Why it's so hard to believe in your own power
Happy holiday season friends! Welcome back to Productivity, Without Privilege. Are you into the vibe of the season yet? Or maybe this time of year is difficult for you, as it is for many of us out here. Regardless of what the season means to you, I hope it brings you light, love, and hopefully a little peace.
And yes, speaking of the holidays, now’s a great time to pick up a copy of Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized, which, despite what Google’s search results screwed up to say a few weeks ago, is by me, Alan Henry, not a civil war author named John Jakes. And no, no amount of reporting has gotten them to fix it. Might be time to spin up a story about this for WIRED. We’ll see. But in the meantime, grab a copy! I think Amazon even has them half-off, or check your local bookstore or use Bookshop instead to support indies! 'Tis the season.
This week I want to break down something that I think we all feel sometimes: Why is it so hard to hear that we deserve to be here, especially people in marginalized groups?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, for a couple of reasons. Spoiler for both of them, they’re both programming we all, as individuals, need to get away from in our own heads first, and then actively work to help others out of.
The first one is the constant sense of personal imposter syndrome that many of us in marginalized communities have whenever we accomplish something: we’re too afraid to be proud of ourselves, worrying (often rightfully) that someone with a more privileged background is waiting around the corner to cut us down to size, or even more personally, we live with the understanding that for every good thing, something bad may be coming for us next, so we try not to get a big head about our accomplishments.
The second one is a little more malicious: it’s the process of constantly questioning whether we’re doing well, doing enough, or heading in the right direction with our lives and careers. That call often comes from inside the house, with us looking over our lot in life and wondering whether it’s close or far from where we wish we were, wishing and wanting things to be different for us. Then other times it’s external pressures, with productivity and hustle culture eager to make you forget why you’re working in the first place in exchange for a hollow sense of control, and the delusion that you’re getting lots done when what you’re really doing is spinning your wheels on someone else’s behalf.
So let’s start with the first one. The call, as they say, is coming from inside the house on this one. When I worked at The New York Times, I could see the class difference between me and my colleagues on a daily basis. The racial differences and body type differences were also at play, for sure, but a lot of it just came down to something I discussed in Seen, Heard, and Paid with the help of some of the experts I spoke to, specifically both Ruchika Tulshyan, author of Inclusivity on Purpose, and Megan Dunbar, CEO of Conscious Company Media, both mentioned to me that one issue with leadership and wanting to see yourself in positions of authority is that socially we’re programmed to consider certain kinds of people as “leaders.”
This is an exercise I do in a number of my talks and lectures: picture a hypothetical leader in your head. Maybe they’re a CEO, or a VP at a powerful company. Without Googling or looking the person up, think about what the CEO of a company you’re familiar with, let’s say your car insurance company or the company that makes your favorite brand of body wash looks like. If you’re like most people, you probably instantly pictured a middle-aged white man, probably of moderate height (at least six feet) and of average-to-thin/sporty build. Maybe you corrected yourself and thought of an executive that you’ve read about who’s also a member of a marginalized group. Maybe you thought about the only female CEO you know, or the only Black or Asian executive you’ve read about that one time. But all of that underscores the problem.
In a world where “CEO” equals people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, there’s no room in our collective imagination for a little Asian girl in a wheelchair to see herself as a corporate executive at any time in her life, not to mention rightfully and meritfully climbing the ladder of her preferred field to a position of leadership. We just don’t see leaders that look like her.
So of course she’s not going to think she deserves to be in a position of leadership or authority when she does earn one: she doesn’t have anyone to look at to reinforce the notion that she deserves to be in the space she’s in. She has to find that encouragement and reinforcement internally, intrinsically, rather than relying on it from outside as many privileged folks do, even over choruses shouting about the leader’s failure to lead, in ways both large and small (eg, Elon Musk.)
This goes further than just a role model conversation, although role models are important. This speaks to the constant reminder that when you do obtain positions of authority, seniority, or really, any position at all, you’re less likely to see people like you that understand your lived experiences. That compounds those issues of marginalization, since the more senior you become, the fewer people you have to support you.
That’s why community is so important. I’ve talked about this before, so I won’t go all the way into it again, but it’s critical that you have support structures of people who understand your background and your lived experiences, even if they differ from yours, and are committed to supporting you and lifting you up—as you should be committed to doing the same for them. It makes all the difference.
So let’s move on to the second one then. First of all, let’s take a look at a particularly awful tweet that I had the dissatisfaction of seeing cross my timeline recently:
I just need you all to know and understand exactly how much effort it took me not to quote-tweet this guy and say something to the effect of “no, my ancestors died so YOU can do that, yours just owned mine so they could do it too,” but I a: didn’t want to engage directly, and b: I felt like this is a better place to break down some of this kind of thinking.
So I’ll save you digging up the guy’s account: he’s a standard misogynist PUA (pick-up artist) type of tweeter who rails against women existing and empowering themselves while simultaneously crowing about how a lack of masculinity is leading to the decline of civilization but of course, he knows the way to a brighter future and that’s where the grift begins, both intellectually and, mostly likely, economically. But this grift, the “hustle and spend every waking moment being your best possible you” mindset is part of the problem, as tempting as it may be to believe it. I’ll save a deeper dive for another newsletter, but the bottom line is that hustle is useless, masturbatory time-wasting unless you know clearly what you’re hustling for, why you’re hustling for it, and what the end goal is for you.
For some people, especially the grifters, the point of hustling is to keep hustling. To feel productive and feel like you’re doing a lot of important things, and to always have something new and interesting to talk about should someone ask. For those folks, the goal of hustle culture is usually to impress people at parties and sell books without actually having to do anything of importance. For others, hustle is what they’ve been convinced or conditioned to do, to pointlessly grind and keep working, whether it’s just as a means to make ends meet or because they believe it’s the path to career, personal, or financial success. Those are the folks I care about: the ones spinning their wheels without knowing whether the work they’re doing actually matters, even to them. Maybe that sounds like you.
So take my word for it: your ancestors were human beings just like you are, and they don’t deserve any particular reverence or course change in your life simply by virtue of having existed. Sure, if you align with the ideals of the people in your family and family history, you can certainly try to make sure you align with them. I often ask myself if my mother, who passed away a decade ago, would be proud of me if she saw me now, but I know the answer to that is yes. She’d be proud to see me happy and thriving, with a roof over my head and food to eat, and my needs seen to—what I did to see to those needs is far less important.
My ancestors, Will, didn’t die for any particular reason other than that someone thought they were expendable commodities. My ancestors, Will, would be thrilled that I’m alive, and I’m free, and I’m beholden to no one for my future except myself, and that I had the power to do work that I choose in order to survive, instead of taking whatever is available to me, not-so-kindly granted by people like you. My ancestors, Will, and likely yours, died so you can have moments of complacency as well as moments of triumph and tragedy. They died so we could live the lives we choose, without being dictated to by people who have no stake in our lives, no desire for our well-being, and certainly don’t have our best interests at heart.
This is absolutely why you, my dear reader, deserve rest and mediocrity as much as you deserve triumph and glory. You deserve as many moments of happiness as you can get, and that means both moments where you achieve your goals, and moments where you have no goals other than to have a great day, be well-rested, and do literally nothing, for no one but yourself. And if that means playing video games, getting high, or masturbating (or all three, as Will so kindly suggests,) that’s what it means. Stare at the sky and let the passing clouds inspire you. Play your favorite games and be glad you worked hard enough to have the time and money to do so. Take your vacations and be decidedly unproductive.
Do it: be your ancestors’ wildest dreams.
[ Worth Reading ]
Don’t Look Away, by Dave Pell: It shouldn’t surprise anyone reading this that I go just as hard on antisemitism as I do on anti-blackness or misogyny, and the rising wave of antisemitism in America, especially right now, is something we all need to pay attention to. And make no mistake that this is coming at the same time as hate attacks against LGBTQ folks are also at an all-time high: two hatreds that are old to America, and two hatreds that often go under-reported and overlooked because. Dave Pell took time out of his excellent newsletter, NextDraft, to explain why this moment is so important, and why we all need to show some resolve in standing against it.
SFPD authorized to kill suspects using robots in draft policy, by Will Jarrett: This is a bit of a local story, but it’s worth keeping an eye on since what one police department gets away with, others will immediately try. I expect the LAPD and NYPD to follow suit on this immediately. So for now, the robots don’t get guns, but they DO get explosives of some type, which…is…supposed to be better. Either way, we’re super close to blaming robots for killing unarmed Black people, so get ready for that.
You Should Be Using More Lube, by Jaina Grey: I figured we could all use a little levity here, and this rave by my colleague and friend Jaina Grey, product reviewer at WIRED, makes an excellent point. You read the headline, you don’t need me to elaborate, but you do need to read what Jaina has to say about it, and why so many people giggle and are shy about the topic. Spoiler: it’s misogyny all the way down, so fix that.
[ See You, Space Cowboy ]
This is around the time of year when Pocket reveals its annual collections, some of the best reads and features from around the internet. This year the collection is great, and there are some incredible predictions for what else we’ll see next year when it comes to the stories that we’ll still be talking about, the big ideas that made an impact on us this year, and the narratives that truly changed the way we think about certain topics and issues this year.
Go check out the whole list, and then dive into the stories that lived in our heads rent-free this year, and even the stories that defined 2022. If you have a favorite or even a story you loved that’s not in the collections, let me know. I’d be curious to check it out. Just reply to this message, the way you would if you wanted to write me back. That’s what you’re doing, anyway. I’ll see you back here in two.