IMO a lot of claims of having imposter syndrome is implicit status signaling. It’s announcing that your biggest worry is the fact that you may just be a regular person. Do cashiers at McDonald’s have imposter syndrome and believe they at heart aren’t really McDonald’s cashiers but actually should be medium-high 6-figure ML researchers at Google? Such an anecdote may provide comfort to a researcher at Google, because the ridiculousness of the premise will remind them of the primacy of the way things have settled in the world. Of course they belong in their high-status position, things are the way they are because they’re meant to be.
To assert the “realness” of imposter syndrome is to assert the premise that certain people do belong, naturally, in high status positions, and others do belong naturally below them. It is more of a static, conservative view of the world that is masturbation for those on top. There is an element of truth to it: genetically predisposed intelligence, contentiousness, and other traits massively advantage certain people over others in fields with societally high status, but the more we reaffirm the impact of these factors, the more we become a society of status games for relative gain, rather than a society of improvement and learning for mutual gain.
… I think so, yes. It would feel like they’re just pretending like they know how to deal with customers, that they’re just pretending to be professional staffers who know the ins and outs of the establishment, while in fact they just walked in from their regular lives, put on a uniform, and are not at all comfortable in that skin. An impression that they should feel like an appendage of a megacorporation, an appendage which may not be important by itself, but is still part of a greater whole; while in actuality, they’re just LARPing being that appendage. An angry or confused customer confronts them about something, and it’s as if they should know how to handle that off the top of their head, but no, they need to scramble and fiddle around and ask their coworkers and make a mess of it.
Or, at least, that’s what I imagine I’d initially feel in that role.
IMO a lot of claims of having imposter syndrome is implicit status signaling. It’s announcing that your biggest worry is the fact that you may just be a regular person.
Imposter syndrome ≠ being a regular person is your “biggest worry”.
IMO a lot of claims of having imposter syndrome is implicit status signaling. It’s announcing that your biggest worry is the fact that you may just be a regular person. Do cashiers at McDonald’s have imposter syndrome and believe they at heart aren’t really McDonald’s cashiers but actually should be medium-high 6-figure ML researchers at Google? Such an anecdote may provide comfort to a researcher at Google, because the ridiculousness of the premise will remind them of the primacy of the way things have settled in the world. Of course they belong in their high-status position, things are the way they are because they’re meant to be.
To assert the “realness” of imposter syndrome is to assert the premise that certain people do belong, naturally, in high status positions, and others do belong naturally below them. It is more of a static, conservative view of the world that is masturbation for those on top. There is an element of truth to it: genetically predisposed intelligence, contentiousness, and other traits massively advantage certain people over others in fields with societally high status, but the more we reaffirm the impact of these factors, the more we become a society of status games for relative gain, rather than a society of improvement and learning for mutual gain.
… I think so, yes. It would feel like they’re just pretending like they know how to deal with customers, that they’re just pretending to be professional staffers who know the ins and outs of the establishment, while in fact they just walked in from their regular lives, put on a uniform, and are not at all comfortable in that skin. An impression that they should feel like an appendage of a megacorporation, an appendage which may not be important by itself, but is still part of a greater whole; while in actuality, they’re just LARPing being that appendage. An angry or confused customer confronts them about something, and it’s as if they should know how to handle that off the top of their head, but no, they need to scramble and fiddle around and ask their coworkers and make a mess of it.
Or, at least, that’s what I imagine I’d initially feel in that role.
Imposter syndrome ≠ being a regular person is your “biggest worry”.