The prestige trap
All the ways the world conspires to make us feel lesser
It’s been a while since I wrote a newsletter, but it’s because I’ve been deep in book 2, and when I wasn’t in book 2, I was motorboating my face in content, content, content. Also, I just didn’t really have anything newsletter-length to say. But today I’m going to talk about prestige, because the other day I was at a party where someone totally ignored me because I didn’t work at a shiny unicorn startup, and that got me thinking about the imaginary hierarchies we believe in.
I’m no stranger to prestige. I think most of us are part of a society where people find ways to categorize and rank you. By your university, by where you work, how much money you make. I can see the calculation that people are making when they ask me where I work, or where I went to school. I went to business school for 2 years, where there were 3 main career paths that people chose from. Isn’t that ridiculous? That out of everything you could do in the world, really there are only three respectable things you could be doing?
How do you win the prestige game in the world of business? You work at a name brand bank or consulting firm, or you work at one of the massive tech companies. It doesn’t matter if it’s another soulless job with backbreaking hours. The title of the company shines from your LinkedIn like a beacon, making everything worth it.
Where am I going with this? Entering publishing reminds me a lot of the uncertainty I experienced during my undergrad years and straight out of college. I went into all of it blind. I had no idea what was good or bad, but I quickly began picking up how people judged prestige in this world, and I let it dictate my own worth. Instead of asking where you worked or where you went to school, people would instead ask about your agent, how many books you’d published, your imprint. Then there were the awards you could’ve won, the book boxes, the book clubs you could’ve been chosen for. Frankly, it is scarier than the world of business because there seem to be far more ways to find yourself lacking, in all directions.
The most horrifying thing is that being an author published by a traditional publisher is supposed to be that prestigious thing. After all, we’ve already jumped through so many hoops: querying, submission, revisions. And yet there’s always more.
Paul Graham has a lot of interesting things to say about prestige in his essay, “How to Do Great Work”:
Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.
Most prestige is fake. For example, what I mentioned above, about there only being three acceptable career paths post-MBA. I learned there was a reason for that. These three things were the only things the already-impotent career center knew anything about. So, it benefited business schools, whose major selling point is placing people into jobs, to push people into those three career paths, which in turn inflated their employment reports every year. In some instances, they actively discouraged people from walking off the beaten path because they didn’t understand it, and it would probably bring down their precious employment numbers.
The perceived prestige of publication can also lead us down bad roads. For writers who have struggled and struggled to get an agent or a publisher, writing to a trend becomes the thing that they believe will save them. To get to the prestige of a book deal, perhaps the only solution is to write what people will buy. I had a conversation with someone where I shared my itty bitty dream to try my hand at fantasy, but they counseled me to stay away from fantasy because it was tough to sell. It made me sad. The joy of unhindered creation, crushed beneath the capitalistic machine. Like there is no point pursuing an idea that excites you, if it can’t be sold, or it diminishes your odds. Instead, let us all pen sexy demon-bodice-rippers (harder done than said).
I fully understand how disheartening it is to write several things, get close, but never over the finish line. But how many of us are writing because we want to be rich, and how many of us are doing it because we love it and it brings to life something inside us that would otherwise be dead? I choose to believe the latter.
I take faith in Graham’s view:
The prestige of a type of work is at best a trailing indicator and sometimes completely mistaken. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. So the question to ask about a type of work is not how much prestige it has, but how well it could be done.
Even after publishing a whole damn book, I was reminded of all the prestige prizes that were out there. Like year-end lists. I never used to pay attention to “Best of” lists. Because in 2025, there will probably be a whole host of new content that I can lose my mind to. But lists kind of rule debut-land. First, it’s the “most anticipated” lists, then it’s the “best book of 2024” lists, then there are the bestseller lists. Everyone tries to game the New York Times bestseller list by pushing pre-orders of books, since they’re all counted in the first week of sales. Lists create buzz, and we note our absences from them with alacrity.
And yet, why do so many lists exist? They’re pretty easy to come up with, at least relative to a longform article or an actual book, and easier to read. 3 things I can’t live without. 5 things that I wish I knew in my 20s. 10 best books of 2024. You don’t even need to give a well-thought-out justification for why that thing is on your list. When the New York Times published their list of the 100 best books, there was some lively debate. There were lists about the list! They are (comparatively) lower effort and spark plenty of discussion. An easy win. In some instances, like the US News & World Report on top universities, it’s a massaged mass of data points with no truly unpredictable results, yet people still lose their minds because so and so school fell by one point.
My point is that a lot of prestige is manufactured. It’s a differentiation ploy by institutions to set them apart from their competitors and anoint themselves the arbiters of taste and greatness. That kind of differentiation is what builds a brand, and brand is priceless because it’s something you can’t mimic. So think about the power it gives these institutions and media outlets when we entrust them to tell us what is impressive.
The other part of prestige is that it’s perception. It’s us thinking about what people around us might find admirable or impressive. Prestige infiltrates every industry. Humans seem to have this unrelenting desire to find a way to set themselves apart, but only in a context that their peers can understand. It’s a language that we develop within our niche because it makes us feel elevated above the rest of the plebs.
Prestige is what we resort to when we don’t know what we really want. When I didn’t know what I wanted to do in college, it was the easy way out. Even if I wasn’t happy, at least people would be impressed by me, because I’d chosen a job that was recognizable. Recently, I have come to realize that not being more intentional about my choices may have irrevocably put me on a path going nowhere, but at least with my writing, I’m still a baby in publishing and can put some real thought into what direction I want to grow. When the hubbub about end of year lists mounted, I stepped away from it. I was working on bettering my book, and that gave me a fulfillment that a callout on someone’s list never would.
Something I wrote today:
She nodded, mesmerized by everything about him. His ambition, his confidence, his willingness to make space in his life just for her. He stood up and stretched. “I’m going to turn in, too. Let yourself out whenever.” As he passed her, he put his hand on her head for a brief second.