Is It Imposter Syndrome? Or Are We All Imposters?

Insecurity in an age of phonies, hucksters, and nonsense jobs.

by Raquel S. Benedict

Imposter syndrome, we are told, is an epidemic among young professionals, especially those of marginalized backgrounds. Prestigious industries like academia, publishing, and medicine churn out advice columns and host seminars to help rising members overcome this psychological ailment. Women, especially those in coveted upper-level positions, commiserate over their shared feelings of inadequacy. Tina Fey suffers from it. So does Meryl Streep.

Psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes first identified what they called “the Imposter Phenomenon” in a 1978 paper in Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice. They placed the blame on parents who over- or underestimated their daughters’ intelligence. Recent publications and studies, which generalize the phenomenon of Imposter Syndrome to people of all genders, name additional factors: mood disorders, perfectionism, families who put too much pressure on their children to succeed, an individualistic culture focused on personal achievement at all costs, and—for those of marginalized backgrounds—the psychological weight of social prejudice and structural discrimination.

The experts tell you that you’ve been traumatized into devaluing your own talents. That you’ve been brainwashed into believing that you’re a fraud.

But what if your fears are correct?

What if you really are an imposter, and this isn’t a syndrome at all?

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All of us in comfortable white collar industries are impostors. We pretend that our jobs are uniquely difficult. They are not. Most of us spend at least an hour of each day chatting with coworkers, browsing the internet, taking unscheduled coffee breaks, and trying to look busy. We pretend we deserve rewards that retail and hospitality workers lack: health insurance, pensions, paid sick leave, vacation days, the ability to sit down during an eight-hour shift. We do not. We pretend our college degrees are necessary for these jobs, rather than an arbitrary way to prevent upward social mobility for the children of the lower classes. They are not. I have never once needed my linguistics background to fulfill the tasks of my position. A high school graduate with a decent grasp of Microsoft Office absolutely could do my job, but they will never be hired. 

Many of us cannot fully explain what our jobs are to other people or why they are necessary. What, exactly, does a brand liaison or an associate relationship manager do? It does not matter. Those who have actual jobs that make sense and produce genuine value for society—teacher, farmer, firefighter, cook, truck driver—make significantly less money and work under more dangerous conditions.

Many of us cannot fully explain what our jobs are to other people or why they are necessary.

The illusion gets more pronounced the higher up the pyramid we go. CEOs, who make thousands of times as much money as their employees say they work 55-hour weeks. A 2012 Wall Street Journal survey found that eighteen of those hours are spent in meetings (rituals which, as any office worker knows, accomplish nothing). CEOs devote another five hours of their work week to meals. They spend another twenty hours on travel, exercise, personal appointments, and other activities. CEOs claim Pilates class, the daily commute, therapy, sessions, sharing memes as hours worked and holding grudges against comedy websites. The rest of us can not. In all, a CEO’s productive time is limited to twelve hours a week: significantly less time than that of a typical bartender. But CEOs cannot admit that. They must pretend that they work much harder and spend their time much more productively than their underlings in order to justify having a salary thousands of times higher. They are imposters.

Our biggest transportation service, Uber, does not own any cars. Our biggest hotel service, AirBNB, does not maintain property. The richest man in the world owns a company that does, to its credit, manufacture cars sometimes, but they have a nasty habit of randomly swerving into crowds of pedestrians and exploding. Tesla touts itself as a solution to the climate crisis, but much of its profit comes from selling pollution credits so that other companies can continue to churn out greenhouse gases.

The world of arts and entertainment promises escape from the ugliness of mundane industry, a true meritocracy where those with passion and talent and drive can make their dreams come true. It is not true. Most 30-under-30 lists are populated with the children of producers, directors, and wealthy executives. 

Last year, Lin Manuel Miranda, one of the most prominent Latinx artists in the United States, made a movie lamenting the gentrification of Washington Heights. Miranda’s father is a robber baron who built a career on stripping Puerto Rico of its public assets and selling them to American investors. The children of gentrifiers have the finances and the connections to make movies; the children of the gentrified do not. Prominent Hollywood feminists Scarlett Johanson and Kate Winslet willingly worked with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski despite well-known accusations of sexual violence. Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay, who recently taught a Master Class in writing for social justice, published an essay in her magazine that forced a child sexual abuse survivor to publicly out herself. Another prominent feminist writer, who released a book of essays in 2019 titled Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, suffered only temporary career setbacks after her wealthy parents were publicly revealed to have taken part in human trafficking. And so on.

Until recently, the most lucrative form of art was churning out crude jpegs for nerds.

All of these artists tout themselves as fearless voices for social justice. None of them are. They are imposters.

Until quite recently, the most lucrative form of art was not writing or film or music. It was churning out crude, algorithmically-generated jpegs and convincing nerds to spend tens of thousands of dollars on them. That they have collapsed entirely over the past two months was both inevitable and seemingly irrelevant. What are NFTs? Most of their believers couldn’t tell you. It didn’t matter. They were not real. But they somehow generated profit, at least temporarily, and for some reason they generated greenhouse gases as well, and prominent entertainment companies and artists rushed to sell them—just as they will inevitably rush to sell the next doomed-to-fail, flash-in-the-pan scheme.

Everything is fake. Everyone is an imposter. Nothing is real.

Then why does imposter syndrome hit marginalized people the hardest? Perspective, probably. If you’re from a marginalized background, you have spent time in the real world. Maybe you worked at a shitty job you couldn’t afford to quit. Maybe you had to share a dingy apartment with another person. Maybe you’ve been mistreated with no legal recourse. Maybe you had to rely on your genuine skills and intelligence rather than your perceived value. And now you’ve made it. You’ve gotten into a decent career and you have a mortgage but you do not feel fundamentally changed from the person you were before. You know that deep down you are not significantly different than your old neighbors or friends or family members who haven’t made it, and the line of social status separating the two of you is a grand illusion. 

You know it’s not real because you know what real is, and this isn’t it.

White men from affluent backgrounds may not have had this experience. Bill Gates, whose high-powered corporate executive mother convinced IBM to invest in her dropout son’s new business, hasn’t. Jeff Bezos, whose parents gave him a quarter of a million dollars to help start his business, hasn’t. Elon Musk, whose father owned an emerald mine in apartheid South Africa, definitely hasn’t. But in the marrow of their bones, they too know that they are imposters. 

Men of privilege have spent millennia building elaborate psychological shields against this uncomfortable revelation: the Curse of Eve, the Curse of Ham, the Divine Right of Kings, Social Darwinism, Phrenology and its 21st century incarnation Evolutionary Psychology. A truly secure man does not need to justify his position in life with skull shape diagrams and just-so stories about berries. These are the floundering excuses of a con artist caught in a lie.

So what should you do with this feeling? You could use your relative power and influence to try and dismantle the system from within. That is what a real person who truly believes in social justice would do. But that’s really, really hard, and dangerous, and it will probably get you blacklisted from your industry or imprisoned or shot. Far better to make peace with your own imposterhood. Go to that seminar. Talk to a therapist. Watch Shadow and Bone for some reason like this grown adult woman did. Write an essay dunking on people with imposter syndrome without doing anything fundamentally different from the targets of your criticism. Maintain the charade and never, ever get caught.

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