You don't have Impostor Syndrome; your job just sucks!

Toward an ecological understanding of a psychological epidemic

You've definitely heard of it, and more likely than not you've felt it too. Impostor Syndrome began as a niche scientific concern (it used to be referred to in academic circles as "the imposter phenomenon") and has long since broken into the mainstream cultural consciousness. The term’s use in conversation can be vague, recruited situation-to-situation to describe anything from generally low assessments of one's own skills to more imminent fears of being fired and replaced at work. It's a versatile term, and even if its definition lacks specificity, there is a general understanding of the type of feeling it describes, which is distinct from mere anxiety or low self-esteem: something along the lines of a creeping, lurking fear that someday, *someone* could parachute in and expose you in some particularly humiliating way for your incompetence, and the whole structure on which your identity and feelings of self-worth are built will collapse in dramatic fashion.

In popular culture and on social media, it’s generally accepted that Impostor Syndrome can affect just about anyone, and the glut of research in this field shows that it presents across gender and culture, and across a wide range of populations, including academics, doctors, veterans, students, and business marketing executives. A paper published in 2023 proposing a new assessment to evaluate Impostor Syndrome defined it as "the subjective experience of perceived self-doubt in one's abilities and accomplishments compared with others, despite evidence to suggest the contrary"¹. This definition, while academically diplomatic enough to avoid directly placing accountability for the experience of Impostor Syndrome on the individual, does little to challenge the notion that it is a personal problem. The name itself is revealing. While no one is under any illusion that Impostor Syndrome is a bona fide genetic syndrome (though there is plenty of research on its correlations with genetic factors like anxiety and depression), referring to it as such ensures that its mention in conversation implies an individual problem or pathology. The limitation of this understanding of Impostor Syndrome is that in placing its occurrence within the individual, we tend not to acknowledge, let alone examine or critique, the systems present in our lives that directly contribute to the feelings of insecurity and inadequacy often described under the Impostor Syndrome umbrella. While there is certainly an individual component—it’s been suggested that those with specific psychological traits including inclinations toward perfectionism and clinically diagnosed anxiety disorders and depression may experience Impostor Syndrome at higher rates and greater intensities (though this says nothing about the environmental factors which contribute to so-called “individual” disorders like depression and anxiety). The presence however of people experiencing Impostor Syndrome who do not share these traits supports the notion that Impostor Syndrome is more general, a systemic phenomenon which may be exacerbated by individual dispositions. This article is an effort to rethink the feelings associated with Impostor Syndrome as being natural responses to a specific set of unnatural conditions–conditions that are commonplace in the modern work environment, education, and in the various roles we occupy in our personal lives.

To place Impostor Syndrome within this systemic frame, I will attempt to highlight three conditions which may act as precursors: the rain, soil, and sunshine for the seeds of Impostor Syndrome. Unlike in this botanical analogy, all three need not necessarily be co-occurring to induce Impostor Syndrome, though it certainly would be a potent combination if they were. These three considerations are: comparative security, bullshit work, and ambiguous performance evaluation.

The first condition, comparative security, may be the most crucial ingredient of Impostor Syndrome. Comparative security refers to a person’s perceived status relative to others, and their awareness of the existence of people below, and far, far, far below, their own social/economic standing. If a society was arranged with the primary goal of meeting material needs without reservation, the playing field would be leveled, and any fear of exposure would be dulled. Without belief in the type of scarcity–of food, resources, housing, opportunity–that a capitalist economy creates and thrives on to drive production and consumption, there would be no looming fear of material deprivation. "Exposure" in the impostor sense, without this scarcity, would not mean anything more than a temporary embarrassment amongst one's peers. One’s ability to meet their immediate needs would be unaffected by this exposure. Daily experience under the current economic system, however, makes it abundantly clear to us that artificial or not, the scarcity of these essential resources has real implications.

Under the myth of meritocracy—that idea that it is only the worthy in society who succeed, and that a society is stronger, better off, when it lets its unsuccessful struggle and suffer—there is a justifiable reason for anyone who possesses a modicum of security to be fearful and paranoid of it being taken away at any moment. If you are exposed as a fraud under our present conditions, it might mean worse than simple embarrassment; it could mean losing your job, losing healthcare coverage, losing the ability to pay your rent. In a very real sense it could mean eviction, starvation, disease, and death.

In the workplace, the intensity of Impostor Syndrome seems to be crucially linked to bullshit jobs and bullshittified jobs. Bullshit jobs are those which have no clear benefit on society or are actively pernicious. Bullshittified jobs are otherwise useful professions which have become laden with bullshit tasks and procedures, often of an administrative or bureaucratic nature. In a profession where it is unclear exactly what one’s benefit to society is, or in a job where the stated benefit is theoretically more clear but most of the day-to-day work’s immediate value is unclear (think: an educator who spends more of their time sending emails and attending meetings than actually educating), a sense of confusion about the social value of one’s work can react in a volatile way with an awareness of comparative security to create undeserving feelings and impostordom. Additionally, I would venture that most people have had or know someone who has had a job in which they doubted whether anything at all would change in the world or in the organization they work for if their position was dissolved. If you experience financial security thanks to a job that you felt could be easily outsourced, automated, or deleted entirely with little consequence, all while confronting daily examples of extremely hard-working people struggling to survive, wouldn't you feel like an impostor?

An additional factor in the bullshit job category is alienation from subsistence work. How many steps are in between the work you do, and the production of the things humans need to survive and thrive–namely food, water, shelter, art, education, music? How many steps removed are you from the gratitude that providing those essentials elicits? I would venture that the greater that number is, the easier it will be to doubt your own worth. In a highly financialized economy, fewer and fewer people work with the consideration of meeting human and environmental needs, let alone to intentionally serve human or ecological well-being.

Let's say you work in the marketing department for some business. Your job consists of creating slide decks to pitch ideas and discuss strategy in marketing meetings. Occasionally, ideas from your pitch deck may be incorporated into some larger marketing strategy for the business. In this case, the fruits of your labor may or may not be used to help create a market for a product that the business is selling, and then to sell that product at as large a scale as possible to maximize value for the company’s shareholders. Hopefully you received some validation along the way from your coworkers or superiors, because in this situation, how the hell else would you know if you were actually helping anyone? You’re not likely to have consumers of your company’s product approaching you on the street to shake your hand and thank you profusely for the marketing strategy that facilitated their most recent online purchase. "Am I even helping anyone?" is a question that is riddled with impostor sentiment. If you doubt your own contribution to a team, a company, or society as a whole, then it follows that you would be afraid that one of your superiors could at any time come to ask the same question.

The final consideration I’ll mention here is the presence of ambiguous systems of performance evaluation. This point pertains to those who may work full-time jobs and still may not have a clue how, or by whom, their work is being evaluated. Especially common in large bureaucracies, the systems that authority figures use to evaluate job performance are often so unclear to those subject to them or rely on such subjective interpretation that it is difficult for an employee to determine where they stand at any given time. These uncertainties often bear a direct relationship to the alienation of one’s work from the provision of human needs discussed earlier. As a rule of thumb, the further removed your work is from the creation and distribution of life essentials, the more convoluted and inscrutable the systems by which your work is evaluated will tend to be. In the example of employment at a marketing firm wherein your work consists of manufacturing demand for a product that people may not ultimately need, it is likely that your performance will be evaluated based on your contributions to company-wide directives or “strategic vision plans” that you had no hand in creating. Because these goals and corresponding performance criteria are unique to your specific company and, in essence, completely made up, at any given moment you can be much less sure that you are meeting the company’s expectations. When you do not know if the people who hold the power to fire you are satisfied with your performance, and are aware that what they consider to be a “good job” is subject to change at any time with little to no justification, a natural response is the insecurity and validation-deprivation that nurtures Impostor Syndrome.

When the markers of performance are ambiguous, whether by nature of the position or made so by a bureaucracy which upholds abstract markers of performance for mass evaluation purposes, spatial and temporal distance is also created between individuals and their potential evaluators. Essentially, when evaluation of your job performance becomes based on “deliverables” or other symbolic markers of your work, it allows your work to be evaluated impersonally from afar. Under these conditions, performance evaluations can be conducted by individuals who need not work alongside you or even know who you are. Now, the hallmark paranoia of Impostor Syndrome begins not to seem so irrational. That the overwhelming vagueness of Impostor Syndrome, the irrational-seeming fear that someone, anyone, will drop in at any time and expose someone’s supposed incompetence, does not exclude it from the realm of imagined possibilities speaks to the bewildering nature of performance evaluation that so many people experience.

When it comes to our capacity to comfort and care for ourselves and others when we experience Impostor Syndrome, the common understanding of the experience stacks the odds against us. The name itself implies personal pathology, as if it were a function of genetics, and those in academic circles tend to talk about it as if it was an indelible part of the human experience, an unfortunate glitch in our collective psychology. I would like for us to challenge this conception. It serves our mental well-being and our critical understanding of the world around us to consider the experience of Impostor Syndrome as less a personal flaw, more a natural psychological reaction to industrial pollutants like gross inequality and abusive labor relations. Less inherent and ingrained, more created and maintained. It is time to rethink Impostor Syndrome as a set of psychological symptoms which arise in the presence of certain poisonous environmental conditions–comparative security, bullshit work, and ambiguous performance evaluation, to name a few–analogous to the way lung cancer arises in those living in close proximity to a coal-fired power plant.

It is my hope that those reading this can use the framing of Impostor Syndrome as a natural reaction to inhumane conditions to put just a little more space between the experience and themselves. I’m not expecting that looking at it in this way will make the symptoms go away; it certainly didn’t for me. The onus is ultimately on us to self-soothe, to celebrate our accomplishments and those of others while at the same time keeping in mind that we are deserving of unconditional love regardless of accomplishment. A hallmark injustice of abusive systems is that the burden to comfort and care for those in need so often falls on people who themselves have been hurt, but this is a burden that can build resilience and unique capacities for care and compassion. If understanding Impostor Syndrome as something done to us helps even a little to heal and forgive ourselves for experiencing it, and to begin thinking about ways of organizing that prevent it, then it seems worthwhile to me.

1. Walker, D. L., & Saklofske, D. H. (2023). Development, Factor Structure, and Psychometric Validation of the Impostor Phenomenon Assessment: A Novel Assessment of Impostor Phenomenon. Assessment, 30(7), 2162-2183. https://doi.org/10.1177/10731911221141870