Meritocratic Mythologies

How chance disguises itself as virtue.

Fifteen hundred euros separate survival from luxury in Spain. That figure determines whether you sleep soundly or wake up calculating. It's not a lot of money, but it marks the boundary between those who can afford to turn down jobs and those who will accept anything. Between that line and the next lies another chasm: those who have enough to live on and those who have enough to never think about money again.

Steve Jobs wasn't an engineer. He was a charismatic salesman who happened to be in the right place at the right time when Wozniak needed a partner. Edison bought most of his patents from inventors without resources. The Wright brothers flew after others, but they knew how to market their version better. The difference between genius and imposter often boils down to who gets to the patent office first or who has better access to capital.

This is unsettling because it dismantles the meritocratic narrative upon which we've built our reward system. If much of success stems from timing and the ability to capitalize on opportunities rather than pure talent, then many failures are equally arbitrary. Society needs to believe that effort guarantees results. Without that fiction, the legitimacy of the entire structure falters.

Musk doesn't sleep in his Tesla out of love for humanity. His nervous system has learned to confuse adrenaline with purpose. Crisis means survival, survival means success. It's a self-reinforcing cycle that becomes an addiction. He needs stress to feel alive and justifies this chemical dependency with grandiose missions about colonizing Mars. It works because he channels this compulsion toward goals that transcend his personal neuroses.

I know businesspeople who operate with a similar logic but without the technological alibi. They seek to recreate the sense of importance they experienced the first time they closed a big sale. They live chasing the chemical rush of feeling indispensable. They can't stop because stopping means confronting the emptiness they've been masking with frenetic activity. The difference is that some build real empires in the process.

The trap of contemporary entrepreneurship is that it sells escape while binding you tighter. It promises you'll be your own boss without mentioning that you'll be the most exploited employee you've ever had. Financial freedom while chaining you to metrics that dictate every decision. But it's also true that some people need those self-imposed chains to give their best.

For millennia, identity and function were one and the same. You were a blacksmith because your father was a blacksmith. Your worth was measured by how well you fulfilled a predefined role. Modern anxiety stems from having destroyed that coherence without replacing it with something equally stable. Now everyone must invent their own definition of success, which grants extraordinary freedom in exchange for constant uncertainty.

Money is a recent invention. Our brains are still wired to value social status and group belonging, not abstract figures in bank accounts. That's why social recognition generates more lasting satisfaction than financial rewards. That's why some prefer low-paying jobs at prestigious companies to high salaries in unglamorous sectors.

Frankl understood this in Auschwitz. Survival requires a project that transcends immediate survival. If your only reason for getting up is to accumulate more than you already have, you are building a prison with golden bars. Meaning is not bought, it is built, and that construction demands materials that the market does not sell.

I've witnessed the exact moment someone realizes their life plan was a scam. It happens when they reach the figure they've been chasing for years and feel only the automatic urge to double it. Some turn to drugs, others get divorced, a few have the clarity to stop and ask themselves what they were really looking for. The smartest ones rethink the game without leaving the board.

The system cracks when you realize you can redefine the rules. Success can be making your children laugh every night. It can be sleeping without medication. It can be contributing to something that will still work fifty years after you die. But it can also be earning enough money to fund those other versions of success without worrying about survival.

It took me far too long to understand that pursuing professional recognition was a sophisticated way of begging for parental approval. When I finally gave it up, I lost income but gained back Sundays. The trade-off was worth it, though it took me months to stop feeling like I was betraying some ambitious version of myself. Some people need that betrayal to grow.

Loyalty erodes because we confuse strategic flexibility with the right to systematic betrayal. When every relationship is evaluated quarterly, when gratitude is considered naiveté, when commitments have an expiration date, you build an efficient but fragile society. It works as long as the incentives are aligned.

The only filter that distinguishes genuine purpose from sophisticated distraction is time. If the teenager you were at fifteen would be proud of who you've become, and if your great-grandchild would have something to thank you for fifty years from now, you're on the right track. If both answers are no, you have a problem that no optimization strategy can solve.

Everything else is a variation on the same theme: how to live without wasting the only opportunity you have.