Contra deBoer on overt status signaling
Not really a "Contra", more of a "yes and" situation
Freddie deBoer recently posted the following article.
He summarizes his message in the following passage:
“Past a certain level of accomplishment, the affect of being unimpressed with one’s self, of not taking one’s own success seriously, becomes worse than arrogance, righteousness, self-promotion, or bragging.”
Essentially he’s pointing out that a lot of people who acted “try-hard” in their school and career achieve a certain level of success, and then pretend as if they were never try-hard about it. It’s like a very attractive person telling you that looks aren’t everything — only related to accomplishments.
People find it irritating because a) it comes across as condescending and b) it misleads people about the level of effort required in order to attain uncommon goals.
This meshes with one of my earliest posts about how most gratitude practices tend to cash out as narcissism.
Freddie’s piece also eloquently summarizes my own experiences in higher education; the majority of the people in [REDACTED BUSINESS SCHOOL] had hyper competitive personalities (a combination of high conscientiousness and high neuroticism), but nevertheless tried to pass themselves off as chill and relatable.
But in the same article, Freddie says:
“I’m not a fan of ambition, in general, but I think it’s even worse when the ambitious deny their ambition as a way to achieve their ambitions. I would much, much rather someone just say “I’m successful, and I know it, and you know it too.” I’ve never been in that position, and I’m sure it’s complicated to sort through those feelings, but I’d like to think that if I had climbed to the top of the achievement heap I wouldn’t be so vulgar as to act like I just tripped and fell into my success, which makes it so much worse for everyone else.”
(Bolding is my own emphasis)
I hope the irony is obvious. He spends the article criticizing people for downplaying their achievements, and then goes on to downplay his own achievements.
Freddie DeBoer is an incredibly accomplished writer, with over 60 thousand subscribers on Substack, a good percentage of them being paid subscribers. He has articles in every major news outlet, and is one of the few writers who can actually make a living from his online content.
Perhaps he would not describe himself as a famous or “elite” writer, but I know for a fact that if his posts got the same level of engagement as mine, he would be on suicide watch:
In fact, I was going to mention this contradiction in the comment section of that post, but I am quite literally too poor to participate in his discussions, as it is restricted to paid subscribers only.
So what’s going on here?
I think there are three reasons:
Status is relative. I’ve been going on about this point for several different posts now, such as this one:
People who are otherwise successful can nevertheless feel like losers because they are comparing themselves to an even more successful reference class.
Bragging is obnoxious. LinkedIn is essentially a platform designed for people to brag about their achievements in corporate/entrepreneurial life. They can’t overtly brag, however, so they have to couch it in language of gratitude, or otherwise downplay their abilities – hence gratitude practices cashing out as narcissism.
Social media promotes relatability over accomplishment. Hank Green recently posted a video where he summarizes the incentive structures of the algorithms neatly, pointing out that it’s easier to talk about his struggles rather than good things going on in his life. In this sense, social media has inverted the stigma of mental health; it’s easier to be mentally ill than it is to be happy.
Thanks for Reading
one last thing….
I hate self promotion of every kind — I would love it you read my previous post on how the world is becoming more Kafkaesque. It dives deeper into the mechanics of our modern world, and attempts to explain a lot of the malaise that we see:
Upvoted to get you above 4 likes.
But seriously, good post.