TL;DR
I grew up on the edge of The Sort. I probably would have been in the center of it, but I got caught in a gifted-kid trap, never learned how to work hard, and hit a wall in grad school. After spending a decade floundering before learning how to actually dedicate myself to difficult work, I got myself back into The Sort.
Now working alongside people who were more aggressively Sorted, I’ve been able to observe the culture like an outsider while still being part of it. And while The Sort offers you a lot in terms of money and respect, it also creates insularity, elitism, and steals away optionality.
I’ve chosen to stay on the edge of The Sort, getting some benefits without losing all my personal time and ability to pursue what matters to me. Everyone Sorted faces this choice, and it’s up to them to decide how to make it.
Transcript
This transcript was editing into essay form by Claude.
Last week, I wrote a post about The Sort—the idea that there’s a lot of systems in the world that incentivize people and enable them to maximize their productivity. This provides a lot of benefits to the world, but it also comes with some costs, especially costs for those who get Sorted.
There are a lot of good things that come out of it. You have access to money. You can go on nice vacations. You can buy cool things. But it also comes with a real psychological toll, or spiritual toll, on a person. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that today. I decided to do it as a video because I also wanted to talk a bit about my own experience being Sorted, and I thought this is maybe a nicer format for that.
For myself, I grew up on what I would say is the edge of The Sort. I didn’t go to the highest prestige university or work at the most prestigious companies. But thanks to a decent amount of smarts and interest, I’ve ended up working in software for a lot of years. Obviously, this puts me in quite close proximity to a lot of folks who have been more aggressively Sorted than I was.
Growing up, I had a lot of expectations put on me. Early on, they did some IQ testing, put me in gifted programs, and really ended up developing this idea of myself that I should always be able to do the best. I should be the smartest person in the room. And for a long time, that got reinforced because it was just true.
I think it wasn’t really until maybe high school that I started to meet other people that felt like they seriously rivaled me in some way. And it wasn’t really until I was in grad school that I even encountered any situations that I couldn’t just sort of float my way through. High school and undergrad, I never studied for anything. I didn’t develop any study skills at all. I would do the work and just be correct. Without really studying, I’d show up, pass the test, get good grades. It was all just fine.
But then eventually I sort of hit this point where I could no longer meet my own expectations anymore. These expectations that had been put on me and that I had been meeting and then had internalized—it just couldn’t happen automatically anymore. At least to continue to progress to the next level, to make the next thing happen, I could no longer be the best without putting in some real work. So I floundered for a bit, for about a decade. And it took me a while to figure out how to work—this is kind of a strange way to put it, but how to actually dedicate myself to something to make it happen, how to learn things when it doesn’t just come automatic.
Eventually I did sort this out. Maybe by the time of 2017 or so, I feel like I was now at least to a point where I can actually do things. I am not the washed out gifted kid anymore who is under-fulfilling his potential—which I should be clear was not actually that bad, right? I was working as a software engineer making plenty decent money. So don’t get me wrong, this was not failure in some absolute sense. It was only failure in this relative sense to which I had these expectations that I could do more.
And just to talk about that for a second, I think this is a problem that happens for a lot of people who get wrapped up in The Sort. A lot of people experience imposter syndrome. I know I certainly dealt with a little bit of that. What I dealt with more strongly though was just having these expectations for myself, expecting to be able to meet them and not being able to do it and finding this quite frustrating and not understanding why I couldn’t meet them. In the end, the answer had nothing to do with how smart I was. It had everything to do with my ability to actually sit down and do the work that is necessary to accomplish the things I’m trying to accomplish.
As I said, I eventually sorted this out and now found myself regularly in situations encountering more of the folks who have been Sorted, who have been caught up in The Sort and pulled along quickly towards the top to work at the most prestigious firms, to work at the most prestigious universities, and to feel like they have permission to work on the hardest problems. Although I should be clear that honestly, I think everyone has permission to work on these problems.
There’s something interesting, I think, that happens about the culture that develops around people who have been very aggressively Sorted in this way. And it has a few key features that I was able to see as a little bit of an anthropologist, looking from the outside in, because this had not been my life the entire time. I had washed out, you might say, for 10 years. Now I am back in. And I’m seeing this stuff a little bit as an outsider, not entirely. I’m good enough to be there perhaps, but have not been living this in the same way as some of my peers were.
There’s a certain level of insularity, I think, that develops. A kind of attitude of, well, look, you didn’t go to the best schools. You’re not working at the best firms. So how could you possibly be good enough? And I think there’s also this expectation that if you are good enough, then you will just appear and rise to the top. And this will happen very quickly. And as long as you have not yet been admitted into this inner circle, then clearly you must not be good enough in some way to get into it. It’s sort of this self-fulfilling thing.
And this is normal human stuff, right? Humans everywhere form cliques. They think that their own in-group is the best, and the out-group is obviously worse, and as you get further away from the in-group, people are just less good, less capable, less whatever it is. So it’s all just very normal human stuff.
The other thing that I think powers it is that it took me a little bit to realize this is what was going on, but a lot of people who have been successfully Sorted have never really experienced hard failures. They’ve spent their entire lives just being successful at the thing they’re doing. And so it’s not really because they’re not trying hard things necessarily. It’s just that they happen to be naturally gifted at those things, or they’re working within areas that they’ve been really well-prepared for. The consequence of this is that when you’ve only ever experienced success, you start to actually believe that you really are just special and able to accomplish things. And also if you haven’t experienced failure in this way, you’re much more likely to, when you see someone else has failed at something or is not performing well at something, to assume this is a deep fact about them rather than a fact about the situation or the type of problem that they’re facing, or a fact about how maybe you have succeeded, which is not because you were so special, but you also just had a lot of good luck and good preparation.
I think this really powers The Sort because the result is that it sort of creates an inner group that just sort of persistently reinforces itself that yes, we are special and we deserve to be here. And everyone else deserves not to be here because they have not demonstrated it.
Now, I want to be a little fair here to myself. I definitely feel some of these same impulses. Even though I didn’t get as aggressively Sorted as some of my peers, I have been Sorted more than many people. There are definitely times when I meet people and I’m like, oh, you clearly are not a real player in some sense, because you’re a person that read some things on the internet, you didn’t go to a good school, you couldn’t have gone to a good school.
And I try my best not to actually be like this, but sometimes it’s quite hard when you’re in a conversation with someone and they’re spouting what feels like a bunch of physics crank nonsense at you to just be like, okay, what’s really going on with this person? And why are they here? Why am I interacting with them?
So I admit that I think I have my own bit of elitism too. And I think that’s fundamentally what we can maybe call this. The Sort invites a kind of elitism because you spend your life among other people who are also in this category of elites. And it creates this bubble where you really expect that everyone else should be able to rise to this, and if they can’t, then they sort of become like NPCs, to borrow that metaphor. They’re not full agentic humans. They are people that just carry out roles and don’t have real stories of their own, which is of course not true. And it’s obviously not true. But it’s very easy to fall into these kinds of traps, especially if you surround yourself only with other people that are like yourself.
I also wanted to talk a little bit about optionality here. One of the other things that The Sort does is it tries very hard to take away your optionality. And this has a lot of impacts on how you end up living your life and maybe actually ties back into this NPC point.
The reality is that when you get very aggressively Sorted, you end up having high opportunity costs. I know I certainly have this. There’s a lot of things I would like to do in my life. For example, it actually sounds kind of great to me to maybe work or go live in a monastery for a while. Could I do that? Sure. Am I likely to do it? No, because I know how much money this would cost me. I don’t mean how much money I would have to pay the monastery. I mean, what is the opportunity cost of doing this? How many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of unearned income is the cost of jumping off the treadmill to go do this?
And I think that lots of other people see the same thing. Maybe I’m working—I’ve written a book, I’m working on revising it. It would be great to get this thing done faster, to spend more time on it, to spend more time as a public intellectual. That sounds fun and appealing if anyone’s interested in what I have to say. But it’s very hard to make it go when I need to spend a lot of time doing other things, spending time at work.
And this just becomes more aggressive the more you let yourself be Sorted. The work in particular really can take over someone’s life to the point that there are many types of activities and hobbies that I know people who are more aggressively Sorted than I am don’t let themselves do because they’re worried that maybe this will come back to reflect poorly on them, or alternatively, that they need to be engaged in the right hobbies to make the right connections with the right people in order to advance their career.
So The Sort really does a lot to constrain someone’s life, not in the same way that a lack of resources does. If you don’t have a lot of money but you have a lot of time, there’s a lot of things you can do with your life. But there’s also things that you can’t because you don’t have the money to afford them. The Sort works to create the opposite situation where you have plenty of money, but it does everything it can to eat all of your time and give you very little control over it.
So you have the money to go on a great vacation. But the only time you can go on that great long vacation is actually when you’re between jobs, because when you’re on the job, the idea of taking a month off is basically impossible. Even two weeks is kind of a lot, especially at some jobs.
What my point is here is that The Sort creates this situation where it offers real benefits to the people that are chosen by it and are sorted up. But it does come with some real significant cost, both to the individual and I think to society at large, which I talked a little bit more about in the essay.
I’m happy enough to be here on the edge of The Sort. And I frequently have to choose to resist becoming more Sorted because there are things I want to do in the world that if I let The Sort pull me up more aggressively, I can tell I will lose the ability to do. I won’t have the time or it will be in conflict where maybe, say, I take a job where the things that I blog about would become a liability and I can’t do that anymore.
So I’ve sort of made my choice here to try to strike a healthy balance of what I think is engaging with The Sort enough to get some benefits from it, but not so much that I lose all of my personal time, all of my ability to pursue the things that I’m interested in and I want to do in this life.
And everyone who’s Sorted has to make the same sort of decision for themselves. Are they going to try to strike a balance? Are they going to go all in? Maybe they’ll strike a balance—and a lot of people do this—by going very hard and then taking time off to do something else. And they go back and forth rather than trying to have it be persistently balanced over time. It’s just different choices that different folks choose to make. We all have to make our own.
