The Meritocracy Will See You Now

This one also wasn’t in the original plan. But something kept nagging at me after Issue 1, and after writing 1.1, I finally realized what it was: I’ve been talking about the pyramid as though it’s something out there. A shape society lives in. A structure we can point at and analyze from a safe distance.

But the pyramid isn’t just out there. It’s the voice in your head that tells you what your options are before you’ve thought to question whether those are really all the options.

Let me back up.

For most of recorded history, the only route to financial security available to women was marriage. Not work — women have always worked, backbreakingly, invisibly, unpaid. But security. The kind that means you don’t lose everything if something goes wrong. That required attaching yourself to someone who had access to the system’s resources, which meant attaching yourself to a man. Not because women weren’t capable of generating those resources. Because the system wasn’t built to let them.

And then, slowly and at enormous cost, that started to change. Women fought — at real personal risk — for the right to work, to own property, to hold accounts, to exist in public economic life as something other than a dependent. And hustle culture arrived with a promise: now that the doors are open, the meritocracy will deliver. Work hard enough, make the right choices, climb correctly, and you’ll get there. The pyramid’s oldest lie, repackaged for a generation of women who had just won the right to believe it.

Hooray!

Right?

Except here we are, several generations into that promise, and the choice on the table looks remarkably familiar. You can hustle — pour yourself into a system that opened its doors without restructuring itself, that will work you harder than the men beside you while paying you less and insisting you still carry all the emotional and familial labor. Or you can marry — and if you’re going to do that, the most visible cultural template right now is the tradwife: a full retreat into the domestic sphere dressed up as empowerment and aesthetic. Both choices exist within the pyramid. Neither is freedom. Which collar would you rather wear? Both come with an “I’m exhausted” dog tag. The difference is that one has a bell to let your man know where you are at all times and the other comes with a work phone microchip whose ringer never stays turned off.

I find this uncomfortably personal. I’m single. I’m building something. And I’m aware that the fastest route to financial stability in my life would probably be marrying someone who already has it. Except that the men most likely to have accumulated that kind of security exist near the top of a smaller pyramid inside the relationship — and trading my independence for their stability isn’t security, it’s a different kind of trap. So I’m left doing the math that women have always done: which version of constrained is least constrained? Which compromise costs least?

That’s the pyramid operating as architecture and as assumption simultaneously. Not just a societal shape I can analyze — a set of calculations that run before I’ve questioned whether those are really all the options. The meritocracy told me I could have independence. It didn’t mention the terms and conditions.

And here’s what I keep coming back to: the system that put me in this position was supposed to be working for men. That was the deal. Men sacrifice emotional intimacy, authentic vulnerability, and genuine connection, and in exchange they get security, status, power. Except increasingly, they’re not getting it either. The manosphere is, among other things, the sound of that deal falling apart — men who did what they were told and didn’t get what they were promised, with no emotional vocabulary to process the betrayal and no community to process it in except the one that points an accusing finger at women. The breakdown is visible from here.

The pyramid is failing at meritocracy because using merit to organize a pyramid assumes that a small percentage of people have disproportionately more worth than the wider base. A pyramid is incapable of delivering on a meritocracy’s promise! And a meritocracy is inherently hierarchical—it just names the mechanism by which the hierarchy is enforced.

So yeah. The fiction of an equal opportunity meritocracy is now thin enough to see through.

So what do you do with that?

I don’t think the answer is a bigger, better hustle. I don’t think it’s a retreat into domesticity. I don’t think it’s a rallying cry of “not all men” or of “I choose the bear” (although I, personally, would also choose the bear). Sustained outrage is not the solution. I said this in 1.2 and I’ll say it again: anger is a fire that burns fast and leaves you hollow. It’s called burnout for a reason.

What I keep coming back to is smaller and less dramatic than any of those. Build the circle. Find the people. Strengthen the community you can reach. Join other circles, invite others to yours, claim your own power, focus on what you can control.

My version of that, right now, is writing this newsletter and offering the occasional cozy witch story to someone who needs a few minutes outside the pyramid. It’s a miniscule thing against the backdrop of inescapable violence, riots, genocide, and political instability. But in a system that runs on extraction and isolation, deciding to build something warm and connected is a genuine act of resistance.

And that’s all we can do.

Together, we resist. Together, we endure. Together, we thrive.

Issue 2 is coming. In the meantime — where do you find your circle? I’d love to know.

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