You go to the grocery store to buy some groceries and you are checked out by the cashier that everyone loves to hate. They can’t even manage to scan every item in your basket without fucking up at least four times; some things are missed, others are double-billed, and when one tiny item refuses to scan, the cashier passes it over and over and over the tiny window without ever adjusting the distance between the item and the scanner or the speed with which they move it, as though sheer repetition is going to make it work right. When the total comes it’s $20.01 and you give them a $50 and a penny and they give you back your penny and a $1 bill. You tell them you gave them a $50 and they say no, you gave them a $30. You respond to this by saying that (a) there is no $30 bill and (b) even if there was, the change from a “$30” would not be $1.01. They disbelieve you and don’t know how to open the register anyway, so they call the manager over the intercom, but they do it in such a jumble of slurred words and colloquialism that you’ll be surprised if the manager ever turns up. When the manager finally does, they accept at face value their employee’s story and ask you why, if you gave them a $30, they should give you more change than $1.01, and they’re suspicious that you didn’t just use your credit card, since everybody pays with credit cards anyway these days.

At a loss for words, you kill yourself with a shard from the jar of pickles that you shatter on the floor in bewildered frustration.

—

I have had two “work opportunities” in as many days with the professional academic “research organization” versions of the characters in this story. I have never spent so many hours in so few days being embarrassed for other people and organizations. I want the money, I really do, but I’m not willing to be employed by a faded, Mexican plastic garden gnome boss and the G.I. Joe action figures they’ve seen fit to bring in as my would-be co-workers.

Not if my name is to be on the academic product that results.

It all makes me realize just why so many people outside the world of graduate degrees and graduate research make fun of the idiot eggheads with Ph.D. degrees. A whole shitload of them need a grant, a board, and a set of working draft development briefs just to wipe their ass. Another significant chunk of them think they’re wiping their ass but are shocked when they scratch half of their face off with sandpaper instead.

It’s shameful.

I wonder if academics in, for example, the E.U. are this way as well, or if it’s just one more indication that the United States is becoming a third world country with third-rate labor, education, and self-awareness, top to bottom.

that I’m not doing it right. I think there are any number of ways to approach this problem, but the easiest is probably to draw a little diagram of a spectrum:

Time spent from time available:

Capability <---------------------> Publicity

The thing about life is that (from a certain metaphysical perspective) it’s made of time—time that is finite. Spend it on one thing, in other words, and you can’t spend it on another.

The other thing about life is that we live it in an incredibly competitive and crowded world in which literally billions of people are vying for attention and opportunity and food and energy all the time, and in which most will not live comfortably.

And that’s the crux of the problem. Because there’s such competition for opportunity, opportunities tend to go to those that have the largest social opportunity structues—that are the most “out there,” in other words; that nurture the strongest kind of continuous “publicity.” They talk and propose and “create” (regardless of the value of such creations) endlessly, almost unable to help their ceaseless and inane chatter and sociality, and their ebullient social networks and solidary connections are the stuff of tsunamis more than social gatherings.

However, when time is spent on publicity, it isn’t spent on developing capability (i.e. becoming skilled or qualified). Because of the amount of competition, however, only the most visible, connected, insistent, and liked end up with jobs, titles, and power. So we have this paradox: the more you get hired or are likely to get hired, the less you are actually qualified to and/or the less you actually know.

The more you can do and the more you know, the less likely you actually are to be given a chance to contribute it to society.

The second-class minds have the jobs, literally; the people with no skills or poor skills or who seriously overestimate their skills. The bigger the fuck-up, the better the job they have, because the hiring is done by fuck-ups (to start with) and because the fuck-ups, by virtue of spending almost none of their time developing actual skills and the vast majority of it becoming popular and “networking,” rise that much more quickly.

I’m supposed to be looking for work. But instead I’m turning my nose up at multiple “opportunities” in a row. I tell myself it’s integrity, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not helpful to my cause (i.e. to live). I don’t know. I simply have this absolute distaste for incompetence. I hate it when I see idiots doing jobs poorly for lots of money. I hate it even more when they invite me to join in and/or when their work actually makes society worse.

Don’t get me wrong, I like money. But I can’t bear (at least not yet) the prospect of letting myself attach my name to utter crap. I think, in fact, that it’s vanity on my part that causes this. In the long term (say, a few lifetimes, a couple centuries), crap rots and disappears from human memory. What’s left is the hidden greatness—often not discovered until much later—that came from those whose contemporaries dismissed them or were far too busy saluting each others’ crap to take notice. I don’t want to leave behind me only totally forgettable crap. Even worse, I’d hate to be remembered from amongst the few who get remembered as one of those responsible for filling the world with crap.

Eventually, I suppose, I’ll have to concede and compromise. I did at Media Tenor. But for the moment, I’m not finding anything equivalent. I’m finding things that are much more idiotic, people doing much worse jobs than I saw there and at the same thinking they’re doing them that much more skillfully, and doing so with much bigger budgets in some cases.

Scary.

And it explains all the prejudice I’ve heard from people I know about “college people” and “egghead Ph.D.” holders who are dumb as rocks. As it turns out, a great many of them are.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Any Ph.D. student worth his or her salt in any discipline can run off a list of giants in the history of their field that were ridiculed while they were young and/or alive, alongside the imbeciles in their field that have dominated it for a decade here or there, gaining converts and enriching themselves shamelessly until suddenly they are transformed from orthodoxy into community of circus clowns literally overnight when their own social network falls into disrepair.

Am I bitter?

Maybe I’m just better than everyone else. 😉