At a party last week I met a man who told me he had just lost his job. I commiserated, but he said it was OK, he was well out of it. He explained that his boss was a fool who could not cope with having an underling who was far brighter and more charismatic than him. The man looked perfectly cheerful and reassured me that his pay-off had been large, and the move was his employer’s loss.
I extricated myself and went to talk to a journalist friend who had also recently lost his job. I asked how the job search was going and he said he’d had masses of interviews but no offers. He told me he was getting tired of having to tell everyone that he was brilliant and dead keen, when in fact he was a fairly ordinary journalist who was ordinarily lazy.
This time I commiserated more enthusiastically. By the law of averages, most of us are, on average, deeply average. But in order to get any job at all, we have to pretend otherwise; it’s an exhausting sham.