In response to someone saying "strivers are akshually good" above. A striver is someone who has to expend 90% effort (time and energy) to accomplish what someone of ability can do with 10%.
It is a degeneration in any organization. If strivers are being selected for, or worse - being created...then you are simply creating a terribly inefficient organization.
Strivers permeate most organizations throughout the world. This is likely natural, but to correct this bad habit of nature, one should erect better structure. IQ tests were a structure like this. As was university before it became rote memorization and regurgitation.
When a non-striver must work with a striver in some collaboration, it is hellish for the non-striver. You are now working with a chimp, with all the pain this entails. Anyway, this is just a short list of facts about the striver.
This is in the "really tries hard" sense of striver, with the "dude, you're making a shitty meditation app for Nigerians" thread of conversation.
The main point of this post is just a critique of overly hypnotize-able ego.
You know how people try to say stuff like "rural areas are all filled with drug addicts" or the same about sub/urban areas? This is typically in the conversation of "where is a good place to live". The reaction to either tends to be a sort of quirk of a purely reflexive ego. "No no no, you are actually like that where you live!" Setting aside that nobody posts the overdose stats to back their shit up, who cares about the category of "rural areas" or "urban areas" or suburbs? I don't need to live in a category, I need to live in a place. Go find a place with a fraction of the average overdoses per capita. I know you can find rural places, I bet you can find some sub/urban ones too.
Similarly, I am the type of person who needs a bit more striver in me. I need to work harder, because I have actual good ideas. But I shouldn't be insulted by people saying "strivers suck!" when they talk about a category I am trying to enter or imitate, because strivers do generally suck. They lack the lucidity and self respect to realize their deficiency, they probably lack vision of actual great things that could be achieved with hard work.
When a category makes someone feel insecure like this, it is just an unhoned part of the brain staking a claim in your ego. It finds a correlation between a category and you, and says "uh oh, somebody in my tribe is attacking my reputation!" You need to vaccinate these parts of your brain until it they are suitably autistic.
I've long contemplated the striver question. When I was in school I only saw this one way. I basically hated anyone who tried in life, because our school tasks were so pointless. I thought anyone who tried so hard to get an A++ in middle school English where you're learning To Kill A Mockingbird deserves to die. The striver is someone comparable to a midwit in my estimation; smart enough to do their work well but not smart enough to think about what work to do or why they're doing it. But there's a positive side to the striver that I've learned to appreciate as I've gotten further away from school. When you're paying for a real material service (eg, restaurant food, home improvement, mechanic, etc) you want a guy who just does his work well and doesn't contemplate his existence too much. Strivers are great in positions like these, not so great in places like school or bullshit jobs (HR eg.)
(Obviously wimmen and chinks will be overly represented as strivers but I think we can all agree they should be deported and oppressed so I'll skip over them.)
The overall percentage of the population with four year degrees has risen from around 5% in 1940 to 30% now. Let's say the the top 5% of IQ are creative/non striver types and the 25% after that are more non-creative/striver types (it won't align with IQ perfectly but it's good enough for the sake of argument.) That would mean that we basically went from college being a closed community of creative geniuses to opening up the gates to the hordes of strivers. These people should be, like, industriously fixing my toilet, but instead there off leaning about Standpoint Epistemology at The New School. Same goes for bullshit jobs probably.
Our society has drastically increased the number of people that can go to college and get desk jobs faster than the genetic stock could catch up. Ergo strivers become placed in positions where they're insufferable.
