtedly goes down well in tutorials, presentations and client meetings has also had the effect of inauthentically exaggerating my abilities. I need a new way of behaving that avoids giving such a false impression.
Thirdly, though, I have to do all this while continuing to put out and endorse my own work. I am doing a PhD in economics, which means that at some point, my opinion on some topics in economics should be valuable for informing better decision-making and making people’s lives better. Otherwise, what is the point in economics? It would also be wrong for me to draw the conclusion that my work is not valuable, and judgement is not sound. If I didn’t honestly think that, then why write things like this? If you are trying to forge a career in economics, it simply is not viable to go through life without having opinions and backing them. If anything, it is more important to do this now because the attitude that allows you to do your best, own your work as your own, and accept honest feedback from others when they think it is wrong, is a difficult balance to strike. For the same reason that it is harder to recover from food or sex addiction than alcohol addiction, developing the right level of confidence in your abilities is a balance that it is hard to strike. Hopefully, a string of small failures, as I attempt arguments, pieces of research, and job applications which do not quite come off, will keep me honest about what I can and cannot do, and help me learn to live with the fact that I am limited.
Why write all of this down? Yeah, it is self-indulgent. It also puts on paper some embarrassingly arrogant aspects of how I think about myself. But I think it has broader implications for lots of people and for society as a whole. Now that capitalism has solved the problem of scarcity for most middle-class people, status is what keeps people working (T.H. Marshall made a prediction loosely along these lines in his Citizenship and Social Class essay). To be clear about what this means, I assert that the additional income that most high-status jobs give a person is not worth the stress and the working hours, and nor do they, by and large, deliver to society things which are intrinsically good. For those people who say that career-driven people might commit so much because they love their jobs, I would ask why there are so few retired sales executives who take up working in a call centre as a hobby in their retirement. Why does a solicitor not investigate vexatious trademarks as a hobby? Why does a civil servant not take holidays to go and write minutes on exciting new topics? I can only see the prospect of higher status professions as an enticement to those who have escaped poverty. If you believe this, then for many people, the continual climbing of the career ladder, taking on more and more responsibility, sacrificing more and more of one’s physical and mental health, can only be rationalised as a fear of being culled. And since firms rely on employees being willing to do this to remain profitable, this means that process of capital continues to operate profitably only for as long as its offer of status and achievement is sufficiently attractive to entice people to take it up. And if we accept that tying one’s status, identity, and ultimately mental health to extrinsic markers of one’s capability is unhealthy, it follows that the survival of capitalism requires many of its workers to be driven by status anxiety. The corollary is that the collapse of capitalism is a necessary implication of citizens reaching their full psychological potential.
Of course, this is not the only, or even the primary, way that capital keeps a fresh supply of labour willing to throw itself on the fire. The creation of false scarcity through financialisation and private debt, government-backed coercion to participate in the labour market via the workfare state, and most recently the recreation of financial insecurity via the gig economy are all more important means of coercing people to continue to surrender the best of their lives to employers even once the economy has advanced to the point where the needs of the population can be easily met. But if I’m right about this (and naturally, I think I am) then learning to disconnect one’s identity from one’s career, and teaching oneself to see one’s status within the economy only as a means to an end- to lift oneself out of poverty and then to put oneself in a position to help other people- is a radical act. It is part of shaking oneself free of capitalism’s psychological chains.