“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.”
I don’t yet know what this week’s issue is going to be about. I was thinking about writing about the Dollar General pricing scandal, and I might still, but as I sat down to write, something annoyed me so that’s where we are starting. A new pet peeve of mine is something I’m calling false self-deprecation. I will explain this. It feels like the new millennial version of “adulting”. That phrase has obviously gotten played out. I hoped the sentiment had gotten worn down too but there is a new version. The phrase “adulting” was dumb in and of itself, but the subtext of “I’m just a kid pretending to be an adult” sentiment was what annoyed me the most. This new false self-deprecation has taken over people in their late 20’s through 30’s and I’m already over it. Here is an example:
I saw this on LinkedIn the other day. His bio brags about his accomplishments but with the tagline “I have no idea what I’m doing.” This is exactly what I’m talking about. This is the new “adulting.” People will post advice or start podcasts and then have some version of “just making it up as I go along.” I don’t know if it’s false humility or just not wanting to take ownership of their advice, but either way it annoys me. Either you know what you’re talking about and I should pay attention to you or you don’t and I shouldn’t. Honestly, if you “have no idea what you’re talking about” or are “just making it up as you go along” then don’t post it or talk about it in an informative way. Have the respect to put in the work of knowing what you’re talking about or have the backbone to own what you say whether it proves right or wrong. Obviously, I say this as someone who writes a lot of silliness and unseriousness, but I don’t pretend to be otherwise genuinely. There is satire, and there is whatever this weird “I’m accidentally smart” thing that’s going on. On the occasions I have written seriously here, I have said so. If someone goes back through and finds evidence of me taking the coward’s way out and saying something like “I don’t know what I’m talking about” after a serious post, then please call me out. I don’t want to be hypocritical.
The post this guy had written was the self aggrandizing crap that is all over LinkedIn. He was heavy handedly patting himself on the back for hiring someone over 55. The post itself was subtextually false self-deprecating. It had some sort of caveat that essentially said, “I thought this was going to be a bad idea but did it anyway and it turned out to be great!” No you didn’t. If you thought he was going to be a bad hire, you wouldn’t have hired him. Stop pretending you lucked into a good hire. You clearly trusted your gut and knew this guy would be good despite his age that would turn other employers away. Own it. Say, “I knew what I was doing and it worked.” It’s ok to even say it was a risk but you believed it would work. Heck, I don’t mind “I made what I thought was the right decision and it was wrong,” but all this new age “I made what I thought was a bad decision on purpose and oopsie poopsie it turned out great!” crap is on my nerves.
Why is positive accountability now associated with pride or arrogance? Is it an overcorrection from the sense that everyone online is showing the greatest version of themselves? Because this half-in-half-out of humility isn’t the fix we’re looking for. It’s ok to be proud of your accomplishments. It’s ok to be confident in who you are even while understanding your weaknesses. It is not arrogance to do good work and own it if held in balance. However, it is not humility to try and wrap ingenuine self-deprecation around pride. If I pee in a bottle and put a Mountain Dew label on it, it isn’t soda. Being arrogant and saying, “I’m not arrogant” doesn’t fix the arrogance problem. Maybe this is what we get for allowing every label to be considered truth.
Maybe my problem isn’t really even with the people doing it, but rather the fact it works at all. Do we all have such imposter syndrome that we relate to people who claim to be bumbling yet lucky fools? Or is it that we are lazy and jealous and don’t want to accept when someone out works us or is more successful so we shame them enough that they pretend to be just like us but with lucky breaks? The truth is successful people do fail. People who succeed are often people who have failed more yet persevered. But to then, after all the hard work of failure, taste success and feel the need to water it down to make it palatable to others is ridiculous.
This is not to say there is no room for humility. In fact, humility is a great thing. We need more genuine humility in our world. Saying you don’t know what you’re doing while also bragging about what you’ve done in a way that is so thinly veiled is not humility though. It honestly feels like the arrogance equivalent of “not to be racist, but…” or, more simply, “no offense” before something offensive. The preluding statement is immediately betrayed by the following truth. C.S Lewis is credited with one of my favorite quotes on humility which is, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.” However, it is his expansion on this idea that speaks clearly to what we are discussing today, “Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.”
I tend to write these issues with a tongue in cheek arrogance. I clearly don’t believe this is the greatest blog/newsletter ever made and you all know I don’t have millions of subscribers, but it would be dishonest and even disrespectful to you all who give me your time and attention most weeks to walk around claiming I’m a bad writer who just word vomits and clicks send. I’m not a great writer in the same way many great novelists or reporters are, but I know I write in a unique and conversational way that people enjoy. I know I am good at weaving together honest introspection, humor, and some creative storytelling. To say otherwise in order to feign ignorance would devalue the writing. It would also devalue you. You all enjoy reading these and give me your time each week. To then go around saying I’m a bad writer who just happens to have an audience says that you don’t care about your time and are simple minded and entertained by nothing. Just like the guy in our example was talking about how he thought he’d made a bad hire that turned out to be good devalues the employee. Rather than standing his ground and honestly saying he thought the candidate would be good and giving that hire the props he deserved, that employee became a supporting character in the guy’s self congratulation.
Well, we never really got to the Dollar General thing. Here is briefly what is happening. Dollar General has been accused of overcharging customers. They label merchandise at a lower price on the floor than what it charges at the register. An investigation by one county’s auditor’s office alone found 20 stores were acting in this manner, with inflated costs ranging from 16.7% to 88.2% of the shelf price. This is going on nationwide. They were also caught selling products that had less volume than listed. Oh yeah, and they were sued for company executives and board members conspiring to artificially boost Dollar General’s stock, which rose from $122 a share in May 2018 to $262 in April 2022. I am officially boycotting Dollar General. They join Chipotle, Bud and Alley’s Trattoria, Apple, and a few other companies as places I will never support. Honestly, the Dollar General price mislabeling scandal thematically fits what we talked about today. Labeling one thing while actually being another. Whether they say the product costs $1 on the shelf but then $1.50 at the register, all that matters is the amount of money they’ll accept. You can label it $1 all day long, but if you don’t accept that price, it isn’t the truth. You can pretend to be a humble and bumbling lucky fool, but will you accept that description of you by others to others? Will you accept people truely viewing you that way? I doubt it. You don’t believe it, don’t say it.
Now, that is some good writing. But maybe I just got lucky…
