If you’ve ever listened to a podcast that isn’t about murder, there’s a strong chance the host would have told you: “You can do it”; or some version of that. It’s a speech as old as your grandmother’s china set, and more common than a tramp stamp in the early 2000s.
Leaving room for differences in style, it goes a little something like this: “You’re brilliant, there’s nothing you can’t achieve, and the world is your oyster. All you have to do is work hard.” Usually, at that point, someone with tons of money and an eerily disingenuous speaking voice comes on and uses their life as proof. After all: “If I can do it, why can’t you?”
It’s a weird conversation, and one whose proof points seem to collapse in front of our eyes. For one, there are a lot of people who can’t do some things that other people can, regardless of the work they put into trying. We see them every week on one of the world’s most popular live podcasts, Kill Tony.
If you’ve never listened to it, the show’s basic premise is based on a bunch of aspiring comedians putting their names in a bucket in the hopes of their name being drawn to perform for a minute. If they do well, they’re invited back, booked for shows or to open for superstar comedians. If they don’t, well, we all get to enjoy a little bit of schadenfreude as some poor soul bombs for the world to see.
A big chunk of the comedians perform and practise for years, subjecting themselves to the nonplussed stares of audience after audience in the hope that one day they’ll be as big as Joe Rogan. They never make it. An office job as a software engineer is their ceiling. Serving drinks at the bar they work at is their calling. Teaching Gen Alphas is their destiny. And that’s okay.
Somewhere in the deep mists of time, two particularly saccharine ideas got stuck in the popular consciousness. The first was that, with enough hard work, we’re all destined to become Britney Spears. Or the Barbiefied Hans Christian Andersen. Or Cristiano Ronaldo’s successor, ad infinitum. The idea is noble but it’s statistically impossible.
More importantly, the promise of certain greatness is having some unintended consequences that are going to kick society in the face. This year, about 85,000 first year students applied to get into WitsUniversity. Only around 6,000 will make it. For Univesity of Johannesburg, 400,000 students applied. Their student population is around 50,000. Look at any university and the number of applicants far exceeds the amount of space available.
This is brilliant for the truly exceptional. Great news for all the kids who got eight distinctions and built a DIY water filtration system using Chappies packets and some rusks. They’ll be surrounded by the greatest minds, go on to live and love similarly extraordinary people. They’ll change the world. There’s never been a better time to be exceptional. There might not be a worse time to just miss the cut.
If you’ve ever listened to a podcast that isn’t about murder, there’s a strong chance the host would have told you: “You can do it”.
For 81,000 kids who don’t get into Wits, the vast majority of whom probably gave it their all, things are looking bleak. Sure, a few will make it. Some will find other avenues. But for the most part, the people who were good but not excellent, lucky but not a four-leafed clover or just simply not privileged enough, the world will be different. They’re increasingly up a particularly famous creek, swimming bare-handed. There was a point in time they had an outlet. Jobs like being a school principal, a journalist, or even an electrician, offered a clear path to the middle class and didn’t need you to be a generational talent.
You could work hard, raise children, send them off to school and hope they were more exceptional than you could ever dream of being. That’s not the case anymore. According to Stats SA, last year, the percentage of young people looking for work and unable to find it was 45%. I know one of those people. She has a master’s degree from Sweden.
The other nobly dangerous idea is that “following your passions at all costs” malarkey. Yes, there are YouTubers who make obscene amounts of money for falling over. Of course, your favourite artist was homeless, but she kept grinding until one day she won a Grammy. Unfortunately, for every one of them, there are a lot more HR managers who dominate their local karaoke night.
Sometimes, instead of following your passions, it may be a better idea to get a hobby and use your boring office job to fund it. Your neighbourhood farmers’ market will thank you for it. No one is saying let’s not work hard. That’s ridiculous. Do that. What if, while we were working hard, we implemented a little plan?
The UN says one-fifth of all the food made for human consumption is lost or wasted. That’s a billion meals a day. There’s also a guy out there who currently has enough money to lose $200bn (R3.8bn) and still be one of the five richest humans alive. We clearly have enough resources on this blue space marble of ours. So (begins a conspiratorial whisper), what if we have a quick chat with this AI thingamabob, stop asking it to make Taylor Swift porn, and tell it to do something useful like solve world hunger or unemployment?
In fact, maybe it could figure out a way to distribute resources so people wouldn’t need to work 80 hours a week just to afford pilchards.
Whatever we’re doing now isn’t working, and when young people actually decide to eat the rich instead of making it a cool T-shirt slogan, you’re going to wish you’d listened.
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