Every year, niche magazines of various kinds publish a top 30 or 40 or 50 list of high achievers, deemed worthy of public recognition. The most beautiful, the wealthiest, the most successful. For several years, there has been a trend of identifying young success stories: ‘30 under 30’, ‘40 under 40’ and so on, and the young entrepreneurs who are creating startups and seeking to change the world in their 20s and 30s are being showcased.
This recognition inevitably brings forth criticism - about the social injustice and inequity innate in a society where privileged and (it is assumed) talentless people are elevated over their peers, simply due to the accident of birth, and as the result of no effort of their own. Such a mentality on the part of the observers of these lists - their comments made publicly in the comments section of the magazines which publish these lists, and ubiquitously on social media - find it difficult to acknowledge any one else’s talent or skill, unless it fits a populist ‘hard luck’ or ‘hustle’ narrative, or a life arc that resonates with and affirms their own.
Many people feel compelled to question the credentials of those awarded, possibly partly due to a public-spirited desire to uphold high standards of professionalism, and make sure the recipients of the accolades are worthy; but also (one might observe at times) from personal rancor, and a feeling of being affronted by the unearned success of others: sour grapes and a grudging feeling of ‘what about me? It isn’t fair. I want my share’.
In a materialistic and capitalistic society, competitive comparisons are inevitable, as resources and benefits, including public acclaim, are perceived as limited. This is true of every group of human beings who have ever been congregated in a competitive mass. 
Jonathan Swift, in his early thirties 300 years ago, observed this phenomenon, in A Tale Of A Tub:
‘Whoever has an ambition to be heard in a crowd must press, and squeeze, and thrust, and climb with indefatigable pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain degree of altitude above them. Now, in all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads their is room enough; but how to reach it is the difficult point, it being as hard to get quit of number as of hell’.
Swift then quotes from Virgil’s Aeneid:
‘Evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est’. Translated, this means: ‘The way downwards is easy, but to retrace your steps into heaven’s air, there is the trouble, there is the toil’.
Many magazines and institutions and organizations which award these prizes and awards for achievement play on the human desire to excel, an evolutionary urge at its most primal. With titles evoking the multi-level strata of the feudal social hierarchy itself, they endorse the belief that amongst the Fortune 500 is the best place to be.
And, like multi-level structures from Utah to Udaipur, they evangelize the ideal of unremitting effort, and ceaseless ‘trouble and toil’, by which an individual becomes ‘worthy’ of such emplacement.
This hustle narrative is of course only really true in a society where all individuals are on an equal footing and have equal access to resources. Hard work alone does not hoist a person to the apex of the pyramid structure. And this is where community support and social engineering come in, often entirely unacknowledged by the judges and the award nominees: the backing of parents, patrons and investors, not only financially, in terms of trust funds set up by parents and grandparents, but in terms of less visible social capital - introductions, alliances and connections.
And this is also what makes talented and under-resourced people so
bitter. How do we compare the achievements of people who are so differently resourced? It is a false statement to describe a ‘30 under 30’ who has access to substantial support and opportunity gained via their family connections as a ‘self-made’ person. How can a comparatively unresourced person compete, or hope to even be in the running, with such inherent inequity being disguised from the public? The numbing notion of the closed circle of fortune and fame is thus enforced, in the glossy pages and the exclusive spaces reserved for the privileged in perpetuity.
People are now calling for a disclosure of assets by the nominees for awards such as these, so that such inequities, operating to disadvantage some, can be seen for what they are.
Talent does not discriminate, and grit and a strong work ethic are not limited to the relatively dispossessed. It could be argued actually that those who are propped up and cushioned by family wealth and connections are more likely to be weak, spineless, untalented and lacking in resilience and survival skills, never having had to earn their own living or balance a budget. Studies of wealthy families over three generations show that getting is not the same as keeping and consolidating. Just as it is easier to fall than to rise, in the Virgil quotation, it is easier to spend than to earn or hold onto wealth. So, in fact, unearned wealth is only a temporary asset.
In the race of life, the climbing of the mountain of our individual aspiration, we can trust that everything we contain within our character will be challenged and tested by life’s events. We can even the odds, adjusting as we go. And the resentment and the rage, which people in a society where few are perceived as privileged often express, at the unjust distribution of resources which has hampered and blocked their progress, does not take into account that it is not what we inherit but what we create, that makes us.
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