Cause for pause
In a city like San Francisco, it is easy to become jaded. It’s the most natural thing when you are surrounded by such competitive people at the top of their game trying to beat each other out of whatever it happens to be. A desirable job position, a desirable apartment in a desirable location, fame, power. Whatever it happens to be. The city is full of status symbols and people trying to acquire them. You would be led to believe this is human nature, that people who don’t act that way are stupid losers who couldn’t win if they tried, so they don’t even try. “Sad” is the term for those people, as it was explained to me by Er, a yuppie gentrifier at one point who moved to California from Oklahoma, no less, to pursue her idea of success.
To some extent, I resonated with Er. Being a kind of ambitious person myself (and I do mean person, since male and female brains are identical), I recently witnessed the phenomenon of well-connected loser myself and it was not pretty. Ka was a lowly, not very intelligent, but very well connected young laydee from N. Carolina, who walked her way into a certain position in the San Francisco office of our company for which she was only marginally qualified and in no way ready for. This annoyed me to no end, because I hate when people get things as a result of special favors while I have to work twice as hard for them. Part of that whole “life is not fair” cliche except it’s true and becomes visceral when you see it happening like that in front of your face. As it turned out, Ka fell flat on her face and couldn’t perform to the specifications of the job, despite getting a hand up and being connected to the big boss. Innocence lost, dreams shattered, but her dreams weren’t realistic or fair to begin with and San Francisco “ate her alive.” There was some truth to what Er used to say. It’s a dog eat dog world. If you want to make it, you have to be sneaky, political, ruthless. You can’t just do your version of “doing a good job” and expect others will agree. No. You have to do your best, befriend the right people in secret, and know that even your best sometimes won’t be good enough in that environment.
This is what I believed, I would say, at least for the last 18 years. Whenever I met someone nice who did the right thing, inevitably they were not successful. They lived with their parents or were unemployed or smoked pot, lived off the kindness of other people. Or they hopped from one low-paid job to another. We all know where this story leads, and it’s not wealth. It’s a modest life in a modest city rocking on an armchair. And whenever I met someone successful, married to someone where they were both making $200k to $300k (money attracts money), living in a $1M+ house (at least!), often with kids, you know the rest. These people were always mean, ruthless, tribal, exploitative bullies. When you see the same pattern thousands of times with no antithesis, you kind of have to believe that’s how things are.
However, today I saw something, or rather someone, that challenged this belief. It was Me’s LinkedIn photo. I would say I had no expectations about what Me looked like. After all, we had only ever communicated by phone. Unlike many people at work, she did not have her profile photo linked to her Outlook or Communcator. There was no way to tell what race she was, whether she had a disability. Some things you could reasonably guess: she was likely recently out of college, moved to Seattle from the Midwest. She seemed as timid and unsure of herself as any other analyst. Our company tends to be very good about keeping people busy at all levels, so the fact that she had time to be added to my client made me suspicious. How did she have all this availability? What is wrong with her? Why didn’t people want to work with her? It must have been prejudice against disabled people, I decided. She must have been in a wheelchair or only has one arm so people are afraid to work with her. Yet in the year we worked together so far by phone and email, she seemed perfectly fine and didn’t have any noticeable impediments.
Being on the way out of this department, I finally could not contain my curiosity any longer. I must know who is this Me and what she looks like. I told myself, “if she is in a wheelchair, I don’t care. I’m only going to be working with her only another two months or so, so I won’t let it color my perception of her.” With that mindset, I got to work. Facebook turned up a girl around the right age with the largest, longest, shiniest forehead I have ever seen. She even had some photos of Seattle’s Public Market. That must be it, I thought. It’s her long and shiny forehead why people avoided working with her.
But upon further inspection, there were an awful lot of University of Arizona photos. She’s not the one. LinkedIn was next and there I found her pretty quickly. It was there that I saw her photo.
A young, idealistic girl in her early to mid 20s, with wavy hair and geometric pendant earrings in the shape of stylized icicles. She looked like someone in their senior year of college, or perhaps had just graduated. What struck me about her photo is the thorough sense of goodness and well-wishing that emanated from her facial expression. There was innocence and a complete LACK of envy, sabotage, glint of evil, that you would see in everyone else’s LinkedIn photo. Everyone is different but it was always there, a sneer, a hint of ridicule, a slightly concealed sense of superiority. Even getting through college, before even starting their first job, people generally lost their innocence and youthful idealism and took on some element of jadedness. And yet there it was Me’s photo that was completely devoid of it. She projected only goodness, innocence and benevolence. It was so rare that I had to stop for a moment and try to wrap my mind around it.
Now, I don’t think it’s my role to rid Me of her innocence and naïveté, to educate her to the true nature of the world and people’s deceptiveness and underhandedness. She may come to those conclusions herself, and maybe she won’t. Maybe she will remain that innocent and pure her whole life. If she does, it will be a rare and precious occurrence indeed.
To some extent, I resonated with Er. Being a kind of ambitious person myself (and I do mean person, since male and female brains are identical), I recently witnessed the phenomenon of well-connected loser myself and it was not pretty. Ka was a lowly, not very intelligent, but very well connected young laydee from N. Carolina, who walked her way into a certain position in the San Francisco office of our company for which she was only marginally qualified and in no way ready for. This annoyed me to no end, because I hate when people get things as a result of special favors while I have to work twice as hard for them. Part of that whole “life is not fair” cliche except it’s true and becomes visceral when you see it happening like that in front of your face. As it turned out, Ka fell flat on her face and couldn’t perform to the specifications of the job, despite getting a hand up and being connected to the big boss. Innocence lost, dreams shattered, but her dreams weren’t realistic or fair to begin with and San Francisco “ate her alive.” There was some truth to what Er used to say. It’s a dog eat dog world. If you want to make it, you have to be sneaky, political, ruthless. You can’t just do your version of “doing a good job” and expect others will agree. No. You have to do your best, befriend the right people in secret, and know that even your best sometimes won’t be good enough in that environment.
This is what I believed, I would say, at least for the last 18 years. Whenever I met someone nice who did the right thing, inevitably they were not successful. They lived with their parents or were unemployed or smoked pot, lived off the kindness of other people. Or they hopped from one low-paid job to another. We all know where this story leads, and it’s not wealth. It’s a modest life in a modest city rocking on an armchair. And whenever I met someone successful, married to someone where they were both making $200k to $300k (money attracts money), living in a $1M+ house (at least!), often with kids, you know the rest. These people were always mean, ruthless, tribal, exploitative bullies. When you see the same pattern thousands of times with no antithesis, you kind of have to believe that’s how things are.
However, today I saw something, or rather someone, that challenged this belief. It was Me’s LinkedIn photo. I would say I had no expectations about what Me looked like. After all, we had only ever communicated by phone. Unlike many people at work, she did not have her profile photo linked to her Outlook or Communcator. There was no way to tell what race she was, whether she had a disability. Some things you could reasonably guess: she was likely recently out of college, moved to Seattle from the Midwest. She seemed as timid and unsure of herself as any other analyst. Our company tends to be very good about keeping people busy at all levels, so the fact that she had time to be added to my client made me suspicious. How did she have all this availability? What is wrong with her? Why didn’t people want to work with her? It must have been prejudice against disabled people, I decided. She must have been in a wheelchair or only has one arm so people are afraid to work with her. Yet in the year we worked together so far by phone and email, she seemed perfectly fine and didn’t have any noticeable impediments.
Being on the way out of this department, I finally could not contain my curiosity any longer. I must know who is this Me and what she looks like. I told myself, “if she is in a wheelchair, I don’t care. I’m only going to be working with her only another two months or so, so I won’t let it color my perception of her.” With that mindset, I got to work. Facebook turned up a girl around the right age with the largest, longest, shiniest forehead I have ever seen. She even had some photos of Seattle’s Public Market. That must be it, I thought. It’s her long and shiny forehead why people avoided working with her.
But upon further inspection, there were an awful lot of University of Arizona photos. She’s not the one. LinkedIn was next and there I found her pretty quickly. It was there that I saw her photo.
A young, idealistic girl in her early to mid 20s, with wavy hair and geometric pendant earrings in the shape of stylized icicles. She looked like someone in their senior year of college, or perhaps had just graduated. What struck me about her photo is the thorough sense of goodness and well-wishing that emanated from her facial expression. There was innocence and a complete LACK of envy, sabotage, glint of evil, that you would see in everyone else’s LinkedIn photo. Everyone is different but it was always there, a sneer, a hint of ridicule, a slightly concealed sense of superiority. Even getting through college, before even starting their first job, people generally lost their innocence and youthful idealism and took on some element of jadedness. And yet there it was Me’s photo that was completely devoid of it. She projected only goodness, innocence and benevolence. It was so rare that I had to stop for a moment and try to wrap my mind around it.
Now, I don’t think it’s my role to rid Me of her innocence and naïveté, to educate her to the true nature of the world and people’s deceptiveness and underhandedness. She may come to those conclusions herself, and maybe she won’t. Maybe she will remain that innocent and pure her whole life. If she does, it will be a rare and precious occurrence indeed.