On Success, Being Smart, and the Meaning of Life

China and the States are actually pretty similar at their core.

Of course, the two countries have completely different histories, institutions, and cultural traditions. But if we put those grand differences aside for a moment and look at how ordinary people imagine their lives, the resemblance is striking: both societies are intensely competitive, both glorify hard work, both believe in education, and both pursue personal achievement with something close to obsession. A good life, it seems, always means getting into a better school, finding a better job, making more money, gaining higher social status, and then giving the next generation a better place to start.

In China, people know the phrase “knowledge changes destiny.” In America, they know the American Dream. They use different words, but tell the same story underneath: you may not be able to choose where you come from, but if you work hard enough and become good enough, you can change your fate.

This is the story of meritocracy—an enormously attractive story, and unfortunately a false one.

Meritocracy has never merely answered an institutional question—how should social resources be distributed? It has also quietly answered a much more personal, and much more dangerous, question:

What kind of life counts as a life worth living?

Once effort, ability, and success are tied together, success is no longer merely a fortunate outcome. It gradually becomes proof of a person’s ability, character, and even worth: because he is successful now, he must have worked hard; because he worked hard, he deserves his success. Failure, in turn, no longer merely means bad circumstances. It increasingly becomes a judgment on the person.

Cause and effect are reversed: the fact of success becomes the justification for success. Underneath it lies an even deeper promise:

Climbing the meritocratic ladder is the most worthwhile way to live. This is taken to be self-evident.

The Beyond Brought into This World

But why do people need this ladder so badly? Because people want to live with purpose and meaning. In premodern society, this was never really a question. Religion had already packaged the answers: why life was worth living, why suffering was worth enduring, what counted as good, and where everything ultimately led—God had already told you.

Then God died.

The problem is that God died, but our need for meaning did not. Modern people had to keep looking for something else to perform the same function, and meritocracy is probably the most successful replacement. It preserved the most important structure of religion while secularizing everything: salvation became success, virtue became ability, grace became credentials, and final judgment became social ranking.

It no longer promises another world, but tells you that salvation still exists; it has simply been deferred to the future. Keep becoming better, keep climbing higher, and one day you will reach a more successful version of yourself—and therefore, supposedly, a more worthy one.

This is the beyond brought into this world. We no longer wait for heaven after death; we wait for life after success. Modern people can spend most of their lives preparing for that “real life,” always believing that if they can just climb a little higher, everything will finally make sense.

This may be the most ingenious part of meritocracy: heaven is always one rung higher.

When the Elevator Stops Going Up

Meritocracy grows best in an age of ascent, because as long as most people’s lives are actually improving, no one has much reason to doubt that “hard work pays off.” Someone gets more education than their parents, moves to a bigger city, finds a more respectable job, and really does enjoy comforts and choices that the previous generation never had. Personal effort, social progress, and the meaning of life are naturally stitched together, and few people feel any need to ask how much of this came from themselves and how much came from simply happening to be inside an elevator going up. Doing push-ups in a rising elevator still means that you are, in fact, moving upward.

The real problem begins when the elevator slows down, or stops.

When someone has studied more, worked longer, and acquired more skills, yet finds that they may still be unable to afford the kind of home their parents could once afford, or obtain the stability and room for upward mobility that the previous generation took for granted, the myth of meritocracy naturally begins to collapse. The previous generation’s success is easily retold as the product of ability and diligence, while forgetting that asset prices, demographics, globalization, urbanization, and economic growth were themselves enormous historical tailwinds. When those tailwinds disappear, those who come later may work just as hard, or be even more capable, and still not get the same result.

At this point, what begins to collapse is not only meritocracy’s promise of fair distribution, but its promise about the meaning of life. If effort no longer guarantees ascent, why should we keep making the effort? Why should the life promised by meritocracy still count as the self-evidently “right” life?

And so those of us living in the modern world are forced to give up the dream of meritocracy and face again the cruel question it had temporarily hidden:

If hard work proves nothing, why should I keep living this way?

Loving Wisdom, or Loving to Prove You Are Smart

A PhD is a good example.

Doctor of Philosophy, at least by name, ought to have something to do with the “love of wisdom”: being interested in questions for their own sake, wanting to know why things are the way they are, wanting to take apart the concepts we have learned to take for granted, and wanting to know what an explanation actually explains—and what it hides.

But the modern PhD can easily move in a completely different direction. A better school, a better advisor, better papers, a better placement, and then a better title. Research itself joins the meritocratic ladder. Of course, this may also be a form of complicity: without the illusion of meritocracy, why would so many young people go do a PhD?

“I want to know the answer to this question” and “I need a question I can publish” are two completely different things. A person can love research and still care about papers and career, and there is no need to pretend to be above reality. But take away the papers, citations, prestige, and the next job—what is left?

If you are not interested in why things are the way they are, if you feel no suspicion toward concepts and assumptions, and if you have no desire to understand the world itself, then what exactly are you doing a PhD for? We all know the answer: because it is the natural next rung on the meritocratic ladder.

And so a degree named after the love of wisdom becomes the ultimate credential for proving that one is smart.

When Being “Smart” Is No Longer Scarce

Then AI arrived. I often say that even though we have already watched AI do this and that—write code, make images—we are still, all of us, seriously underestimating what AI will do to us.

One of AI’s more fundamental consequences may be the collapse of meritocracy itself. As I said above, a PhD remains something like the ultimate credential for proving that one is smart. But now the question is:

Are you smarter than AI?

If that question was still debatable two years ago, by 2026 even the people most dismissive of LLMs may have to admit that AI can do Fields Medal–level work—work I could never understand in my lifetime. This way of putting it is itself quite meritocratic: mathematics sits at the top of our hierarchy of being “smart.”

This is what truly separates AI from earlier tools. Search engines let people find knowledge faster, and computers let them calculate faster, but neither disturbed the category of “the smart person” itself. AI is the first thing to make many people see directly that the abilities they spent more than a decade training—and even used to define themselves—were not as scarce as they had imagined.

This is where the difference between loving wisdom and loving to prove that one is smart finally becomes visible. If you do a PhD to prove that you are smart, AI is of course unsettling. But if you do a PhD because you genuinely want to know, then things become much simpler: a tool as powerful as AI can only help us understand more.

This really is the best of times.

So What Is Left?

And so those of us living in modern society have to give up the dream of meritocracy.

And face again the cruel question it had temporarily hidden:

If hard work proves nothing, why should I keep living this way?

So what is left?

Nothing.

Life has no preexisting meaning waiting to be discovered. There is no answer, no beyond, and no point at which we finally “make it”; no once-and-for-all solution that works for everyone, and no final destination where, once we arrive, the prince and princess get to live happily ever after.

All that remains is to keep reflecting, choosing, and then reflecting again: What do I really want? What is worth spending my limited time on? What kind of life would I still be willing to devote my whole life to, even if no one could ever certify it as “successful”?