Quick quiz, no scoring, nobody's watching.
Name the person who worked out that washing your hands between patients might stop women from dying in childbirth. Name whoever figured out how to keep the concrete in your building from crumbling in a mild tremor. Name the person who wrote the grammar rules you are currently using, unconsciously, flawlessly, to read this sentence. Name your grandmother's favorite teacher.
Now name five people who are famous for being famous. I'll wait. Actually I won't, because you did it in about four seconds and so did I, and neither of us feels great about it.
Here's the part that should bother us more than it does: every single object in the room you're in right now — the light, the glass, the coating on the glass, the antibiotic you took in 2011 that is the only reason you're here to read this — was put there by somebody whose name would not survive a round of trivia night. And the culture has arrived at a broad, unspoken agreement that these people are boring.
They built the whole thing. And we filed them under boring.
So the question I want to dive deeply into today isn't "why are people so shallow." That question is a trap and it makes us stupid. The question is harder: if you were sitting across from a bright seventeen-year-old tonight, and she asked you whether it's idiotic to want to spend her life on physics, or on translation, or on teaching ninth-grade chemistry in a school with a leaking roof — what would you honestly say? Not the inspirational version. The version you'd actually stake her life on.
I've been asked that question. I gave a bad answer. This is my attempt at a better one.
First, a small demolition
Before we get to the mourning, let me knock down part of the monument, because the story we tell about the past is about forty percent nostalgia and it's making our diagnosis worse.
Yes, there was a time when a scientist could be a genuine popular celebrity. When the 1919 eclipse observations came back and confirmed Einstein's predictions about starlight bending, he became a global famous person, mobbed on tours, the way a musician would be. Marie Curie toured America and was received by presidents. Alexander von Humboldt was, for a stretch of the nineteenth century, one of the most famous men alive — cities and currents and penguins are named after him. Victor Hugo's funeral in 1885 reportedly drew something in the range of a million people into the streets of Paris, which is a number that makes modern stadium tours look modest. Carl Sagan made a television series about the cosmos and became a household face. This is all real. It happened.
And now the other column.
Gregor Mendel worked out the basic mechanism of heredity and died more or less unknown to science; his work sat ignored for decades. Emily Dickinson published fewer than a dozen poems in her lifetime out of nearly eighteen hundred. Herman Melville, having written the novel that would eventually be shoved at every teenager in the English-speaking world, spent his last stretch of working life as a customs inspector on the New York docks, and his death barely registered. Van Gogh's commercial career is famously a rounding error. For every Humboldt with a current named after him, there were ten thousand naturalists, schoolteachers, midwives, engineers, and translators who lived and worked and died in complete, permanent obscurity, and whose names we don't know precisely because we never knew them.
So the golden age was real for a handful of people and imaginary for everyone else. What we're actually feeling nostalgic about is survivorship bias with a nice frame around it.
Why does this matter? Because if you misdiagnose the disease as "we used to worship thinkers and now we don't," you'll prescribe the wrong medicine. You'll try to make scientists famous. You'll build a campaign. You'll get a physicist a slot on a talk show and call it a win.
That's not the problem. The problem is somewhere less glamorous, which is where problems usually live.
The thing that actually collapsed
Here's what I think actually broke, and it isn't the pantheon. It's the floor.
For most of the modern era, there was a stable, unspectacular, livable middle for people who did serious work. Not fame. Status. There's an enormous difference and we've lost the vocabulary for it.
The town doctor was not famous. He was known. The high school Arabic teacher was not on television. She was the person whose opinion mattered at every family gathering in a four-street radius, and whose former students, forty years old and balding, still stood up when she entered a room. The newspaper had a science correspondent with a desk and a salary and a pension. The university had a librarian who knew things, was paid to know things, and would still be paid to know things in twenty years. The lab had technicians who could keep an instrument alive with a screwdriver and a grudge, and they had contracts.
None of these people were celebrities. All of them had two things that turn out to be the actual load-bearing beams of a vocation: enough money to live an ordinary adult life, and enough local recognition to feel that the life meant something to someone.
That middle is what has been steadily dismantled — through adjunctification, through the collapse of local press, through short contracts and grant cycles and hiring freezes, through inflation eating fixed salaries, through the specific catastrophe that happened to public sector pay in my own country. And here's the mechanism people miss: a profession recruits with its stars but survives on its middle. Nobody enters physics expecting a Nobel. They enter expecting a job — a decent, respectable, ordinary job doing something they find beautiful. Take away the ordinary job and the Nobel becomes a lottery ticket, and lottery tickets attract a very different kind of player than careers do.
We didn't stop honoring intellectuals. We stopped paying them a wage that permits a normal life, and then, some years later, we noticed that our children weren't interested, and we decided this was a mystery about values.
The tyranny of the comparable number
There's a second machine running underneath the first one, and it's newer, and I think it's doing more damage than we've admitted.
Recognition used to be local because it had nowhere else to go. If you were the best oud player in your neighborhood, you were the best oud player in your neighborhood, full stop — there was no live feed of a nine-year-old in Cairo doing it better. If you were the sharpest mind in your graduating class, that fact stood on its own. Local sufficiency wasn't a coping strategy or a wholesome philosophy. It was simply the shape of available information.
Then we built a machine that makes everything comparable to everything, instantly, in public, using a single number.
Followers. Views. Citations, actually — academia had this disease early, and h-indices did to scholars roughly what engagement metrics later did to everyone else. Once a quantity is public and comparable, three things happen automatically. You know where you rank. Someone else always ranks higher. And the number, which was invented to measure the thing, quietly becomes the thing.
The cruelty here is mathematical rather than moral. On a global comparison scale with a single axis, almost everyone is losing almost always. Your brilliant local classroom, your solid decent paper, your good album that six hundred people love — all of it now arrives to you pre-labeled as small. It isn't small. It's ranked small, which is a different sentence that we have not learned to hear differently.
And a young person entering the world reads all of this before they read anything else. They don't first learn that chemistry is beautiful. They first learn that there is a public scoreboard, and that chemistry does not appear on it.
Where my own hands stop being clean
I should stop here and admit something, because otherwise this becomes another piece where a man in a chair blames the culture for a market he participates in every single day.
I run a magazine. I write headlines. I have, more than once, taken a piece I believed in and retitled it with something sharper, something with a hook in it, something engineered to catch the exact reflexive attention I have spent the last three sections describing as corrosive. I have chosen an image because it performs. I have looked at a beautiful, careful, difficult essay and thought: this will do nothing. And I have published the other one first.
I check analytics before I've finished my coffee. There are mornings the number is good and I feel briefly, chemically, like a person of consequence, and mornings the number is flat and I read my own work as if it were written by a fraud. That is not a stable relationship with the truth. That's a slot machine with a byline.
So when I say the culture rewards the hollow, understand that I'm not standing outside the culture pointing at it. I'm inside, holding a lever, pulling it, and complaining about the noise.
I don't think this disqualifies the argument. I think it's the only honest place to argue from, and I think anyone making this case from a position of claimed purity is either lying or has an income source they'd rather not discuss. The market for attention isn't a weather system that happened to us. It's a set of daily choices, made by millions of people including me, mostly for defensible small reasons, adding up to something none of us would have chosen on purpose.
Which is, incidentally, how almost every large bad thing is built.
In defense of the people we love to blame
Now let me do something that may cost me a little goodwill: I don't think influencers are the villain of this story, and I think making them the villain is how we avoid the real conversation.
Start with the arithmetic. The overwhelming majority of people producing content for a living are not wealthy. They are freelancers with no employer, no contract, no sick leave, no pension, and an income that can be halved by an algorithm change decided in a meeting they'll never hear about. They work constantly. They're on call to a comment section that includes people who will discuss their face. The famous ones are visible precisely because they're rare, which is the same survivorship bias we applied to Einstein twenty minutes ago, just pointed at a different target.
So the dream of influence isn't shallow. It's a lottery ticket, and lottery tickets sell best exactly where the ordinary routes are blocked. Show me a place where the young are most convinced that visibility is the only ladder, and I'll show you a place where the normal ladders — stable employment, functioning institutions, promotion by competence — have rotted through. In my country you don't need to look far. When a system runs on connections rather than merit, going viral starts to look less like vanity and more like the only meritocracy on offer. At least the algorithm doesn't ask who your uncle is.
And one more thing, the one that stings a little: some of the people doing the best public work on earth right now are, functionally, influencers. The doctor who spent the pandemic explaining aerosols patiently to a hostile timeline. The mathematician making videos so beautiful that teenagers learn linear algebra voluntarily. The classicist doing philology in short vertical clips. They didn't sell out. They noticed that explaining is half the job and that the half was going undone.
The binary — substance over here, attention over there — is comfortable and false. What's actually scarce isn't attention or substance separately. It's people who have both, and the institutions willing to fund the years of silence it takes to develop the first one.
The reason nobody panics
Here's what makes this an invisible threat rather than a loud one: the damage runs on a twenty-year delay, and no political or commercial cycle is that long.
A country that stops producing physicists does not notice next quarter. It doesn't notice next year. The existing physicists keep going. The hospitals keep running on equipment maintained by people trained in the eighties. The bridges keep standing because the engineers who designed them are still alive to be consulted. The literature keeps being taught by teachers educated when teaching was a serious career. Everything looks fine, which is the whole problem, because everything is fine — for now — on inherited capital nobody is replacing.
Then a generation retires. And the gap is discovered all at once, in the form of things that can no longer be done: a machine nobody can repair, an archive nobody can read, a language nobody can translate out of, a disease nobody local is studying, a body of national literature with no one left who can teach it in the original. You can't import your way out of some of these on short notice, because the training pipeline for the person you'd need to hire is itself twenty years long, and it starts with a fourteen-year-old being interested.
This is why the metaphor of the "brain drain" is slightly wrong. A drain implies water leaving a full basin. What's actually happening in a lot of places, mine included, is closer to a tap that was turned off some years ago while everyone stood around discussing the water still in the basin.
And it's why nobody panics. Panic requires a visible event. There is no headline for a child who would have become an epidemiologist decided at sixteen that it looked like a losing proposition. That's not an event. That's a non-event, repeated a hundred thousand times, and it will only become an event decades later, at which point it will be reported as a crisis that came from nowhere.
The people who could have prevented it will be dead or forgotten, which is, as we've established, the standard career outcome in this line of work.
The part where I stop being funny
I want to be plain for a while, because the next thing doesn't deserve wit.
You cannot recruit people to a vocation that will not let them live. Everything else in this essay is commentary; this is the text.
I have watched a chemistry teacher — genuinely gifted, the kind of teacher who makes a subject look like a door rather than a wall — leave for a job in the Gulf because his salary here had been reduced, by currency collapse, to something that could not cover his son's school fees at the school where he himself taught. He didn't leave because he stopped loving chemistry. He left because loving chemistry was not a form of payment accepted by anyone he owed money to. He is a good teacher in another country now, and the students who would have had him do not know what they lost, because you never know what you lost.
I have watched research groups thin out one departure at a time, each one individually reasonable. I have watched a public university's payroll turn into a bitter joke told in three currencies. I have watched people who spent nine years training in a specialty end up doing something adjacent and lesser and stable, and be right to.
And I have heard, in that same period, an enormous amount of encouragement addressed at the young. Follow your passion. Money isn't everything. Do what you love and you'll never work a day. Every one of those sentences, spoken to someone with no floor under them, is a request that they subsidize the public good with their own poverty. We're asking individuals to personally absorb a cost that we, collectively, refused to pay. And then we praise them for it, which is cheaper than paying them, and feels almost as good.
So if you want to know why the smart seventeen-year-old is looking at a camera instead of a laboratory, the first answer isn't cultural and it isn't generational. Somebody has to be able to pay rent. Any analysis that skips that is a luxury analysis, and we have run out of room for those.
The second collapse: what we stopped showing them
Money is the floor. But there's a second failure, and this one is squarely our fault as teachers, editors, parents, and writers — my fault, professionally.
We stopped showing people the process and started showing them only the result, and the result is genuinely boring. Of course it is. A finished theorem is boring. A textbook is a corpse with excellent posture. A monument to a scientist tells you nothing about the six years he was wrong.
Nobody in the history of the world fell in love with a conclusion. People fall in love with a live problem — with the moment where someone says nobody knows why this happens, and the room goes quiet in a good way. That's the drug. That's the whole recruitment pitch, and it's free, and we bury it under curriculum.
Think about what we hand a fifteen-year-old. We hand her the periodic table as a fact to memorize rather than as one of the greatest acts of pattern-recognition in human history, made by a man arranging cards and leaving gaps for elements that hadn't been found yet — and then being right about the gaps. We hand her a poem with a worksheet stapled to it. We hand her grammar as a set of rules to be punished by rather than as the astonishing fact that her mouth can generate a sentence never before spoken in the history of the species and another person's brain will catch it.
If you present the most interesting thing humans have ever done as a compliance exercise, you've done more damage to science than any influencer ever managed. The word "boring" wasn't imposed on these fields from outside by the entertainment industry. We coated them in it ourselves, thoroughly, over twelve years of schooling, with a straight face.
And here's the uncomfortable corollary: the people currently making science and literature look thrilling online are doing the job that formal education was supposed to do and largely stopped doing. They didn't steal the audience. They picked it up off the floor where we'd left it.
So what do you actually tell her?
Back to the seventeen-year-old. She's still sitting there. She's asked a real question and she can smell a motivational poster from three rooms away, because her generation was raised on a diet of them and has developed antibodies.
Here's what I'd say now, having given a worse answer once.
First, the honest odds. If you want fame, this path is a bad instrument. Most excellent scientists are not famous. Most excellent poets are read by a few thousand people. Most excellent teachers are known to a few hundred students, some of whom will remember them with startling force in thirty years and never say so. If public recognition is what you're hungry for, say so out loud, without shame — it's a normal human hunger, not a defect — and then choose accordingly, with your eyes open. Don't do a PhD as an oblique route to being admired. That's a nine-year detour to disappointment.
Second, the actual compensation, which is not a consolation prize. The work gives you a small number of things almost nothing else gives. It gives you a problem that outlives your moods — something you can return to on the bad days that doesn't care how you feel, and which will still be there, still interesting, when you are. It gives you the specific physical pleasure of competence, which is underrated in every conversation about meaning: the moment your hands know the machine, your ear knows the interval, your eye catches the flaw in the argument before your conscious mind does. It gives you time that accumulates rather than evaporates. Ten years on the scoreboard leaves you with nothing but an older number. Ten years on a craft leaves you with a different brain.
Third, the witnesses. You will not be famous. You will, if you're lucky and persistent, be known — by a handful of people who understand exactly what you did and how hard it was. Three or four of them. Maybe six. I want to be careful here, because there's a saccharine version of this point that I refuse to make: I'm not going to tell you that six people is secretly better than six million. It isn't obviously better. It's smaller and quieter and there are nights it will feel like nothing. But it's real in a way that a number cannot be, because those people can see your actual work rather than its silhouette. That's not a consolation. It's a different currency, and you should know it's the one you'll be paid in before you sign.
Fourth, learn to explain what you do. This is not a betrayal of seriousness. The contempt some serious people hold for communication is a luxury purchased with someone else's funding, and the bill has come due. Learn to write a clear paragraph. Learn to stand up and make a stranger care for ninety seconds. It doubles the value of everything else you'll ever make.
Fifth, and this is the one I'd underline: get the money question settled early and unromantically. Find out what the field actually pays, in your actual country, at year one and year ten. Find out who funds it and what happens when they stop. Build a floor — a skill that sells, a second language, a trade, something. Not because the work is unworthy of full commitment, but because a floor is what lets you stay committed when the funding cycle turns. Every artist and researcher I know who's still working at fifty solved this problem somehow. The ones who didn't aren't in the conversation anymore, which is exactly why the survivors' advice sounds so much more romantic than it should.
What actually helps, at the scale where we have any power
I don't have a policy program and I'd distrust myself if I did. But there are a few things I've watched work at the small scale, which is the only scale I have any real evidence about.
Pay people. Actually. Not with exposure, not with a certificate, not with a plaque in a hallway. If you run anything — a school, a magazine, a lab, a collective — the single most pro-science, pro-literature, pro-teaching act available to you is a wage that permits an ordinary life. Everything else is decoration on top of that.
Restore local honor, deliberately. Global comparison is unbeatable, so stop competing with it and rebuild the thing it replaced. Name the room after the retired physics teacher. Put the technician's name on the paper. Have the school invite back the alumna who does water engineering, not just the one who's on television. Recognition that's specific and local and from people who understand the work is the only kind that reliably survives contact with a bad week.
Show the mess. Teach the wrong turns. Show a draft with its throat cut. Show the failed experiment, the notebook, the six years of being wrong. Not as an inspirational lesson about perseverance — as the actual content, because the mess is where the interest lives and the polish is where it dies.
Protect the middle, not just the stars. Scholarships for the top one percent are cheap glory. What sustains a field is the habitable ordinary job: the lab manager, the sub-editor, the librarian, the technician, the person who keeps the archive. If your field has only geniuses and nothing beneath them, it isn't a profession. It's a lottery with a dress code.
Stop using "boring" as a description of things that require patience. That's not what boring means. Boring is empty. Difficult is not boring. Slow is not boring. We've let one word do the work of three and it's cost us a generation of interest.
What we're actually asking
Here's the thing I circled for three days before I could write it down.
When we ask "how do we get young people to value science and literature and teaching again," a good part of what we're doing — I'm doing — is asking for reassurance. We want to be told that the life we chose was not a mistake. We want the culture to confirm, retroactively, that the years we spent on something quiet and difficult and unpaid were the right years, well spent, and not a long detour taken by people who couldn't read a room.
That's why the complaint has so much heat in it. It isn't really about the young; the young are fine, and are making rational choices in a badly designed system, and will build the next thing whether or not we approve of their haircuts. It's about us. It's about a specific fear that arrives around three in the morning: that we picked the hard road for nothing, that the work will disappear without a trace, that we could have been visible instead and chose invisible without knowing that's what we were choosing.
I can't dissolve that fear, and I'm not going to pretend the work is its own reward, because on some nights it flatly isn't and you'd know I was lying. What I can say is this: the fear is about legacy, and legacy is the wrong frame. The chemistry teacher who left for the Gulf is not remembered by most of his students. But the ones who took organic chemistry because of him are treating patients right now, and the causal chain is real whether or not anyone can trace it, and it does not require his name to keep working. That's not a comfort exactly. It's just true. The effect survives the credit. It always has. Every single thing in the room you're sitting in is proof of that, which is where we came in.
The invisible people are not invisible because they failed. They're invisible because the thing they made became infrastructure, and infrastructure, when it works, disappears. That's what success looks like in these professions: your work becomes so ordinary that nobody can see it anymore. It's a strange, thankless, unglamorous kind of achievement, and it is the one that has built literally everything.
We will always need those people. That will not change. The only real question is whether we're willing to pay them, honor them locally, show their working, and stop describing patience as boredom — or whether we'll keep asking the young to be heroic on our behalf and calling it encouragement.
Where I've landed, in practice
I don't have a grand closing. I have a rule, and it's small, and it's about the only thing in this essay I've actually implemented.
I don't open the analytics until I've done two hours of work.
That's it. That's the whole reform. It sounds trivial and it isn't, because it means the first thing that touches my brain each day is the sentence I'm trying to fix rather than a number telling me where I rank. Some mornings I break it. Most mornings I don't. It has changed what I write more than any strategy meeting I've ever sat in.
And there's a second thing, which costs nothing. Twice a year I write to a teacher. Just an email — the one who taught me to hear a sentence, the one who made me learn the periodic table properly rather than as a poster. Nothing lengthy, nothing sentimental. Here's the specific thing you did, here's where it ended up.
I do it because the honor system we've built pays out in the wrong direction, and because that's a system I can partially override for the cost of ten minutes, and because most of these people have genuinely no idea. One of them wrote back last year, after a very long delay, to say he had assumed for thirty years that none of it had landed anywhere.
It landed. He just never got the number.
Questions To Think About
Think about a subject you now find genuinely interesting that you were taught badly. What specifically was removed in the teaching that made it dull — and could you have found it on your own?
Who is the person whose work you rely on most whose name you don't know? Could you find out?
If you have a public metric attached to anything you do — followers, views, sales, citations, grades — what would change about your work if it were private tomorrow? Is that change something you'd welcome or fear?
Is there a version of "follow your passion" that isn't a request for someone to subsidize the public with their own poverty? What would it have to include to be honest?
When you tell a young person to pursue something meaningful, how much of that is advice to them and how much is reassurance for you? (I found my own answer uncomfortable.)
What's the smallest institution you have any power over — a class, a team, a household, a group chat? What does it currently honor, and what could it honor instead?
What To Actually Do
Write to one teacher this week. Be specific about what they did and where it went. Not gratitude in general — evidence. Most of them never find out.
If you employ or commission anyone, look at what you pay them this month. Exposure isn't a currency. Say the number out loud to yourself and see how it sounds.
Learn one thing badly on purpose. Pick something outside your competence and stay in the beginner phase long enough to remember what patience feels like from the inside. It'll change how you talk about "boring."
If you make anything, show the mess once. Post the draft, the failed run, the version that didn't work. The polished result recruits nobody.
And if you're the seventeen-year-old in this essay: ask the money question early, out loud, to someone ten years into the field. Not because it's the most important question. Because it's the one nobody will volunteer, and the romantic advice you'll get instead has been quietly filtered by everyone who couldn't afford to stay.
0 Comments