is the most self-confident moral system in the world today. It’s so engrossing and seems so natural that we’re not even aware of how it encourages a certain economic vocabulary about noneconomic things. Words change their meaning. “Character” is no longer a moral quality oriented around love, service, and care, but a set of workplace traits organized around grit, productivity, and self-discipline. The meritocracy defines “community” as a mass of talented individuals competing with one another. It organizes society into an endless set of outer and inner rings, with high achievers at the Davos center and everybody else arrayed across the wider rings toward the edge. While it pretends not to, it subliminally sends the message that those who are smarter and more accomplished are actually worth more than those who are not.
The meritocracy’s soul-flattening influence is survivable if you have your own competing moral system that exists in you alongside it, but if you have no competing value system, the meritocracy swallows you whole. You lose your sense of agency, because the rungs of the professional ladder determine your schedule and life course. The meritocracy gives you brands to attach to—your prestigious school, your nice job title—which work well as status markers and seem to replace the urgent need to find out who you are. Work, the poet David Whyte writes, “is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself.”
Journalist Lisa Miller describes an “ambition collision” she saw in her peers, mostly young women of the professional set. These are the opportunity seizers, she writes, the list makers, the ascendant females weaned on Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, who delayed marriage and children because they were driven to do big things and run big things.
But at a certain age, Miller writes, they’ve “lost it, like a child losing grasp of a helium balloon. Grief-stricken, they are baffled too.” As one woman told Miller, “There’s no vision.” Or, as another put it, there’s “nothing solid.” They fantasize about quitting their jobs and moving home to Michigan, or having kids merely as an excuse to drop out of the rat race. “They murmur about purpose, about the concrete satisfactions of baking a loaf of bread or watching a garden grow.” They stay put, diligently working, “waiting for something—anything—to reignite them, to convince them that their wanting hasn’t abandoned them for good.”
Miller portrays this as a female problem, arising from society’s screwed-up attitudes about women and work. But I notice many men also have a sensation that they are under-living their lives. Centuries ago there was a common word for what these people are going through: acedia.
This word is used much less frequently today, which is peculiar since the state it describes is so common. Acedia is the quieting of passion. It is a lack of care. It is living a life that doesn’t arouse your strong passions and therefore instills a sluggishness of the soul, like an oven set on warm. The person living in acedia may have a job and a family, but he is not entirely grabbed by his own life. His heart is over there, but his life is over here.
Desire makes you adhesive. Desire pushes you to get close—to the person, job, or town you love. But lack of desire makes you detached, and instills in you over time an attitude of emotional avoidance, a phony nonchalance. In short, the meritocracy encourages you to drift into a life that society loves but which you don’t. It’s impossible to feel wholehearted.
A person who tries to treat life as if it were an extension of school often becomes what the Danish novelist Matias Dalsgaard calls an “insecure overachiever”: “Such a person must have no stable or solid foundation to build upon, and yet nonetheless tries to build his way out of his problem. It’s an impossible situation. You can’t compensate for having a foundation made of quicksand by building a new story on top. But this person takes no notice and hopes that the problem down in the foundation won’t be found out if only the construction work on the top keeps going.”
The problem with pragmatism, as they say, is that it doesn’t work. The insecure overachiever never fully wills anything and thus is never fully satisfied. His brain is moving and his status is rising, but his heart and soul are never fully engaged.
When you have nothing but your identity and job title to rest on, then you find yourself constantly comparing yourself