Bureaucracies of gifted children
The beauty about being retarded, as it turns out, is that you’ve learned grit, which is something that seems nearly impossible for the gifted to learn.
You are being ruled over by gifted children, and they’re still as infuriating as they were in school.
Across any organization - whether governmental, corporate, or cultural - the people who make decisions are former gifted children, and it’s as bad as it sounds. The people who are directly or indirectly making policy decisions are, almost without exception, people who were formerly special.
Back in college, I had an entire friend group of gifted children. They were smart, had been told so, and because we still live in a nominal meritocracy, they landed excellent jobs right out of college. They were very serious people. They were very Mature.
I also had a bevy of friends who, to put it politely, were dysfunctional and immature kids who were failing out of classes, drank too much, and it was often a coin toss whether or not their cars would even start tomorrow morning. Our jokes were off-color. We were self-deprecatingly insecure about our retardedness.
The problem is that, 15 years later, the gifted children are still in those same jobs. And an excellent job for a 22 year old is not an excellent job for a 37 year old.
The dysfunctional retards now run their own thing, made hundreds of thousands off Bitcoin, own a few properties, have a family and kids, and don’t have to fill out requests for vacation.
The arc of the gifted child
Simply by benefits of IQ, the smart kid has it easy. They score well on tests, they’re precocious, they interact well with adults, and they probably do things like chess club or debate club. They take a white collar education track, they probably get a scholarship and into a good college, and almost without fail land a much better job right after graduation than any of the normal (or dumb) kids.
Of course you’d want these folks running your institutions, right? As it turns out, wrong.
The beginning of life is easy compared to the middle of life. When you win by default, you’re kind of shuttled along a fast track to mediocrity. There’s a lot of on-paper qualification, but it turns out that is not all that is required. You also have to have grit and determination and creativity. Developing this requires some level of overcoming adversity, which is hard to acquire if you’re the teacher’s pet.
At some point the giftedness is no longer a benefit, but a seagull hung around your neck. If you’re basing everything on qualifications and intelligence, the only way up is within highly structured organizations where you get promoted based on checking the right boxes and showing up on time.
The gifted children end up in governmental or academic roles. The sorts of bushy-tailed, wide-eyed people that “write policy” or “work in development” and “community activism” and take home a paycheck that increases by a 4% annually for the rest of their lives.
They do not start companies, because the statistical failure rate is so high. They do not go into blue collar work, because that is work. They don’t do anything unorthodox at all, really, because the system has worked so well for them that there’s no point in changing anything. They will probably accumulate certifications and degrees and eventually become a middle manager with various academic suffixes appended to their LinkedIn profile.
Near the end of their career, they work until the pension hits, and then they retire, which allows them to dedicate more time to activism. They find a few nonprofit or government boards to sit on, which lets them ban plastic straws and work to ensure that the local wolf population has been restocked.
The arc of the retard
I was not a gifted child. I was smart, but I was also retarded and weird. Right out of college, this was a huge problem. I couldn’t get a good job because I was not plugged in. I wasn’t very serious. I was too strange and angry.
The outcasts and misfits never fit in well in school. One professor (who actively hated me and my retard club) told me I was “mercenary” because I had three part-time jobs.
(Me and one of my dysfunctional friends splattered his car with eggs and Sharpied his cell number in every single public bathroom stall on campus. He had to change his number. I only admit this because I believe it is past the statute of limitations).
It’s pretty amazing what a villain like that can do to a guy, especially when you’re 21 and the only thing you have to your name is about $400 in damp twenties. What I lacked in GPA I gained in total disdain and a chip on my shoulder.
A lot of my other weird friends had the same path. We could only land the crappiest of jobs for years. But eventually it ate at us enough that after five or ten years, we started taking risks that the gifted child would never entertain. We started taking stands that the gifted child thought heretical. We started bucking the system, which somehow allows you to find cracks in the system that are wide open for the taking.
The trajectory of the gifted child is accomplishment > high status > stasis. The trajectory of the socially retarded is struggle > pain > achievement.
For the entire first decade of the retard’s career, we suffered under a bureaucracy of gifted children who did things right. In the second decade, it begins to flip. In the third decade, the gifted children work for the retards.
Simply because constant adversity creates chips on your shoulder, and eventually the doggedness wins out.
The gifted children still cause us pain. Their HR policies and progressive taxes and socially responsible behavior grinds our gears. They do not even like that we call ourselves retarded.
The glimmer of hope that the retarded have, though, is that the gifted children have no idea how angry they have made us. They are still very serious and mature. The retarded are still very unserious and immature. The gifted do not understand, and won’t.
If you’re retarded, you can likely commiserate with me.
The beauty about being retarded, as it turns out, is that you’ve learned grit, which is something that seems nearly impossible for the gifted to learn.
You just have to stick it out.
Then, eventually, you can put them on one of their very own Performance Improvement Plans.