I exist solely in meritocracies.
For whatever reason, perhaps due to an inclination toward a quiet personality, I’ve been overlooked my entire life. By early impression, at least. By now I’m used to it. In fact, it has many advantages. During my misassessment I have time to properly gauge everyone around; that whole element of surprise thing; and also the chip on my shoulder the quietly, steadily, obsessively propels me to be the best possible (at anything).
So it is no wonder why I look at everything as a meritocracy, because I’m used to having to earn everything. Respect, admiration, friendship, trust, authority, and so on, by one way or the other, I placed myself in a position where I can distinguish myself.
A haven of merit
Sports are probably the easiest example of a meritocracy (and even that’s not a complete meritocracy). I’d wager that I’ll be fascinated by the phenomenon of pickup basketball for the rest of my life. You step onto that court and you essentially are nobody, except what you can do with 7 to 9 other people, a ball, and a rim.
It’s the consummate example of an arena where I constantly get overlooked.
Hubris doesn’t help, and let me tell you, among team sports, basketball reigns as lord paramount over ego driven pissing contests. I’ve played with more absolute scrub players so far insulated in the bubble of their own ego that 1988-89 Jordan could be on the court and they’d still be totally convinced they were the best player on the court — to the point where they wouldn’t even pass him the ball.
So that’s what you deal with when you’re a barely-six-feet-tall-quiet-skinny-kid-of-vague-ethnicity stepping onto the hardwood. But once the ball is in play, most of that is out the door.
And it’s just as much about proving yourself as it is winning or losing.
Never mind if I never get to touch the ball, I know that I can do a million things to show my worth, and that’s exactly my mentality. And with this I go to work. 95% of the time I can assume that I’ll be the best leaper and fastest man out there, which means the other 5% I’ll at least be on their level. I love defense, and in a world that doesn’t glorify brilliant defenders as much as guys who shoot a lot, that automatically nets me some points. And bit by bit it all piles up. Good/smarter players, especially those who really get the team concept, recognize it first, but over time you are filled with the sense that you are respected by the other players there. Even though the biggest egos would never hand out the credit, they sneak it in by other means, usually by trying to get you on their team, or on the occasion that you push back vocally, by sidestepping and trying to get out the way of your frustration.
In my experience, respect is imperceptible. You either have it or you don’t, but it’s unmistakable to everyone, yourself included, which camp you’re in.
The thing about these natural meritocratic environments is that you can always angle things in a way to increase your chances of distinguishment. I do put a lot of work into making sure I’m the most athletic guy out there, yet not everyone is necessarily as physically gifted, but you can work to become smarter, more skilled, savvy, a better team player, or fill-in those parts of the game that most everyone else doesn’t work on.
That’s the beauty of a meritocracy; you have to earn it.
The antithesis of a meritocracy
I was thinking a lot about the whole bar/club scene. Part of me feels weird spending so much thought and time as an active observer. In the Bible Belt, specifically, you end up with a rift of friends who have this incredibly polarizing black & white view of the world that almost serves as an accidental alienation void. As someone who shares core beliefs, you slide deep into this crevasse, constricted by a conflicting feeling that you’re not living up to someone else’s standards of God instead of a more basic, what I believe to be objective, take on how God sees us and our behavior.
And if any of my decisions let anyone down, it shouldn’t matter, yet I still can’t help but try to preserve that because I grew up so firmly in that mentality that I make the choices I make and live a certain way largely on the fact that it would let certain other people down (or maybe that certain other people would subtly make you feel like you did).
I’m not trying to touch on this right here or now, though (I do want to one day write some on why living in the Bible Belt is so exhausting, but I will probably do that anonymously somewhere because I don’t have the time, energy, or care to deal with the potential flurry of people chiming in with what they think otherwise), so tangent aside — I’ve spent a lot of time my last few years in the whole ‘going out’ scene.
If you asked me why, I don’t think I could give you a definitive why beyond the mere fact that I am young, restless, and have nothing tying me down. It’s an interesting atmosphere regardless, because, for the most part, you can break it down into a 2×2 matrix of people that fall in a range of various facets; horny, lonely, fun-seeking/bored/unwinders, and tag-a-longs.
There are some other major facets that could easily be subbed in there or added into a larger matrix (e.g., the high-functioning alcoholics), but this is the 2×2 matrix I think covers the most ground.
Above all else, I posit that the desire to avoid stagnation is the overall tie-in. Maybe you go out with your friends, but the hope is that in your group, you meet some cool new people that could either become part of that group, or another branch that can fulfill certain social needs that maybe your current ones lack or have lost. Maybe you go out there hoping to take someone home for the night, or to date on a more long-term basis, or maybe you just want to dance with other people who like to dance.
The point is that there is a heightened excitement because there is a largely unknown factor to the whole affair. At most parties, you more-or-less know which faces to expect there. When you tunnel down further, you know even more what to expect when you just limit social affairs to well-known groups of friends; but there is no telling what kind of characters you’ll witness in that smoky dive bar housed in a run down trailer, or some hyped up club with an artificially engineered line and $15 cover (though the answer to that is usually 19 year olds, other obnoxious people, and a lot of remorse on wasting $15).
Granted, 9 out of 10 times it ends up being a bit of a waste; a number that can be whittled down to 4-5 times out of 10 for the most prominent social butterflies, but it is a twinge that I’ve personally answered more often than not lately.
Generally, I just go and enjoy the company of the group of friends I’m with, but I’ve thought a lot about how these atmospheres drive me crazy. A bar or a club is about as antithetical to a meritocracy as possible.
First, let’s remember the assumption that, much like baseball, your ‘fail’ rate is going to be much higher than your success rate. In this case, we’ll assume that success is having an experience that registers on that scale of the idea that you if you go out, you might have a good time in some way that you wouldn’t if you stuck with the status quo. For the most part, the traits that will increase those chances are predispositions more than they are characteristics that you can develop and earn a good standing with.
Let’s start with the first two that are the most predisposed; social proclivity and physical aesthetics.
I think I’d put social proclivity as the least malleable. For instance, some people are just pure extroverts. They feed off of being around other people and interacting with other people. Sometimes I’m a extrovert in introvert’s clothing, but that’s the best I can usually manage unless I am in a big group of people I know very well (it’s probably why I come alive the most at my own birthday parties). For someone like me, I am always aware of the fact that a stranger is likely to annoy me, come off as too much of a fool for me to want to try to converse with, be too different, or a million other things; at the outset. It takes a lot longer to drill to each other’s core. Drilling is work. That’s exhausting.
I look at the pure extrovert as a symbiotic magnet, or a little Ewok that just loves to cuddle everything. They’ll just latch onto nearest person for a while and get their social embraces until someone else walks by, then they’ll leap in the ear, excitedly yodeling and latch onto them; ad infinitum.
When you have no real ways to distinguish yourself, this is the number one trait that stands out; whoever has the easiest time hanging out with absolute strangers.
For people who fall closer to the middle, we might actually love being around new people, but it is much more pleasant for us when the attention is first diverted on us (once again outlining why I’m so comfortable with the idea of meritocracy).
Physical aesthetics is what it is. And is what it always will be, though what is en vogue varies on culture and place in history, so I won’t speak much on it. But, like anywhere else, if you look a certain way, you’ll be predisposed to do better for yourself. Short of Michael Jackson-ing yourself, there isn’t much more you can do other than layer a bunch of subtle things.
Lately I’ve begun to realize that this is another annoying factor of living in the South. I can’t tell you how many times I get asked ‘what I am’ or ‘where I’m from’ — honestly, I’m really laid back, and I usually could give a damn, so I’ve never been offended or annoyed in the moment when someone does, but I’ll admit it is starting to get to the point where, cumulatively, it’s getting annoying.
My mom is what you’d call a Chicana, from a family of Mexicans with a dash of Native American to boot (I forgot which tribe). My dad is an Italian. He was raised by Italians and his mom was Italian, and had less opportunity to get in touch with his other inner white boy, but his dad’s is of English and Scottish ancestry; in effect, I’m as much ‘white’ as I am ‘brown’. Culturally speaking, I’m closer to the middle class American caucasian stereotype than anything else, yet because you can’t really tell where I’m from, I get mistaken for Salvadoran, Iranian, Egyptian, Jewish, Ecuadoran, and the list goes on and on. People in high school legitimately believed I was Ethiopian, in part because I’m a very good liar, but also in part because, in general, people from the South are very culturally ignorant.
This creeps into the entire physical appearance thing. I’ve only started to understand this. Of course, this isn’t the only way physical traits predispose the merit subconsciously awarded to you by others in a bar, but this is a way that is pertinent to me and I can easily illustrate.
I could continue with other traits that have a high predisposition to development ratio, but I think the point is that these environments are constructed in a way that pretty much has no way to reward characteristics that are earned. The best that can be done is to distinguish yourself indirectly, but the problem there is that usually it is a very two dimensional translation and also that those can easily be faked.
Selfishly, I’d love for their to be a social environment that has some of the appeal of the unknown that a bar or club does that has some sort of meritocratic framework, but I’m also not invested in any of those things to care that strongly. Rather, I just wanted to talk about my mainframe existing in the constructs of a meritocracy, and how it’s interest and also uncomfortable to take a person like myself out of that in an environment that’s antithetical to my comfort zone. (Though I do believe that meritocracies are wholly better than the latter).
The beautiful struggle; cycles don’t end
I’d like to return to these people I’ve competed against who are deeply embedded in their own ego bubble. I think that is what happens when you take a person who is already suffocated in their self-cloud; puffing about, blinded by nothing more than the self-dependency they exist in, involuntarily threatening to occlude the lives around them with the dense fog of their ego.
When you connect the two, you realize how many people you know who are like this; or at least I do. I have a lot of friends who are that obnoxious dude obsessed with his own delusional ego that nobody really wants to play with. The moments you can pull them out of their own little cloud, you can enjoy that person, but the instances in which you can are limited. This phenomenon is exacerbated by an opportunity to ‘prove’ oneself of ego; a sport of competition is that gateway.
It makes me sad thinking about the friends I have who would fall into this classification of ‘limited friend’. Not just because how much more enjoyable that friendship would be if it didn’t have to be so limited, or if you didn’t have to get sucked into dealing with their boundless web of self-generated bullshit, but also because of the type of friends it makes the rest of us.
For instance, it is my experience that these friends are so ignorant of their own selfishness that you couldn’t even call them out on it if you wanted to. They won’t hear it. If they heard it, then they wouldn’t listen. And if they listened, they’d only forget it the next day. And even if you go that far, they’d convince themselves otherwise.
I think this is part of why it is so tempting for us to talk about people behind their back. It’s really hard to break through a wall of ignorance otherwise. The moment you say something about someone in confidence to another, it’s exponentially more credible. I’m not trying to condone or glorify bashing people behind their back, but I’m just pointing out a cycle that we slip into and get spat out of our entire lives.
Eventually, the back talk slips out, feelings get hurt, the drama is flung around in one of the few things more disgusting than a food fight, and in the end each party either learns something about themselves and improves — or they stay the same. In that case, at some point the cycle repeats until people either realize the friendship isn’t worth it and it ends.
I don’t think that any of us could say that we haven’t been ever possible piece of that cycle — I’ve played the role of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and still am as I speak.
I didn’t really have a purpose other than to write out some of the stuff that brews in my mind. Just some stuff to think on.