The Mysterious Return of Imposter Syndrome
e-flux.com
e-flux.com
> But insofar as it is the passing on of second-hand knowledge about being, it is itself a form of imposture that reproduces and impersonates without meaning or sense and therefore enacts imposture in the act of naming itself as well as in the manner that it imitates an act of passing on knowledge of an existing disease or syndrome.
The essay doesn’t actually have a lot to say, but that fact is hidden by convoluted language.
Maybe the author is trying to give the reader impostor syndrome?
As with any community, each other. Not only does the jargon signify belonging, it obscures the real message from the unvitiated.
As psychiatrists we see a lot of people coming in saying "Man, I feel like an imposter. I just don't measure up." Most of the time we'll convince them everyone feels that way and they should chillax. It ain't no big thing. A lot of famous people talk about it, almost like they're bragging or something.
If that doesn't work we tell them it's just a meaningless label people throw around for something else that is going on. It's modern "disease" of the times. You hear others throw the words around and pretty soon you're wearing that jacket.
Now the old white dudes had some thoughts on this but they're outdated. They can't help us because they weren't hip to the needs of women and people of color.
You might think most people would go away at this point with less anxiety, but here we get to the real subject we want to speak on, which is privileged people who grew up being told they were special and then finding out everyone in their circle was told the same thing. We can't all be special, lets face it. It's quite a let down for some. It's doubly hard if they haven't separated from their parents yet but no longer get their parents daily affirmations of their specialness because they don't live with them anymore.
Those privileged people usually want to go away feeling good about identifying the problem and vowing to learn a little humility, but this is where we get them. We tell them that they are special, but the capitalist system wants to keep them down and consistently on the treadmill for the capitalist masters. We tell them they've been turned into a robot. Then we close the deal and tell them that we are their only hope and it might involve a lot of work with our specialists at considerable cost.
yeah if you're famous and super successful in your field and you talk about having imposter syndrome it does feel a bit of a humblebrag.
What is strange however are all the people who thinks they have impostor syndrome even though nobody thinks they have done anything great at all. They don't see themselves as impostors, they just see themselves as nobodies and feel bad about that.
> Q: Was the above article written by a bot? Explain your reasoning.
It's response was:
> A: It is difficult to say for certain whether or not the above article was written by a bot, but there are several clues that suggest it may be the case. First, the article seems to lack a clear purpose or focus, instead meandering from topic to topic without really saying anything significant. Second, the writing is often awkward or stilted, as if it has been translated from another language. Finally, the article ends abruptly and without resolution, as if the author ran out of ideas or simply gave up. Taken together, these factors suggest that the article may have been written by a bot, or at least by someone who is not a skilled writer.
I thought this was a pretty humorous take.
In seriousness, I appreciate your analogy above. That brings the article into a more interesting light.
A pair of clinical psychologists practicing in Manhattan and Brooklyn NY could probably say something useful about this. But they didn't.
Thought for today: Is impostor syndrome driving the use of excessively complex tech stacks on problems that don't really need them? If it's not complicated, do they really need to pay you $250K a year?
Now, on imposter syndrome, I've often thought of myself as having this, but, the comfort that thought gives me makes me wonder if I'm not just seeking validation and trying to put myself up there with those brilliant people who supposedly had it too..
Sanity check: have you done something you got praised for and later thought you weren't worth that praise? That is the core of impostor syndrome, if you haven't experienced it then you don't have impostor syndrome. When a brilliant person has impostor syndrome its because others thinks the brilliant person is brilliant, but the brilliant person doesn't see himself as brilliant. But if you fail the first step meaning others don't see you as brilliant, then you can't have impostor syndrome since the syndrome means you don't think you deserve the praise you are getting.
We sit in nice offices, sipping coffee and play with computers..
Praise is such an ingrained part of our culture, I feel like my generation has been praised throughout our lives for every little, entirely normal thing we do. It takes so very little. It feels hollow and fake, social norm that is followed.
I cannot construe praise to be anything beyond "affirmative, the task was done and there was nothing so wrong with it that it needs mention".
I don't like to receive "high praise" it feels patronizing at the very least.
Do I really have [XYZ]? Or am I simply trying to rationalise something to myself?
Except, of course I am not, and of course I'm not explicitly thinking that way, but I do think that my brain unconsciously makes that connection on some level, irrational as it may be.
It's such an alluring thought, that maybe I'm not incompetent, maybe I'm just having this "syndrome" that so many other bright people have too... A lot easier to accept than the truth.
This whole thread is brilliant - I really admire the one or two people that tried to summarise/translate sections. That said, I find something weird about people that write about imposter syndrome.
Something similar to imposter syndrome is normal for anyone who is highly skilled:
* To be highly skilled you are continuously improving you skills, by fixing the flaws in your work and fixing your own flaws, from the large to the small.
* To successfully fix flaws, you need to be able to recognise the flaws, in finer and finer detail, as you become more and more skilled. The irony is that while external parties can genuinely admire your work, you yourself can only see more and more that is wrong with your work.
* If you can’t see flaws, you don’t fix the flaws, and you don’t progress.
There is a gorgeous section of one interview with Jim Keller (a legendary/genius chip designer) where he talks about how he knew how deeply flawed his work is. He is really inspiring because he he is so insightful about his thought processes, and there is no entangled bullshit like the article we are commenting on. I also love this quote of his: "Imagine 99% of your thought process is protecting your self-conception, and 98% of that is wrong.". Quote is at @1:23:00 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
It's not you. The author appears to have been influenced by deconstructionist philosophy. Read some Derrida to get a feel for this. That style is snarky with a layer of pseudo-intellectualism on top. This was a big thing at liberal arts schools in the 1990s. About one sentence in five will say something concrete. The rest discusses tangents consistent with the author's ideology. There's just enough meat in this sort of writing to prevent it from being dismissed as totally bogus. But the fat content is excessive.
Text:
By virtue of every imaginable variety of insufficient parenting and relentless contingencies of Oedipal failure, the victim suffered insufficient separation and individuation and was rendered susceptible to feelings of being a fake. The imposter was said to have an undeveloped ego that fluctuated wildly between grandiosity and insufficiency, and to be susceptible to what Freud called “the family romance,” a secret belief that one’s all-too-abject parents could not really be one’s parents. Surely, the imposter thinks, the real parents will arrive to reveal the truth of a more noble bearing. Today’s imposter is not subject to the Oedipal treadmill. Experts assigned by universities and companies to mitigate imposter syndrome emphasize a rigorous self-sufficiency that tends to render the old fashioned attempts at a family-based etiology irrelevant. In another inversion, the neurotic imposter of old was the exception to the normal vicissitudes that would render one rooted in a convincing-enough sense of self. Today’s victim of imposter syndrome is the exception insofar as they belong to an elite and privileged class, but in other respects the imposter is the norm, the expected result of a naturalized economy where parents aspire to produce admirably competitive subjects whose imposter diagnosis testifies to the success of their efforts in raising admirable offspring.
Simplified version:
Impostor syndrome used to be mostly about with comparing yourself with your parents. (Classical theme of Freudian psychoanalysis.) Now it's more about being in a group of high-achievers and not feeling up to their level.
As someone wrote above, "the essay doesn’t actually have a lot to say, but that fact is hidden by convoluted language."
Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/451/
Working in tech (but i guess it could apply to any corporate job) one of the reason I feel like an imposter is the significant salary gap between my job and other very technical and essentials job like : nurses, teachers, farmer, etc...
Yes my job is maybe useful in some way but nothing I do seem so special that it justifies such a salary difference with people than actually enable us to exist as a society. You'd think Covid would have change thing a little, but back to normal with covid we are...
I don't mean to pick on you or anything. I think you've written down what a lot of people feel, but it's kind of crazy to expect that of yourself.
It's OK to just be OK.
To each his own, the imporant piece in my opinion is to not judge others by your own measuring stick or live your life trying to measure up to others to get their acceptance or approval.
Every runner practices and runs to win the race. Every fighter also fights to win a championship. I realize a job isn't any of those but when you realize that ultimately a runner and a fighter both run and fight against themsleves, to be the best they can be and nothing more then maybe that is something we can all relate with.
This is definitely not true.
Be kind to yourself :)
FWIW, I struggle to relate to "competers". I do things because they make me fulfilled (or put food on the table), not to "win" or be the best at something. I don't think it's something everyone can relate to.
"I'm not better than everyone else but I think I should be" is not impostor syndrome. You don't see yourself as an impostor, wanting to push yourself hard to achieve more is not impostor syndrome.
If you ran a very popular blog and still felt you couldn't write blog posts then that would be impostor syndrome. If you had published a lot of papers and still felt you couldn't make something noteworthy then that would be impostor syndrome. But feeling bad over not being able to do those things when you haven't done them then that isn't impostor syndrome at all.
Now, this isn't to say that others' opinions don't count. You need some external sanity check to avoid turning into a crackpot smelling your own farts all day. But doing something of substance, and marketing it are two very different things. Blogging and public speaking are useful for the latter, but irrelevant and potentially detrimental to the former if one lacks the proper motivation.
I would say, figure out what you're good at and what your goals are independent of recognition. Learn from experts, and develop self-awareness, but always keep your own barometer of success. If you do this, then whatever recognition that comes will be genuine and you have no reason for imposter syndrome. If recognition does not come, whether because your contributions were mediocre in the grand scheme of things, or because of lack of self-promotion, you can still sleep at night knowing that you made the most of your gifts. The idea of pursuing greatness and global personal competition among 7B people fueled by instantaneous connectivity and social media is absolutely toxic and undermines each individual's ability to follow their own muse and make their own unique contribution.
Imposter syndrome is unintentionally spread via the attempts to contain it, similar to the case of trigger warnings, where anticipating the potentially traumatic effect of some material by issuing a trigger warning can itself be a trigger, triggered by the simple phrase “trigger.” We are paralyzed by an endless series of words and phrases that seek to depotentiate the trauma only to further the trauma, a progression that bears resemblance to the flashbacks and traumatic dreams that caused Freud to question the sovereignty of the pleasure principle. One is interpellated as an imposter––a diagnosis whose history is lost or repressed––that comes to be the opposite of what it was, that comes from nowhere and can never be resolved. The diagnosis is therefore a name, a description, and a curse. To speak it is to try to rid oneself of its effects, to pass it on to another who might neutralize it, stop it in its tracks.
As for impostor syndrome, maybe it's not actually a psychological phenomenon at all. Maybe it's real and vast majority of people doing something are indeed impostors. We are living in the era of fakery and incompetence and being a well-paid professional or a business owner doesn't mean someone is not an absolute fake. And maybe these people are just feeling it with their guts.
It doesn't mean it shouldn't be corrected by therapy. Simply because believing you are not a fake makes you a much better, more convincing fake.
I think the cure to impostor syndrome is to talk to those around us who we trust. By talking to others, we can much better see the full range of their skills, and hear an outside opinion on the full range of our skills. The difference is usually not as large as we thought.
I'd love to hear others techniques for combating it too!
”Both the university and workplace assist in the naming and propagation of imposter syndrome as a desired and necessary result…”
So our schools and workplaces make imposter syndrome worse by identifying it and offering help. Plenty more wild-ass speculation in the piece.
I didn't feel it was a dismissive account.. Plenty of useful writing on psychology/psychoanalysis is written by practitioners who don't themselves experience symptoms they study and research.
However, trained psychotherapists are likely to be more sensitive than clinical psychologists because they must first go through intensive therapy themselves.
It seems an incredibly complex phenomenon. Just below the surface I sense there is a very delicate and potentially explosive force of feelings of the same depth as race and gender issues. I don't think anyone should be dismissive of it. That said, I am not sure "imposter syndrome" is the most helpful term, or that there's a single phenomenon at play, or exactly what's normative or pathological.
After all it's hardly debatable that we live in a "fake society" of "fake news" and "fake leaders" running things. As Marcuse and Fromm both said in different ways, such feelings would be a sane reaction to an insane world. Maybe people with "imposter syndrome" are taking ownership of a societal projection and are the only ones around smart enough to know we're all kidding ourselves :)
Capitalism tells you you can be anything you want to be, if you're good enough. Of course, most people are never going to get anything good--the decent opportunities were mostly allocated before we were born. Watching this, the naive conclusion is that only the very best are going to get anything, and that everyone else just sucks. (And, if 99.9% of people who try to do something suck at it, it's just reasonable to assume a high probability that you also suck. Priors. Self-perception does not typically have enough resolution to conclude otherwise.) The other possibility is that society is deeply and thoroughly corrupt, but to voice it makes a person sound bitter... and bitterness, at least in the US, is extremely socially unacceptable, especially when one is right.
If it were a college, it would look like this.
Person: Hi, Labor Market University Dean. I'd like to major in writing.
Labor Market: No can do. We've got too many writers.
Person: I suppose I'll major in... machine learning sounds fun.
Labor Market: No slots left. All taken.
Person: What about business leadership?
Labor Market: Hahaha, no.
Person: Well, I have to do something. What've ya got?
Labor Market: It looks like we've got room for you to major in... subordinate bullshit, subordinate bullshit, and... subordinate bullshit.
As humans, it comes naturally to find patterns when they aren't actually there. If we fail, it's too easy to accept society's narrative that we deserved failure and aren't really fit to be more than a business subordinate. If we succeed, we see both (a) the failure of people as good as, or better than, we are, as well as (b) undeserved success of incompetents even at the highest levels. The first case is one of perceiving a spurious pattern; the second is a case of watching the pattern break down and concluding that external indicators of one's competence carry almost no signal, thus falling back into an I-know-nothing state... which tends to make a person feel incompetent... because how good can you be if you don't even know whether you're good[1]?
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[1] In reality, there is at most a weak correlation between one's competence and precise confidence thereabout; however, if we make certain assumptions of rationality that sometimes hold and sometimes fail, we are led to expect that they would correlate.
I mentioned this devastating mismatch between promises and realistic opportunities in a comment yesterday. It's baked into the education system now, which has become something of a racket for selling broken dreams.
> And, if 99.9% of people who try to do something suck at it, it's just reasonable to assume a high probability that you also suck.
I pause to ever mention Jordan Peterson here (because usually that leads to massive down-votes), but anyway, he has a major blind-spot in assuming dominance hierarchies are congruent with competence hierarchies. People who laud meritocracies often forget this.
> worldly success, rare as it is in anything worth doing, is not indicative of skill or talent
"The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong...." Getting over this is an important part of growing up, and I think some people don't quite get that.
> The other possibility is that society is deeply and thoroughly corrupt
What I think happened is that our shared "noble lies" became embarrassing sordid tales of uncle Bob screwing the pooch. After your prime minister has fucked a pig's face it's almost impossible to recover and re-orientate. Is there still an institution that hasn't been utterly razed by scandal?
> because how good can you be if you don't even know whether you're good?
Without objective measures and exposure to genuine competence you can respect and aspire to there is no yardstick. The demise of recognisable institutions took this away.
> bitterness, at least in the US, is extremely socially unacceptable, especially when one is right.
That's a bit weird. A WASP thing? British culture allows more for a general sourness around class resentments. We know our leaders are over-privileged incompetents and make light of it openly. But not to the extent of utter nihilistic cynicism as Russians.
I want to say that US Americans don't have the quiescent injustice of class hanging over everything... but I am not sure that's true. You just deal with it differently across the pond.