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  • Why are we so worried about our careers? Why do we care so much about our reputations?

  • Partly it’s to do with money of course, but there’s another, more psychological

  • aspect to our fears as well. We worry because we suspectnot wrongly

  • that the world is full of a frightening sort of person ready to judge us ruthlessly

  • and swiftly: a person we can call a snob. A snob is anyone who takes a relatively small

  • part of us and uses it to come to a rigid and unbudgeable conclusion about how much

  • of their attention we deserve. In the past, that might have meant a snob being interested

  • in your lineage and royal connections. Nowadays, the snob cares about one thing only: what

  • you do for a living. This explains why the first question we will

  • be asked in any new social context isWhat do you do?’ and according to how we answer,

  • snobs will either welcome us with broad smiles, or swiftly abandon us by the peanuts. The

  • opposite of a snob is your mothernot necessarily your mother in particularbut

  • the ideal mother, someone who doesn’t care so much what we have achieved, but who thinks about who

  • we are in the broad sense. But most of the world is not like our mothersand that

  • is why we are fired up by such a desperate urge to achieve and impress.

  • Sometimes our behaviour is mistaken for greed and vanity, but it is more poignant than this.

  • A lot of our interest in fancy cars, jobs and houses has nothing to do with materialism.

  • It has to do with a hunger for the respect and esteem that is only available in our societies

  • through the acquisition of material goods. It isn’t the goods themselves we seek, it

  • is the love we stand to gain through our possession of them. The next time we see someone driving

  • a Ferrari, we shouldn’t condemn them for their greed, we should pity them for the intensity

  • of their need for love from the world. At the root of snobbery is a lack of imagination

  • and confidence about how to decide who in the world is valuable. The snob isn’t wrong

  • in their background sense that there are better and worse sorts of people around. They are

  • just brutally misguided and slavish in their beliefs about how the superior individuals

  • can identified. For snobs, it is the already-acclaimed and already successful who are the only ones

  • worthy of respect. There is no room in their timid regimented minds to imagine that someone

  • might be clever, kind or goodand yet somehow have been overlooked entirely by society,

  • their qualities lurking beneath an unfamiliar guise, and having as yet discovered no obvious

  • outlets. Touchingly, the personal origins of snobbery

  • typically lie in parents who were themselves snobsand never endowed their offspring

  • with the confidence to judge each new person on their own terms, without reference to social

  • status, income and reputation. Despite their commitment to surrounding themselves by people

  • of high status, ironically, snobs constantly fail to spot who might one day be feted and

  • applauded. They are misled by the unexpected outward forms that brilliance often takes.

  • Snobs don’t sign up the Beatles, don’t invest in the start-up iteration of Google

  • or Apple, don’t give the time of day to the taxi driver who might one day be the president

  • or the old lady in a woolly hat writing the great novel of the 21st century.

  • The true answer to snobbery is not to say that there is no such thing as a better or

  • worse person, but to insist that better or worse exist in constantly unexpected places

  • and carry none of the outward signs of distinction. And because we are such poor judges of the

  • worth of others, our ultimate duty remains to be kind, good, curious and imaginative

  • about pretty much everyone who ever crosses our pathand that includes ourselves.

Why are we so worried about our careers? Why do we care so much about our reputations?

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スノッブに対処する方法 (How To Cope With Snobbery)

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    Hcling1015 に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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