Demographic Lotteries
2025-12-16
I read this article posted by a friend in a Discord server earlier this morning. To summarize, the article is a several-thousand-word diatribe on younger white males becoming ostracized from prestigious institutions. The writer (a younger white guy) laments on being passed up for a career as a television writer. He spends most of the article quoting demographic statistics from several industries, namely media, academia, medicine, law, and tech. White men used to be a strong majority, but their representation has dwindled. The writer of the article points out that this has been a result of a decade of DEI initiatives and a surreptitious collusion against younger white guys. Essentially, the claim made in the article is that institutions have become less focused on merit and have become increasingly identitarian.
As a younger white guy myself (younger than the author, a 40-something millennial), I haven't really felt the pains that he was describing. Granted, I haven't gone out and tried applying for positions at big newspapers or attempted to become a staff writer for a network television show or pursued tenure at an Ivy League university, but even in my experiences in college and at work, I haven't felt a strong sense of identitarianism either way.
I went to the University of Texas and got accepted there automatically because I had a high enough class rank in high school. I didn't get into the business school like I had hoped for, so instead I spent most of my time as a student figuring out what major I could even get as an "undeclared." At that point, though, I had enough of the university life and felt like I wasn't going to get what I wanted for my career with a degree, so I dropped out.
I never blamed my lack of acceptance into UT's degree programs on my whiteness. Instead, I internalized the lack of acceptance into those programs as a personal failure. It was my fault that I couldn't do it. It was me who was not good enough. As a younger white guy today, it's easy to take the piss on things like DEI initiatives and build resentments over a different-looking person getting hired over you and ascending to a senior position in record time, but those things are neither applicant's fault. Instead, it's the institutions themselves that need to be examined.
The truth is, being something like a writer or an academic or some kind of managerial professional is ultimately a much cozier job than many. It's a nice gig to sit inside and clack away at a computer all day and get paid very well as opposed to working outside in dangerous conditions doing dangerous work and getting paid pennies on the dollar. It doesn't matter if you're a young white guy or a black lesbian—a white collar job is just a better deal. This heightened competition for these jobs has become utterly contrived and not based on talent or even pedigree. It's a fucking lottery. I'd rather just not even play a rigged game at all.
I reflect on these things and again wonder about my own hopes and dreams for my work. Clearly, money is off the table. Prestige seems to be a more fleeting thing as well. Whether the prestigious institutions want me or not isn't even the issue. The relevance of the institutions themselves is waning. Still, I wonder where space for my kind of work will go. I wonder and wonder, yet never find myself with a satisfactory answer. My work here feels like a complete shot in the dark, a Hail Mary, and many times nothing at all. What will I have after all of this is said and done?
It doesn't matter. I play the lottery either way.
No matter what I get, I'll still have to give it all away in the end.