➺ June 23, 2026

Last week, Boston almost ran out of beer. The Tartan Army drank the White Bull Tavern on Union Street dry. "I expected it to be busy," the owner told a reporter from The Scotsman, “but not this much fun.”

There’s a word for what that publican and every management consultant in Wellesley finds so charming about the McHooligans. Clydesideism. The hangover left by a century of hardcore Glasgow shipyard solidarity (in 1919 Britain sent tanks to put down a "Bolshevik revolution”; in 1971 workers protested shutdowns by locking themselves in and continuing to build ships) and post-industrial melancholy, Clydesideism is a very specific mentality. Collectivist. Hyper-masculine. Self-effacing. A legion of menacing men in skirts singing the 1977 disco number "Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” in semi-intelligible harmony.

That Scotland drew Boston — well, Foxborough — is almost too perfect. Statistically, Massachusetts is the richest, most-credentialed state in the country. And it hasn't voted Republican for president since Reagan. The politics of Clydesideism, and even the hardman element, are oddly recognizable to the portfolio managers in Dover who prefer Dunkies to Stahbucks. The kinship the regulatory-affairs director in Weston feels for Fergus McSporran is part political recognition and part social envy. Meritocracy is a solvent that breaks solidarity down into self-interest and self-seriousness. Rooting for Scotland is a way of trying to reverse the reaction. So is drinking. Cheers.

A single lifetime ago, it was normal for doctors and lawyers to keep domestic staff. Mostly for the better, that labor supply evaporated during WWII, when women left the upstairs-downstairs economy for the factory floor and then the typing pool. Demand remained. It was simply sublimated into consumer goods — which is why so many of the best-selling kitchen tools at Sur La Table and Williams Sonoma have a faintly anthropomorphic quality, as though, left alone on the counter, they might break into a tightly choreographed rendition of "Be Our Guest." They live to serve. Or they would, if they lived at all.

Here's a version of a riddle that most white-collar workers encounter by their mid-thirties: Caitlin, the recently elevated senior vice-president of performance marketing at a Series B startup selling attribution solutions to mid-market SaaS orgs, has diagnosed herself with imposter syndrome despite occupying precisely the kind of overpaid role that attracts plenty of Colby grads and precisely zero actual imposters. Why?

It's a tough one, because imposter syndrome, the lay diagnosis for people who can't believe their often minor success, is both prevalent (the oft-cited figure is that 70% of people feel it at some point in their career) and ill-defined (it's not in the DSM). None of which is to say that Caitlin is wrong about how she feels. She can't be. Just that she does not seem to have posited one of the six plausible solutions to her riddle.

Solution 1
The Narcissistic Organization
Company leaders cultivate identification – employees feeling the firm's triumphs and failures as their own – while describing their firms in wildly ambitious terms. WeWork, a company that rented desks, set out to "elevate the world's consciousness." Google, a company that sells ads, is on a mission to "organize the world's information." Imposter syndrome is what happens when a sane person overidentifies with a narcissistic organization that demands admiration and experiences criticism as insult. Caitlin's sense of proportion feels pathological because there’s Kool-Aid in the water cooler.


Solution 2
The Cheap Admission
Odd as it may sound, "I am bullshit" is a far less frightening thought than "this whole thing is bullshit." The former leaves the sources of meaning and the social web intact; it does not diminish the worth of one's work or jeopardize real relationships. The latter does. This may be why imposter syndrome ran so high in tech during the zero-interest-rate era, when employees at firms like WeWork, Uber, and DoorDash were paid handsomely to sell four dollars for three, the least meaningful job imaginable. They understood on some level that the goal was to turn investor capital into more investor capital and call it a company. Feeling like an imposter felt better than feeling like a cog in a financialized machine. Caitlin doesn't want to face the disconnect between the inputs she cares about and the outputs that have nothing to do with her work.

Solution 3
The Lucky Duck
Observant, successful people know they've been lucky, so they conclude their success is a singular instance of unfairness produced by an otherwise fair system. The intuition is half-right: luck does drive outcomes. In fact, it drives most of them. This is mathematically self-evident. Talent is distributed across a normal curve; income follows a power law. Two shapes that different can only be reconciled by luck. Caitlin is right to think she's lucky, but wrong to assume she's luckier than her coworkers.

Solution 4
The Mishandled Bribe
Pay is a lousy proxy for the importance of work. In fact, pay is often negatively correlated to perceived social value. In Gallup's long-running survey, the most respected professionals are modestly paid caregivers (nurses, pharmacists, grade-school teachers) and public servants (firefighters, military officers). Business executives are among the least respected, and marketers poll somewhere below elephant poachers. Those roles pay well due to what economists call a "compensating differential," a premium offered to workers with pointless or corrupting jobs. Caitlin is simply mistaking earned money for unearned respect.

Solution 5
The Attendance Award
Getting ahead is less about work product than work presence. Decades of research on proximity bias—the tendency to reward the physically present over the merely productive—show that visibility trumps output. Imposter syndrome is what happens when employees wondering why they are being promoted look past the obvious answer. Caitlin's success doesn't square with her assessment of her work because she thinks her job is to show competence when, in fact, her job is to show up.

Solution 6
The Unwelcome Mat
The most cited explanation for imposter syndrome is Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey's 2021 Harvard Business Review essay, "Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome," which holds that the feeling is an emotional response to existing in an unwelcoming room. This accounts for why self-reported imposter syndrome runs higher among women and people of color than other groups (for instance: morons, who tend to feel great). Having acclimatized to unfair rejection, a competent Caitlin feels like an imposter when she gets treated like a replacement-level Ethan.