To be, rather than to seem

Wherever you are right now stop for a moment, look at a random person, and judge them. What’s their income? Are they more/less intelligent than you? Are they a good parent? Partner? Have they contributed more to society than you have?

You probably don’t like how easy that was but I bet 100% of you had a gut feeling (right or wrong) in the first second. That assignment isn’t hard because we have ancient machinery built into our brains that excels at making these quick, intuitive, judgements about others. Evolutionary biologists overwhelmingly agree that social animals live in hierarchies and being able to peg one’s relative position in that hierarchy is essential; both to each individual and the collective health of the group. You don’t have to like the fact that we live in self imposed social hierarchies but they affect your life as much if not more than gravity.

Old Hardware

This ranking hardware is outdated, it’s really old — like Commodore 64 powered by a stationary bicycle old. It relies on the most basic of signals to make it rankings. This worked well in a simple world where the strongest men looked the strongest, and the most fertile women looked the most fertile. In today’s world our positions in social hierarchies have much less to do with how we look and much more to do with what we’re capable of doing intellectually and socially.

Luckily we’ve found ways to work around these limitations. Long conversations, formal interviews, reference checks, and real world tests help us pick out the real from the fake. Unfortunately our old brain hardware hasn’t caught up. It can’t make reference calls or determine how much bullshit is on someone’s resume or social networks in an instant…that takes hours, sometimes weeks to assess.

So instead of running every stranger we meet through the proper rigor, most of us conflate the value of the ancient signals with our more modern ones.

This opens the door to ‘faking it’. If you can find ways to emit the proper signals you can hack someone else’s brain and make yourself appear higher in status than you actually are. This is easier than ever today because of how complex the world has become.

• Employment laws prevent most companies / managers from giving a hiring manager negative information. This means all on-the-record reference calls are filtered to show only the best (or completely fabricated) account of a person
• Working out for 1 hour a day to develop a good body will make strangers treat you differently. Don’t believe me? Try it.
• Social media makes it easy to filter your life so all people see are the good/impressive moments.
• It’s orders of magnitude easier to speak intelligently about how you would do a modern workplace assignment than to actually do it.
• Confidence is transitive and compartmental at a time when there are more arenas to succeed in than ever. This means someone can present with genuine confidence they gained from excelling at a completely unrelated task. Star athletes may be pretty confident but are they good at accounting, or dating, or anything else you might ask them to do?
• It’s easier than ever to acquire nice cloths and convincing fake luxury goods at an affordable price.
• The incentives/revenue models in media are completely broken. You can get articles written that paint you or your company in any light you wish.
• We’ve all become hyper aware of the signals we present and how other people will perceive them and we act accordingly.

Is this ok?

I don’t care. I believe morality should be individual struggle so I’ll pass no judgment over whether this sort of thing is right or wrong. Seriously, signal away. One thing is for sure: it’s a lot easier to seem than to be. And since society renders the social rewards of higher status on those who appear to deserve them, why wouldn’t you? That’s the reality of the world we live in. Walk into any networking event or nightclub and you’ll find a dozen people who have propped themselves up and are living off of this hacked goodwill...and little else.

Growth (if you’re into that)

If you want to grow that means that over time you want to BEcome more. It means you want your identity to be more real than made up or desired. It means you want to realize your potential and get out of your comfort zone. If you always want to be growing than you must accept that you will always be unhappy with where you are.

Hacking the system provides a short term win, it nulls the pain of not being there yet. It helps you avoid thinking about the work you need to get busy doing reforming your life. It’s like offering the child that is your brain a piece of candy if he accomplishes something and then giving him the whole cookie jar before he even starts.

Even worse, psychologists have proved that for the most part we come to embody an identity and status in alignment with how others treat us. This is why people who can’t admit failure both privately and publicly rarely improve — they deny themselves the growth opportunity of hitting rock bottom. The primitive parts of your brain and its reward centers don’t care if you’ve genuinely earned admiration of those around you, they just release dopamine to reinforce the whatever behaviors it has linked to those social benefits.

That’s the cost of faking it, you don’t pay it right away, but over time the debt accumulates. Every time you fake it you’re taking out a mortgage on your future self. That line of credit is far from infinite so be as careful with it as you are with a credit card.

This world is complex which means it’s easier to hack status than ever. But if you want to grow, don’t do it. Don’t deny yourself the benevolent chisel of reality. One of the most common motifs in mythology is the rebirth of the hero. That ideal has co-evolved independently in every culture on Earth because it works: facing hardships head on renews your spirit and makes you better. If you’re running a company or just trying to improve your life a commitment to being real will set you apart in our modern world and help you become what you aspire to be faster than anyone around you.

esse quam videri
to be, rather than to seem