"Why Don't People Appreciate My Hard Work?" Whines the Nepo Hire

When a "successful" individual has benefited from personal advantages such as coming from a wealthy, powerful and well-connected family anyone's pointing out the fact has a way of making them defensive--the relentless defense of extreme inequality that is the basis of so much "conventional wisdom" becoming for them a very personal fight now. Thus rather than saying that yes, life has been very good to them, they can't deny that and they know that it has made a difference and appreciating this they feel some humility, some responsibility, something, anything, that makes for a more complex emotional life than sheer egomania, they trivialize their advantages, as they insist that they have earned and deserve all that they have, for they are not beneficiaries of social "privilege" in the term's true and proper sense (Heavens no!), but instead owe everything they have to "hard work," speaking those two words as if they were a magical incantation that must secure the acquiescence of anyone in anything they have to say.

"I worked hard to have what I do," they say.

Or, expressed in more blatantly self-pitying terms: "Why don't people appreciate my hard work?"

In doing so they are oblivious to how unbelieveably insulting they are being to every person who "works hard"--often far harder than they ever did, if indeed they ever did any hard work--for far, far less than the world has given them. For to say what they do is either to deny others' hard work--or to raise the question of why they had such an extraordinarily higher return on their effort than other people with those personal advantages ruled out as a possible answer, such that one can only conclude that their superior return is a matter of their being superior people.

Putting it another way, the "Why don't people appreciate my hard work?" they are so quick to speak is translatable as:

"I worked hard, and you losers didn't, that's why you're not rich and famous like me," or

"I worked hard--and my hard work got me somewhere because I'm BETTER THAN YOU, so just SHUT UP AND ACCEPT IT LOSERS."

One may add that on top of this undeniable and rather severe insult--the at least implicit claim that those who do not have what they have either failed to work hard, or were in some way deficient--the statement is a great insult to the intelligence of the listener, regardless of whether they are aggrieved in this particular way. For as anyone who is not a complete idiot (i.e. smarter than those throwing their claims of "hard work") is well aware, without opportunity, in many an area of endeavor the kind of opportunity that is very disproportionately enjoyed and often monopolized by those for whom nepotism is a super power (usually, their only one), all of the hard work in the world--and all the talent and everything else that makes up "merit" too--very often amounts to little or nothing but exhaustion and bitterness at the end of a misspent life in which those who failed to do well can only feel that the aspirationalism with which they have been indoctrinated was a cheat and a snare, with those competing most closely with nepotism's beneficiaries without that advantage feeling the fact especially keenly. Indeed, given the choice between a capacity for "hard work" (and other such meritorious qualities), and having the right background, the right connections, from the standpoint of simply getting ahead it is far, far better to have the latter than the former.

Of course, simple and frankly obvious as all this is you won't see this spelled out very often--for the media is staffed by the courtiers of privilege, who, "more royalist than the king" (and the king is pretty damn royalist), cheer for every punch these throw down at the plebs, for these Josiah Bounderbys who so readily whine about their hard work not being appreciated ("No one appreciates me, no one," say they as they clutch the Oscar they have just been awarded) make very clear that much as they demand the world's sympathy for their supposed plight they have no sympathy for anyone else, least of all those to whom the world has been far less kind.