Merit, duty, and finding softness inside a system built on proving yourself

why our origin stories still hurt

The Oxford Union debate on whether meritocracy is a myth went viral because it did something rare in public argument: it disturbed both sides.

On the proposition side was Daniel Markovits, a Yale law professor and author of The Meritocracy Trap. He didn’t say what people usually assume. He didn’t argue that talent is fake, or that effort is irrelevant, or that everyone should get the same outcome. His claim was sharper: meritocracy works exactly as designed, and that’s the problem. ¹

Modern meritocracy, as he framed it, relies on two big filters:

1. Exams and credentials – who can perform on the tests needed to enter elite schools and professions.

2. Market demand – who can sell their labor at a high price in a largely deregulated, neoliberal economy. ²

We all know there’s a difference between being good at exams and actually understanding something. There’s an even bigger gap between test-taking and wisdom. Exam‑driven systems distort education into training for a gate, not an encounter with the world or with oneself. John Dewey once described education as a process of entering into shared social consciousness, learning to locate yourself in a world of others. Reducing it to a sequence of entrance tests is something else entirely.

Markovits adds a second, more unsettling point: meritocracy doesn’t only distort education. It distorts how we value ourselves.

Perfect practice and the price of being “good enough”.

One of his phrases stuck with me: practice doesn’t make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect. Perfect practice requires something unevenly distributed: investment.

Merit, in our world, is not just effort plus ability. It’s effort plus ability inside an architecture of sustained investment: money, time, tutoring, emotional bandwidth, and freedom from constant crisis.

In one summary of his work, Markovits sketches a rough ladder of educational spending: a poor child in a poor district might receive around $8,000 of schooling per year; a middle‑class child in a middle‑income district around $12,000; a rich child in a rich state $27,000; and a very rich child in an elite private school as much as $75,000 per year.³

Those numbers aren’t exact for every place, and overall U.S. public per‑pupil spending has risen since then. ⁴ But the pattern holds: some children are simply trained more and better from the beginning.

At the college level, Raj Chetty and colleagues have shown that children from the top 1% of the income distribution are dramatically more likely to attend an Ivy League or “Ivy‑Plus” college than children from the bottom 20%, and far more likely than middle‑class peers with comparable test scores. ⁵

Markovits’ point is not that these students have no talent. It’s that the system takes a group of already advantaged children, surrounds them with almost uninterrupted “perfect practice”, then turns around and calls the resulting performance purely individual merit.

In that sense, meritocracy doesn’t fail. It is highly efficient at converting inherited advantage into “earned” success.

Merit, inclusion, and the false “or”.

This is where our public conversation usually derails.

We keep framing the question as:

• Merit or inclusion

• Excellence or fairness

• Standards or access

Once it becomes an “or,” everyone hears an accusation.

If you emphasize inclusion, people hear: so my effort didn’t matter.
If you defend merit, people hear: so you think inequality is my fault.

But the reality, and my own experience, sits in the “and”:

You can believe in high standards and believe that current systems don’t perfectly detect talent.
You can oppose coercive ideological conformity and admit that access has never been evenly distributed.

The debate only becomes unreasonable when it is framed as an “or.” It isn’t binary.

How meritocracy feels from the inside

Markovits is often read as if he’s only talking about inequality between rich and poor. But his argument is also about what this system does to people psychologically .

That is the part that resonates most with what I’ve seen up close.

Some of my closest friends grew up in immense privilege: the shorthand would be “trust fund babies,” though that phrase erases more than it reveals. What I actually see is a kind of quiet restraint, an invisible weight on their shoulders.

There is constant pressure to appear unmoved, capable, composed, and never to falter in public because they carry a family name, a family firm, or a family reputation. Many live with a low‑grade awareness that the foundations of their lives were not built by their own hands. That awareness can show up in different ways:

• relentless overachievement

• never being “off duty”

• self‑erasure, staying bland to avoid disappointing anyone

• or, sometimes, in the opposite direction: reckless risk-taking, because nothing will ever feel fully earned anyway

Markovits describes the elite children in his book as “poked and prodded and tested and tutored” from an early age, subject to extra classes, extra prep, extra everything. It’s not actually easy to have that much invested in you; it can feel less like being supported and more like being managed.

Investment breeds competence. It also breeds expectation.

On the other end, I have friends whose stories began with almost nothing.

One close friend lost his father early. His mother struggled with substance abuse. His grandmother stepped in to raise him and then passed, too. There were periods where he slept in an empty warehouse as a child, being bullied at school for looking rugged, when reality was he technically had a roof over his head, but was functionally homeless.

Today, he is one of the most successful men I know by any conventional metric: income in the high 7s or low 8s, status, and network. Yet when I look at him, I see a similar pain to the one I see in my wealthy friends, expressed through different grammar:

• the need to prove, again and again

• the inability to rest, because rest feels like backsliding

• the constant movement of the goalpost; success landing more like a temporary stay of execution than a safe arrival

Scarcity, when internalized early, does not vanish just because the bank balance changes. It lingers as a script: if I stop pushing, it all disappears.

From the outside, these two trajectories, the scion and the survivor, look like opposites. From the inside, to me, they often rhyme.

Different origins. Similar restlessness. Different advantages. Similar fears.

Merit exists in both stories. So do luck, grief, and the accumulated weight of other people’s expectations.

What meritocracy tells us about ourselves.

This is where Markovits’ critique cuts deeper.

He argues that meritocracy doesn’t just allocate advantage. It teaches people how to interpret their own lives.

For the elite, the story goes like this:

You worked incredibly hard. You jumped every hurdle. You sacrificed. Your success proves your virtue.

And in many ways, that story feels true. The lives of elite professionals are not lazy. They are often structured around exams, applications, late nights, delayed gratification. The very difficulty of the path becomes evidence that they must deserve the outcome. The ideology and the lived experience reinforce each other.

Over time, this can calcify into entitlement… not always loud, but deeply felt: I earned this. I earned all of it. It becomes easier to overlook how much invisible architecture was holding them up: investments, networks, safety nets, assumptions about what people “like them” can and should do.

For everyone else, the narrative flips:

If you didn’t get in, if you didn’t climb high, it’s because you lacked merit: you weren’t smart enough, disciplined enough, virtuous enough.

Structural exclusion (underfunded schools, unstable neighborhoods, lack of time, lack of bandwidth) gets repackaged as individual failure.

Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have documented how, in the U.S., midlife mortality has risen in recent decades for adults without a college degree, driven by what they call “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, suicide, alcohol-related disease. ⁶

Those trends aren’t caused by meritocracy alone, but they rhyme with Markovits’ description: the non‑elite internalizing failure, turning disappointment inward in the form of addiction, self‑harm, or quiet self‑erasure. ⁷

In his framing, meritocracy makes the rich smug and leaves everyone else “naked in their rejection.” It’s a harsh sentence, but it matches the emotional terrain I see: one group compelled to prove they deserve everything, another group haunted by the suspicion they deserve nothing.

The gendered scripts underneath.

All of the specific friends I’ve written about above are men. That matters for how their stories get told and judged.

Men are often born into an expectation of expansion. Build an empire or grow an existing one. Provide. Scale. Win. The ceiling is presumed to be somewhere far above their heads, and the only question is how high they can climb before they hit it.

The comparisons that follow are usually about scope and speed:

• Who advanced faster?

• Who built more?

• Who commands more visible respect, more leverage, more power?

These conversations don’t always happen out loud. They don’t need to. The measuring sticks are ambient.

For women, comparisons tend to be quieter and more internal, though no less ruthless.

Is she prettier than me?
More desirable?
More effortless?
More “balanced”?

Is she ambitious in a way that still feels palatable? Warm enough to be liked, contained enough not to be threatening, accomplished enough to be admired but not so visible that she draws resentment?

Of course, women carry achievement scripts too… about careers, motherhood, partnership, independence. But I notice that the surveillance often lands on how a woman is, not just what she does.

Different metrics. Same game.

My own contradictions.

This system doesn’t just shape how I view others. It shapes how others view me and how I’ve learned to view myself.

I’ve often been misunderstood by people I’ve dated for having more male friends than female. The assumption is predictable: that I must enjoy the attention, or that I prefer it this way, or that it’s some extended flirtation strategy.

The reality is simpler and less flattering. I didn’t get much time to explore childhood. I grew up in an environment where being hyper‑aware and emotionally vigilant was a survival skill. I learned to read subtle shifts in tone, to anticipate moods, to scan for what might go wrong. That sensitivity followed me into adulthood.

It turns out that being attuned to men, their insecurities, their silences, the pressure they carry but don’t articulate made it easier for me to befriend them. Not because I wanted anything from them, but because I recognized the shape of their strain.

For a long time, I envied people who seemed to come from “complete” homes. I saw my own as fractured, unfinished. Over time, I’ve tried to reframe that. My home was whole in its own way. The cracks taught me to see things other people could afford to ignore.

That reframing didn’t come without a cost. I still wrestle with the tension between a feminine exterior and a heart that feels more traditionally masculine: driven, protective, wary, often armored. Part of me longs to soften. To relax into something gentler. Another part is still on watch.

I carry duties as a daughter that sometimes feel like having wings that aren’t fully unclipped. At worst, it can feel like knowing you were built to fly and still choosing, for now, to stay closer to the ground. At best, it feels like a privilege — a quiet pride in having already gone further than anyone ever expected me to.

I remember one Thanksgiving, at twenty‑one, telling my family I wanted to become a lawyer. The table answered with a kind of nervous, half‑patronizing laughter. It wasn’t overt cruelty; it was disbelief dressed up as a joke.

At the time, it hurt. Now, oddly, it feels like a strange kind of gift. Doubt forces clarity. It makes you decide whether you want something badly enough to pursue it without applause.

Holding the “and”.

Coming back to the Oxford debate, I don’t think the core question is whether merit exists. Of course it does. Some people work harder. Some people have rarer talents. Some people combine both in extraordinary ways.

The harder question is whether we are honest about how much scaffolding sits behind what we call merit, and what stories we tell ourselves about worth as a result.

You don’t have to agree with every part of Markovits’ conclusion to recognize that something is off when a society trains a small group relentlessly and then tells everyone else their exclusion is a personal failure.

You also don’t have to hate elites to see that this system isn’t kind to them either. The same machine that lifts them up also locks them into an identity that must never stop justifying itself.

So I keep coming back to a quieter, less dramatic claim:

• Merit matters.

• Investment matters.

• Structure matters.

• So do the private stories people carry under their public labels.

If there’s anything I hope people take from debates like the one at Oxford, it’s not a verdict for or against meritocracy. It’s a change in posture:

To look at a “trust fund kid” and see not just entitlement, but also the weight of inherited expectation.
To look at someone who started in chaos and now stands in a polished room and see not just grit, but the lingering fear that it could all vanish.
To look at ourselves and notice how much of our self‑worth is tied to performance in systems we did not design.

We learn more when we stop insisting on “or” and start practicing “and.”

High standards and wider access.
Ambition and humility.
Structure and sympathy.

That doesn’t solve policy questions on its own. But it’s a better place to begin: seeing contrast without rushing to blame and letting that clarity make us a little more gentle with each other, and with ourselves.

1. https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/professor-markovits-meritocracy-trap

2.

3. https://mrgmpls.wordpress.com/2021/02/22/the-meritocracy-trap-book-notes

4. https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics

5. https://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/papers/coll_mrc_paper.pdf

6. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9389919

7. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/23/why-americans-are-dying-from-despair