Prestige is Mug's Game

Don't sacrifice your life just to impress the person who disliked you the minute you two met.

The place I thought I was destined to enter. Photo by Brett Wharton on Unsplash

When I was young, I wanted nothing more than to be part of the elite. My father was one of Hong Kong’s first venture capitalists, and my mother was the daughter of an important Communist civil servant.

Before I was born, my father had pulled himself up by his bootstraps. He graduated top of his class from St Paul’s Coeducational School (in Hong Kong), won a King Edward’s Scholarship to Hong Kong University, and then spurned it to attend MIT. He did so because one of his science teachers had gone there. Having admired his teacher’s brilliance and clarity, he decided to disobey his own father’s recommendations and take the SS President Wilson to San Francisco. From there, he took a bus to Cambridge, Massachusetts. During a stop somewhere, he lost a suitcase full of his best tailored suits and ties. Nothing ever came for free, my father realized. But, undeterred, he continued his journey, eventually arrived on campus, and after briefly settling down, started his climb.

He and a couple of other Asian students shacked up in a dormitory, learned how to cook Chinese food, and studied like mad. One of the stories that I begged him to tell me again and again was about where he was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I still remember him telling me, almost nonchalantly, that when he and his group learned about the possibility of nuclear war (I can’t remember whether he had heard it on the radio or if someone had just barged into the room and mentioned it), one of his colleagues had immediately ducked and covered under the lunch table. As an aside, my father even told me about the time he passed the mandatory swim class and the French lessons he took. He was impressively well-rounded.

But when you’re a pudgy nine or ten-year-old who’s being confronted with all this, and meanwhile you’re just beginning to understand the severity of your Tourettes, and how unusual it feels not to understand mathematics instinctively, all you can ever think about is “How do I top my Dad?” Perhaps because I was anxious, I even asked him how expensive MIT was and whether he could afford to send me there to begin with. Sometime later, when it had become clear to both of us that my grades were not going to improve, I asked him whether it was possible for me to get into a prestigious university. He said, “Yes, but you need to excel at one thing.” My father then begged me to start writing essays to accompany the hundreds of photographs I had taken on the Canon 60D that he had asked my uncle to buy for me.

I didn’t understand his advice at the time; it only sank in once I watched a YouTube video of some SAT wizard effectively saying the same thing in more Millennial language: “You need to excel at one thing. Become so irreplaceable that they can’t ignore you!” (I’ve forgotten it, but it was something like that.) Even then, momentum towards conventional success was not forthcoming for me. Despite all my visits to a panoply of doctors, psychologists, therapists, tutors, special needs experts, and even politicians, nothing really worked. Neither they nor I were able to craft a role for me, much less find a path to mainstream recognition.

And so, as I got fatter, angrier, lazier, and more mentally ill, Dad and I would end up getting into the same arguments every single day, for years on end. I’d ask him loaded questions: “Why didn’t I succeed academically and socially?”; “Why did I fail at all the high schools I attended?”; “What’s keeping me from becoming a star pupil?”; “And why, Dad…did my Civics teacher outright tell the city caseworker that I was not fit to attend Beekman—and while I was in the room, no less?” Most of these arguments would end with me crying bucketloads of tears into the bolognese my father made just for me. He would almost always go on to reassure me that he still loved me and tell me that my venting was rational. “But why do you keep asking me these things?” he’d often say. Sometimes I would respond with something really stupid like, “You owe me,” only for him to go cold and reply, “I don’t owe you anything”. Looking back, the best thing that my father did in these situations was to expose the fact that I had two contradictory goals: “You want recognition, but you also want to do your own thing.” In the end, he would tell me to do my own thing, to explore my passions without trying to spend too much money doing so.

At last, when I gained admittance to a genuinely prestigious institution, Baruch College, my father was incredibly proud of me. Having spent the last few weeks venting and sobbing over a rejected application to Columbia University’s School of General Studies, I felt that I had secured from one of New York City’s finer public universities a rare vote of confidence: one that did not come from my previous support network. Victory was mine, mine alone. Nevertheless, even though my achievement felt nothing like a consolation prize, my father reacted to the news by saying, “Oh, good! You did it without my help!” To hear him say that, a couple of days after he had admitted there was no donation large enough to guarantee my acceptance, felt both unnerving and uplifting. In another world, I would have taken to Baruch like a fish to water and become a truly academic specimen.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. On my first day of getting there, I had a panic attack. The combination of an unfriendly environment and pandemic-induced anxiety had already made it impossible for me to function there. It was then that I finally accepted that my lifelong conditions would not be recognized, addressed, or cured by the people I wanted to impress. It took me another year or two to accept that writing a book and focusing on my health paid more dividends than trying to find the right special ed program. In March 2022, a few weeks after dropping out of yet another college program, I decided to call up my old writing teacher. The rest is history.

One of the pleasures of becoming a Jolly Heretic and getting involved in the radical right was meeting men and women who had similar challenges to mine. They, like me, were hungry to gain the approval of people and institutions that had made up their minds the minute they cast their eyes on us.

I met one man with a stellar resume, but who was hounded out of his university after his pseudonymous writings on race and IQ were maliciously leaked by a colleague. Another man was driven out of academia after committing one faux pas too many. He had refused to bend the knee, even as the institution tried its hardest to bend him. Another: a very capable acquaintance of mine, whom I’ve known since 2021, was embittered by the slow, harrowing process of being gradually unpersoned for writing and saying things that were suddenly “unacceptable”, despite never having been before.

I want to stress that these were not all atypical nerds. Many of them have chiseled physiques, winning personalities, fierce intellects, and an even fiercer thirst for the truth. One woman, let’s call her Anneka, was on the path to becoming Western Europe’s foremost expert on the psychology of behavioral change, were it not for a hostile work environment. She now helps people like me. Another man, let’s call him Ira, would almost definitely have been a provocative auteur director (had he held the correct Hollywood-approved opinions). He now makes films for up-and-coming right-wing stars. These new friends of mine spent years trying to please their betters, only to notice that the objects of their affection had no intention of reciprocating. If only we had all realized years earlier that chasing prestige wouldn’t lead anywhere, we would have saved ourselves from decades of misery.

I know that some of my readers are barely in their twenties but hunger to change the world through deep thinking, hard science, and provocative art. I know many of you want nothing more than to show your peers the work that came from your tears and sweat. The feeling of being recognized by great men and women, renowned universities, well-endowed charities, and dynamic companies is almost intoxicating. When you’re young, nothing feels more gratifying than seeing people you respect praise you and your accomplishments.

However, this euphoria is ephemeral. It does not lead to finer drawings or superior sentences. It does not make you whole. It almost certainly will not make you happier or more content in the long run. Chasing prestige is a mug’s game. Once you become addicted, you’ll blunt the sharp edges that made your output notable in the first place. And if you become reliant on the judgment of your desired peers, you will eventually compromise your art until it becomes nothing but gorgeous mush.

You are capable of achieving so much more than a Blue Plaque on your house and an award from Harvard. And once you realize that, you will change the world.