A few weeks ago, I had a thought while listening to a No Stupid Questions podcast episode. For the uninitiated, No Stupid Questions is a podcast where the hosts – currently Angela Duckworth and Mike Maughn – pick a question (either submitted by a listener or drawn from the hosts’ lives or experiences), and attempt to answer the question by drawing on research findings in conversation. The conversation in question was on the premise of meritocracy, which is the idea that people are awarded rewards because of what they achieve rather than their social status, pedigree, lineage or heritage.
The podcast hosts made the case that there’s no such thing as meritocracy, which I found interesting because it goes against so much of the narrative in popular culture. If our public, educational and corporate institutions are to be believed, we’re rewarded adequately for our efforts, everyone gets what they deserve, and there’s hardly any luck at play because we earn what we have largely on merit. This is the common narrative, so it was refreshing to hear Angela and Mike discuss the idea that there’s no such thing as a meritocracy, not in the sense we think of it anyway. According to this viewpoint, while life isn’t perfect, most of us are fortunate to be in the positions we find ourselves in. If you’re reading this, you’ve likely benefited from a lot of good fortune, from the genes you have, to the parents you were born to, and even the country you were born in.
That last point – on being born in or being a citizen of a particular country – cannot be overstated. Did you know that more than two-thirds (approximately 68 percent) of the variability in a person’s income can be explained by only one variable: the country in which they live? It’s no wonder Warren Buffet attributes his success to 3 things: living in America, good genes, and compound interest. I recognise that this is a quote you’ll likely hear echoed in finance and business spheres, with the third item – compound interest – being the most germane and pertinent to those spaces. However, the first two – country of birth and one’s genetic makeup – are just as important, if not more important in the calculus of the factors to which Buffet attributes his success.
This can be quite the sensitive topic to discuss. I’ve mulled over this idea for weeks as I’ve summoned the courage to finally lay out my reasoning in a blog post, and yet, I still experience some discomfort at the thought that this stance could be easily misinterpreted. To suggest that there’s hardly a thing as pure meritocracy is not to diminish the achievements and accomplishments of people who have worked hard and done well for themselves. It is merely a tacit acknowledgement that we all have privileges that others may not have. This is another difficult topic in itself, the idea of privilege, especially when discussed in the context of the unequal social landscape in society. Being privileged doesn’t mean one’s life is easy, nor does it suggest that one has had advantages that others haven’t, though this is sometimes the case. Rather, privilege is the absence of disadvantage in a particular facet of one’s life, and it is important to acknowledge the “facet” part of this. A person can be privileged by virtue of their race, gender, nationality, genes, or a host of other attributes that make us who we are, and be disadvantaged at the same time. For instance, in a Euro-centric society, a Caucasian woman may benefit from white privilege but may be disadvantaged due to the patriarchy. Similarly, a middle-class man in a wheelchair may be privileged because of his gender and socio-economic status but may be disadvantaged due to a lack of accessibility considerations in urban planning. Of course, these are basic oversimplifications which remain subject to debate, but I use these examples to make the point that privilege isn’t an all-or-nothing construct.
This is all to say we all have things in our lives we would like to improve. But do we ever stop to consider all the things that could be much worse? I’d hazard a guess that we don’t spend enough time thinking about this, and I’d like to suggest that maybe we should. We can start by taking a cue from ancient Greek Stoics’ writings on the practice of negative visualisation, which is the act of contemplating what could go wrong in one’s life, the idea being that it could help us feel more gratitude for our lives, as well as prepare us for the things that could go wrong in the future.
Here comes the obvious caveat. I’m in a first-world country, living in good health in an economically and socially stable climate, with access to all the basic amenities and then some. I don’t live from hand to mouth in a war zone, and I don’t have to worry about contracting a disease from my next meal or drink of water. I’ve been incredibly fortunate, so much so that it is nearly impossible for me to list all the reasons I have to be thankful, but I recognise that some aren’t so lucky. And this is what I found so refreshing about Angela’s and Mike’s conversation, the self-awareness to recognise that there are countless factors out of our control that impact our lives for better or worse, and the courage to be openly transparent about it.
P.S.: My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, and my middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.