Price of meritocracy and struggle of Responsibility

I was shaving and i had this thought - many things around me are working, and working pretty good. Examples: 1. The razor. There are many razors, depends on price. I have this razor that is not cheapest but its still nothing fancy. It has moving head: it moves at the every curve of my face and every move of my wrist. Someone had to invent it, and this someone was pretty smart. Who constructed this particular Copy of Idea: some factory workers, badly payed and miserable. They are constructing copies and not inventing it, probably because they are not so smart. There are a lot of cheap, fine things we take for granted and that are working, and i believe there will be more of them - because we live in meritocracy. There are good things and its good. 2. On website of my soykafty uni in third-world country there is fine idea of course filiming. Some teacher is recording every course of subject and uploading it on website. I think some programmer also wrote custom media player working in browser and its buggy as fuarrrk. Its glitching, refusing to full-screen or refuse to show “episode” feature. Idea was fine and its good, but its working not so well and its bad for me cause it costs my time. Programming may be swell hobby, but as work its pretty responsible, maybe not as much as being doctor, but still… If you want to be “someone” you must to take some responsibility. 3. I was watching one of those meme viral video on youtube: video was about some bridge made in “modern” architectorial style. It was badly made and it falled on some people heads, who were driving underneath it, killing at least 6 people. Well, thats called responsible job. And now what about this guy who made it? He is bad because he is incompetent? He probably loses his job, maybe goes to jail, or he will never build another bridge in his life. Only because he was incompetent. Well, thats also good, we need safe bridges, you need to agree on it. And here is my question: How do you deal with those feelings? That no one cares about you, but only on quality of your contribution? There are many ways in which one could sin: he could rape or murder someone, but is there worse sin than being incompetent? And probably worst aspect of it: you cannot EVER confess this sin to someone. You meet some guy/girl, he/she is loser and you are loser, but you both are silent about it. There is always this constant need of being perfect. You live in society – you must adapt. You talk with people – you must adapt, and its important, that you do show your competency in some humble brag way. Try to talk with someone and mention to him you problems – he will listen to you with digusts on his face, in reaction to your “bitching and whining”. I am constantly depressed because of things like these, but only way to vent it is here, anonymous. Thank you, I guess that you made this awesome platform I could whine on, this is another proof to theory, that there is nothing more important in life than merit and will. And I am sorry for bad english, I am not native speaker.

From what I can get from this you lack self-confidence. Getting good is an option, simply get better at what you are doing and gain self confidence or even better attract some praise for your work. Getting better at a craft takes time and the last steps to mastery usually takes longer than all the time you spent making up to this point so don't be discouraged and be persistent. Finding/making someone around you more miserable than you are will be a boost to your self confidence as well.

>>10040 What a trite, silly little response.

>>10041 Yep but you have to admit he answered the question. He basically confirmed what OP said. Personally OP I disagree. Theres a lot of people including myself who will judge you and value you on beauty. And while the feeling of beauty is universal what evokes it is not. If you want to talk about beauty being functional or something sure, but im saying in your bridge analogy theres people who would rather the bridge be pretty then safe. To not be reductive, what my view on this would say is if his bridge failed and killed people but was beautiful id certainly make sure he doesnt design a bridge ALONE again. And I apply this to people as well, in fact im more interested in "useless" people. I feel like in a time where it seems like nobody can comprehend a better future, that whatever is right for us surely must be among the things nobody enjoys, likes, or sees any use for. So when I look at my friend whos an alcoholic working retail and prostitution on the side I see a future prophet. Im like khadija or something, just waiting for the right seemingly useless ugly person to confide in me so I can give them the confidence and safety to change the world.

>>10040 I think i meant: how its possible to hone your imperfect skills in world that is build on working things? How to treat complex world with other living beings as your own sandbox? You could say: "yes, but there are internships". Yes, and there are thousands of people for one intern. how am i supposed to show that i am better than them? Do i really need to be better than everyone? When everyone has 0 experience, things outside the craft are deciding factors. I read many stories, where some people barely know programming prior but got accepted to job because they scored high on logical/iq test. I was literally reading about some literal CHAD that spend 10 years on teaching people karate, and then he got programming job, because he has "experience in leadership" or other normal person soykaf. How am i supposed to compete in this world. when i got dealed cards so bad and i am genetic waste?

>>10039 >no one cares about you, but only on quality of your contribution? We are our contributions to the world. >>10043 That's not fundamentally different from the status quo, you just gauge merit differently. Everyone makes their own value claims based on different criteria to different degrees. Aesthetics, durability, price, etc. are all just factors to consider during evaluation.

Success shames the incompetent, anon. But thank god it does, otherwise nothing would prevent me from doing something dumb.

It's an interesting question and something a lot of people go through in life, this removal of abstractions. What are you when you remove all the other layers that makes others perceive you as you? I've been in various roles within society, from promising "this guy will go far" programmer to "this guy will suck your dick for a line of coke" junkie. I only leisurely sucked dicks though, i was just at the level of junkie where you would assume I'd do anything for another line. And being someone who can with little effort move within society but doesn't believe in it, as in, i don't see the value in the things i was supposed to find value in (grow within a company, get a nice house or car, raise a family, etc..), it's kinda tricky to find a reason to live. For the past few years i struggled in justifying my existence, I've had many traumatic experiences over the course of my life and last year i isolated myself from the last relationships i maintained, which triggered this ego death, this need to justify why do i live if i have absolutely nothing. No friends, no career, no family, and most of all no desire to do anything. Think about it, if you have no social connections anymore, no job outside the bare minimum necessary to survive, why live? I'm not trying to write a pretentious medium post or anything, I'm just trying to put you in the mindset i was in and i don't think i can convey the hopelessness of it, i was in this sort of coma for a few months and recently i decided to live again, and the justification i found isn't really that great, it's something i can barely explain.. I will try my best to sound rational. As people said in this thread, most people imply that the value we have is what we contribute to society, yeah? I also thought like that for a long time, but now i disagree for many reasons. The most important reason is that yes, your contribution to society makes you feel good, however, how real is this contribution when you're making stock broker software? Serving coffee? Cleaning a room? Buying and selling houses? Who is progressing? Do you really feel like you're contributing anything to society? Doesn't that only make sense when your progress is represented by the maintenance of the status quo? How abstracted away from reality are you, at what point are you contributing to society and at what point are you just masturbating yourself into an ethos that was fed into you by your environment and necessities? At what point are you doing what you believe in and at what point are you following a path that was laid for you, instead of walking your own? My problem as a member of society has always been that i didn't feel like any of it mattered, i never valued having high gravitas within society, being perceived as someone important, it just felt hollow and petty, same for wealth accumulation, it just..never did anything for me, you know? When i was really young i remember wishing to be really rich, but that died pretty quickly, and since then I've just kind of been living on automatic. I don't need a lot of money, and if the justification to go to work in the morning is "to make more money", then the answer is It doesn't matter if i stay home or not. After a few months in this coma, i kind of debugged myself into understanding what makes me feel good and what makes me feel empty, and I'm not sure I'll be able to convey my conclusions so put some effort into understanding it. We all have this value, right? You may call it honor, pride, whatever, there's this vision you have of yourself, this kind of compass that tells you whenever you're behaving in a way that makes you proud to yourself, makes you value yourself, and also tells you whenever you're disappointing yourself. Throughout life i was kind of living according to society's values, but they're not my values. Whenever i joined a relationship where i pretended to be something i wasn't, whenever i went to a social gathering by people i don't really care about, whenever i joined a company and pretended to believe in their values and hierarchies, i just felt less human, like i was a glorified meat bot, too tired to do anything when i get home, a powered down glorified meat bot. So all this bullsoykaf, all this "I'm changing the world by making money for some rich old fuarrrk, oh I'm living a true fuarrrking love story being in a relationship with this person who doesn't even fuarrrking know me", all this builds up. It's not that you can't be a loser, you can, i was a loser for years with all these mental breakdowns, i was objectively a loser, doing the bare minimum to pay the bills and nothing else. Yet i didn't feel like a loser, all this time, with all this depression, i never once felt like as much a loser as when i was working in a soykafty fuarrrking cubicle and dating people i didn't enjoy being around. I hope I'm being able to convey what i mean, it's not that i can't join a company and make tons of cash, right now i can join fuarrrking microsoft because i know my values, i know it's just a job, i have control, agency. If I'm joining a demanding job that pays well is because i have a specific, precise goal in mind, not because "that's what you're supposed to do". Before i never had agency, i was just buying into someone else's narrative and once i got home after work i didn't know what to do, i was a machine who went to sleep when not needed. Now it's different you know? I go to work because i need to, i need money to be social, to learn the things i want to learn, to experience life. Before i thought i needed the money but i didn't know what to do with it, it wasn't a necessity i was fulfilling, the work and the money was an end in itself, now they are just the means to achieve what i want. I don't need work, i need to live, and work allows me to live in this society, but if society fuarrrking breaks? I won't break, because i have this center that doesn't rely in the validation of this society. I don't need to be in a relationship, i just want to be around someone i enjoy being around too much, the relationship isn't the end goal, it's just the means to be around for longer. I don't need to study, i just wanna do cool projects, and the studies are a means to achieve that, because i like working on my projects and building the type of society i believe in, actually building it, actually organizing, actually doing what i can to change what i view as wrong. Can you see the difference? It's not that you can't be a loser, you can, but you can never feel like one, you can never betray that value within yourself, you can never disappoint yourself, you know? Maybe you really value building a family and buying stocks or something, as long as you're doing what you believe in it's all good. But if you feel like worthless trash, maybe whatever you're doing with your life isn't something you value, you're need to understand yourself more until your center is rock solid. This is one huge fuarrrking bible of text, but i hope it helps you in some way, Lain, may you have roses buddy.

Care for others and they'll care for you. I always make a point to let my friends know how much I value them for being in my life.

>>10045 >how am i supposed to show that i am better than them? Do i really need to be better than everyone? that kind of thing is mostly random chance and persuasion. Social skills are more highly sought after than technical skills.

>>12521 >as long as you're doing what you believe in it's all good. But if you feel like worthless trash, maybe whatever you're doing with your life isn't something you value This creates a very common dichotomy with "I'm a good person". People want to believe it but not act it for the clear costs that helping without profit brings. The mental gymnastics around it and what happens when someone points it out is always a sight to behold.

>>12525 well, being a good person in whose eyes? being a good person in the eyes of your peers is meaningless if you don't view yourself as equally good. For example, you can be a priest who rapes little boys. Others who don't know you will view you as a good, caring person. Would the priest view himself that way? This is where internal compass matters the most. You can be viewed as a good, upstanding citizen if you don't do drugs, go to work, raise a family and die. You might not feel good however, you might in fact feel barely human. Is it worth it? What does being viewed as a good person do for you or others besides status quo maintenance? Everyone should be as uniquely themselves as possible, this might manifest itself in a good upstanding accountant raising a family and dying, it might also manifest itself in a conscious suicide, as I've tried many times. As long as that person is aware of their individuality and making the conscious decision of expressing themselves that way. Being a good person is often euphemism for doing what you're told. Which again brings the dichotomy of being an uninformed edgy piece of soykaf, which is equally bad and as much doing as you're told as the other side, except by a different point of view that is equally not yours.

>12526 >being a good person in the eyes of your peers is meaningless Good reputation has real use -it is a necessary tool to exploit people. PR exists for that reason. Giving yourself a pat has no utility in comparison. That's why everyone tries to look good regardless of their inner values. The easiest way to get ahead is being comfortable with being a ruthless animal. Those who can't fall into the previously mentioned dichotomy where they try to lie to themselves as much as to others to maintain the good appearance while breaking everything that would qualify them as good. There's generally little talk about it but some of the biggest companies were build on continuously backstabbing business partners while somehow managing to uphold a good reputation.

>>12531 >The easiest way to get ahead Get ahead of what? Getting ahead to be the CEO of a company? then yeah i agree, but that's not what the post is about.

>>12534 Whatever you want to do it likely will require some form of limited resources and that requires beating the competition.

>>10039 I've been around for what seems to me like a long time, met loads of people and frankly so what. You breathe, eat and soykaf, good. You can use your brains and ponder upon the use of undecisive labor, nice. You are unaware that most minds already have stopped caring a little before the second step of enlightment, as physical functions are their primary focus, especially in a physical world shaped by simple symbols and references about commodified and STRONGLY ADVISED normal, everyday pleasures such as sex, eating and watching the latest trending series on netflix. And you'd be wrong if you think this triangle of leisure was invented by the romans. The mind of people are always predictable, but the path they use to reach their conclusions are always curious. Like mirrors, they reflect, so don't be surprised if they get all weirded out by the fact that you're a loser, they are not disgusted by the fact that you're a loser, they are totally at lost with what might happen to them if they were a loser. All in all, comfort yourself with a few people that you can be yourself with, the rest are just robots having nightmares that's all. This being said, don't try to contribute beyond anything that doesn't involve yourself in any way, especially in this closing era of cheap oil and failed democracies. The skills you have - use them. Don't let them be used.

>some factory workers, badly payed and miserable [manufactured this instance] Is that a fact? If I were a betting man, I'd bet a small odd prime number of weeks worth of my pocket money at fibonacci ratio odds (for) that mechanical robots did most if not all of that labor. >[engineer who built a bridge which failed with fatal consequence] probably loses his job, maybe goes to jail, or he will never build another bridge in his life. Only because he was incompetent. Is that also a fact? It is not impossible that the bridge failed due to factors outside the bridge, that nothing about the bridge caused a decrease in expectation (probability theory). It is not necessary nor beneficial to imprison or disemploy a person for his mistakes (this is suggestive of a vindictive society that cares more about hurting those that hurt them than preventing and correcting errors which may occur), it is sufficient to know that this person committed these mistakes (implying knowledge of the nature of the mistakes made, but I do not use this fact here), therefore it is likely that there is a higher chance of him committing mistakes than another person who has never yet committed a mistake, so his commitments ought to be inspected with greater care and mistakes which are found to be mitigated prior to further propagation of his committed. It would be more reasonable for him to be moved to a less responsible position, or for his pay to be reduced to account for, and in accord with, the greater care the others must take in inspecting his results and mitigating his errors before further propagation. Why were the mistakes propagated in the first place? Are there no checks and rechecks of everyone's work? If not then there is a great (and i do not think it is possible to overemphasize this) flaw with the very business which created the bridge, and if there were checks, then it is simultaneously the fault of all people responsible for checking and rechecking the work prior to propagating it. Nevertheless, it may be that the mistake was not due to any errors in the persons that the business did not foresee or did not insure. if it was foreseen but not insured, the business who hired him is at fault, if it was not foreseen but was foreseeable, the business who hired him is at fault, if it was unforeseeable, then nobody was at fault, except that those harmed by it ought to be reasonably compensated, and there ought to be contracts in place that ensure that this compensation occurs (e.g. insurance policies) and that help decide who is to pay for the compensation (insurance companies) >How do you deal with those feelings? That no one cares about you By not putting any great importance in having other people taking great pains thinking about me. >I am constantly depressed because of things like these No. Depression is a serious psychic disorder which is never caused by outside sources, though they may exacerbate the symptoms, and requires serious behavioral, cognitive, or pharmaceutical treatment. If you have depression, and you are unable to treat yourself using the means available to you (e.g. by learning about (including how to), and applying cognitive/behavioral therapy to yourself), get professional help. If you meant these things cause you to feel emotions associated with depression but that you do not have depression, then know that you and you alone are causing your emotions. ''You'' are the one perceiving the things in the world which ''you'' are attributing to these emotions, ''you alone'' are the one who is reacting in such a way that is causing (or letting happen, there is no essential difference) these emotions to exist. you are the only person who can control yourself. The main problem with meritocracy is when there is not universal safety net that anyone can unconditionally use so that they do not have to worry about their own survival. If there were such a safety net, then there would be no problem of unemployment, because unemployment would not be a problem. What about incentivizing people to to productive things? they'll still be incentivized because they can go to work without worrying about the safety net disappearing, and they will be compensated as usual for their work, and the safety net is not such a great place that people would be willing to hang out there for any great lengths of time if they could do otherwise. Remember that it's a bare minimum for survival. >> >Do you really feel like you're contributing anything to society? The mere fact that someone is paying for you to do it means he is either an idiot or they get some benefit from you doing it. I doubt any true idiots exist, so if you really pry at them to tell you what benefit they get from you, then you will find out either that they are an idiot, in which case they will find that out too (or you will need to point out the lack of benefit), or what the benefit is (unless they are keen on privacy, but you can still try to figure out how to find out how much they benefit from it). >if the justification to go to work in the morning is "to make more money" find some other purpose, go into art, mathematics, philosophy, >dating people i didn't enjoy being around stay single, then. >buying into someone else's narrative isn't the narrative of "i don't want to buy into someone else's narrative" someone else's narrative? >i have this center that doesn't rely in the validation of this society and everyone ought to have their own center, and that center ought to be absolutely their own, not influenced in any way by any other person. >one huge fuarrrking bible of text If it is not malapropos, I'd like to ask which bible. >>12522 >Care for others and they'll care for you not necessarily, but it helps >>12525 >Being a good person is often euphemism for doing what you're told Good people tend to confuse confuse being a good person and being a right person, the latter just means following the rules. >era of ... failed democracies NO! FALSE! WRONG! See, it doesn't matter whether the democracies have failed. Democracy itself, and all versions of democracy which we have tried so far, are flawed. no matter what democracy we try, it will be flawed. It is written.

>>12531 Or perhaps you could simply see no wrong in being, as you said, a "ruthless animal", rather than merely being comfortable. Let's put aside the nonsensical notions of "morality" and just recognize that whatever benefits us is that which should naturally be perceived as truly good. Other ideas of "good" are just brainwashing.

>>14161 the ego is the biggest spook of all friend.

>>14165 Can't say that I agree.

>>14166 spooky

>>14173 I am against the ideas of most everything listed in that picture, why did you use that one against me? I just don't have an issue with the ego. What I referred to as "good" just means whatever suits my purposes. Doesn't mean anything deeper than that to me.>>14173

>>14175 >being against all fabrications except the biggest fabrication of all

>>14176 I don't see it that way. If anything, the real fabrication is everything BUT my ego.

>>14186 objective? I just said you're wrong. Y'all motherfuckers need eris.