Distinguishing Quality If The Silver Platter Was Taken Away: The Difference Between Potential and Privilege.
Title and talent.
Terms that aren’t even synonymous with one another but have begun to overlap that it’s hard to tell them apart.
With how much this generation seems to favor making a name for yourself as well as being known as someone influential despite the lack of credibility, people have begun to disregard the importance of giving someone a platform because of what they can do and instead emphasize more on who they are.
What makes someone worthy to have an online presence that’s so heavily praised? To have people fawn over them and give them worldwide recognition? For people to say that this specific personality is the type that the younger generation should look up to?
Some might argue that people should just mind their business and let other people like what they like considering life is too short of taking things too seriously. Not everything has to be analyzed in-depth, and although I do understand the rebuttal of “live and let live” I think there’s a ripple effect at stake here when we incessantly ignore the value of well-made content that is laced with intricacy all because we can’t bear its complex meanings.
Of course, not all media has to be deep and abstract for an audience to enjoy and appreciate it, sometimes having to engage in something because it’s fun and indulgent is just as meaningful and purposeful, as well.
We shouldn’t have to go the extra mile to prove that our works and our efforts are deserving of recognition, sometimes just being able to create for creation’s sake is good enough.
Not everyone has to have an extravagant set of skills to be respected for what they do, in the end, everyone deserves to be given a chance, regardless of what they can bring to the table because you’ll never know when you’ll encounter the next well-acclaimed artist.
… But it seems as though as the days have progressed, this adage has been ignored when determining whether someone deserves to be given opportunities that’ll allow them to showcase their potential.
It’s becoming less about recognizing someone’s talent and giving them the appropriate resources to further develop their skills and possibly invest in their art, and more about preserving what has already been known to maintain a standard.
To delegate the same type of content and faces that are akin to what’s already been shown before in fear of trying something different and having it backfire on you.
From what I’ve noticed in the mainstream media and all types of corporations these days, they are more inclined to redundancy just for the sake of getting guaranteed results for as long as the general public still isn’t sick of it.
Even if it means applying the absolute bare minimum.
So it doesn’t really matter if something is overplayed or if we’re just nitpicking the same old faces in a crowd bursting with potential — because in this world that we live in, people have a tendency to fixate on gaining the awaited accomplishments than they are on about implementing the work that’s needed to achieve them.
It’s one thing to look at a previous piece of work and take inspiration from it, but recycling the same thing over and over again because you refuse to take risks is another.
Or to include diversity in the media you’re showing because you’re too hung up on the reaction you’ve gotten in the past and you’re too greedy to let it go.
Setting a norm that exclusively caters to one specific group, building a glass ceiling other people can’t seem to shatter no matter how hard they try, and although some have attempted to deconstruct this barrier, others are just as desperately building it right back for the sake of gatekeeping something that was already handed to them.
Considering you wouldn’t have oppression without the oppressors.
The kind that relies too much on connections, a person’s upbringing, financial background, and public status even though none of those things signify reliability— it doesn’t matter as long as someone has a famous last name slapped right across their birth certificate or if someone from their family has close relations with the person they’re planning to work for.
Instantly granting them a position that they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise if it weren’t for the convenience of who they are and where they came from.
Someone doesn’t even need the luxury of a famous last name for them to get what they want, sometimes being able to look a certain way manages to get you places.
Disregarding the need to prove why you deserve to be given this job and what you have to offer to further excel at it — those questions simply do not matter anymore because employers would much rather look at someone’s resume and see that they already fit the basic criteria of white and middle class and let those defining factors earn their stamp of approval.
It’s not about someone’s passion, creativity, hard work, or what makes them different anymore. If anything, the more that you resemble what’s already been fawned over, the easier it’ll be for you to get a job that won’t require much effort in garnering appeal when your looks were already made for that.
We’ve been so consumed by quick and easy ways of becoming successful that it doesn’t matter whether our efforts are inadequate and mediocre at best — and that’s not to say you have to bend over backward trying to prove that you’re the next Michelangelo just to be given an opportunity.
But the more that we keep perpetuating this mindset of “Work smarter not harder.” that is mostly preached by individuals who came from some sort of generational wealth that granted them the sufficient resources that have always been available to them since the day they were born — that’s when it starts to become a problem.
If you think about it, the same people who are always up your face telling you how you should strategize your career path saying if you have the potential to be who you want to be, you wouldn’t have gone out of your way to apply for an ordinary 9–5 job, as if you had any other choice.
Implying that if you were any good, you wouldn’t have to conform to manual labor, you’d already be in the industry you’d want to work in.
Letting them sermonize you with their revolutionary takes — not realizing that if we take away the same privileges that allowed them to foster that mentality — they’d be fretting over the same problems that we have to face as average working-class people who need to survive in order to accomplish our own goals and dreams.
These things are tied to a deeper systematic issue that goes beyond overnight success and a twinge of good luck — because if we look at the bigger picture here, nothing is ever that easy unless you have a support system that you know you can always fall back on in case things fail and you need an alternative.
But that’s basically suggesting everyone has this kind of luxury which isn’t true.
This is why it’s very crucial that we take into reconsideration who we decide to give our money to and who we choose to take advice from and who we decide to look up to as our main source of motivation because a lot of the time, their circumstances are painstakingly much different from ours that’s why they were granted the kind of lifestyle that you rave about and aspire to have someday.
It’s especially more important that we’d be aware that whatever happens in our working conditions when we, for example, get rejected from the job we try to apply to because someone from a more renowned background gets picked instead of us, that it is way out of our control and is a matter of biases and prejudices than it is that we’re simply not good enough.
There are people who are average at best in their careers who are claimed as talented just because the people before them in their family already built a legacy around their name which they can use to their own advantage — even though they don’t possess the same level of talent as their previous family members and it’s all purely based on subjectivity.
It also ties back to racial discrimination, and classism that incites employers to think that only a specific group of people are able to draw hype around their brand and so they will keep repurposing the same actors, artists, performers, and entertainers based on what they think is ideal.
When on the other side of the media that’s already shown is an endless list of new faces who have so much more to offer but aren’t able to because they can’t afford the right equipment, and classes that are deemed mandatory.
We place so much emphasis on appeal than we do on the actual quality of the work, and if we just take a moment to really dissect all aspects of what’s trending and try to determine if it lives up to the hype and or if its the hype that’s supplying its relevance — that’s when we’ll be able to reevaluate the content that we are mindlessly consuming.
So I ask you this:
If the food you’ve always bragged about eating was somehow delivered on a different plate without your knowledge, the type that the people around you have used and not the same silver platter that deep down, you know is the reason why you brag about the meal in the first place:
Would the food still taste the same?
Would you still gladly swallow it… or would you spit it out because of where the food came from?
