Meritocracy Is Making A Comeback
And It’s Here to Burn the Bullshit Down
Meritocracy is making a comeback, baby. Turns out you can only live in “Losers Are Winners La La Land” for so long before the whole thing comes crashing down. And guess what? It’s crashing. Right now. In real time. It’s not going to be a silent comeback either, it’s going to claw its way out of the grave with a vengeance. Why? Because there’s literally no other option left. The empire built on vibes, feelings, and government handouts is out of gas. The Bottleneckers of the world have skimmed all the fat off the top. The funny money printer is jammed. The safety nets have holes. And the consequences are no longer hypothetical. There’s nothing left for them to take. They literally need the Builders back to build something of value again for them to continue to survive.
Because for the last decade, we’ve been told that merit doesn’t matter. That what you produce, what you solve, what you create…none of it means anything compared to who you are on paper. What box you check on a form. Were you the right gender to have that take? Were you the right skin color for the job? Performance became a dirty word and instead all that mattered was your “identity” and your “feelings”. The ultimate success became avoiding conflict and making sure you never made anyone the slightest bit uncomfortable. Not whether or not you made a quality product at a price that makes sense. Not whether or not you got the job done and did it well. It was decided that the goal of business wasn’t to solve problems or build something better, but to meet a diversity quota, follow the DEI script, and outsource thinking to a committee that has never had an original thought. They stopped hiring the best. They started hiring the safest. They stopped asking “Can they do the job?” and started asking “Will they keep the group chat calm?”
This worked for a while. You can pretend productivity doesn’t matter when the government’s cutting checks like it’s Monopoly night. You can hide garbage products behind inclusive TikTok videos and ESG reports. You can inflate job titles, invent meaningless roles, and create entire departments dedicated to making sure no one’s ever mildly uncomfortable. But when the music stops? All of that bullshit gets exposed for what it is. Bloat. And bloat doesn’t survive in a real economy.
Suddenly the companies with 17 layers of approval to post an Instagram story will be laying off “Culture Architects.” Suddenly the startups that burned through $200M in funding to make a meditation app for cats will be pivoting to bankruptcy. Because when things actually matter again merit wins. Every era of collapse has its reckoning. And when the Bottleneckers are done siphoning the system dry, they have no choice but to let the Builders build again. The Builders are those people who never stopped working. Who still care about value. Who didn’t bend when the mob said, “Sit down, you’re too intense.” The ones that for the last ten years plus have been insulted for being “too direct”. Dismissed for being focused. Mocked for not buying into the circus.
If that’s you. Well, congratulations because it’s finally your time again. It’s about to be a very good time to be the kind of person who knows how to build. So if you’ve been playing small? Step up. If you’ve been hiding your edge? Bring it out. If you’ve been told you’re too much? You’re probably just what we need. So, we build again. But this time, we need to make sure we don’t allow them to ruin it all.
Elizabeth Duffy