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Clique is Salient af
| cowgod | 06/13/26 |
Poast new message in this thread
Date: June 13th, 2026 8:46 PM Author: cowgod The official adult story is:
> High school is fake. Popularity will not matter. The real world rewards competence.
The truer version is:
> High school popularity mutates into institutional legibility.
It stops looking like cafeteria tables and starts looking like:
target schools, Greek life, internship pipelines, OCI, alumni referrals, “culture fit,” weddings, country clubs, industry conferences, LinkedIn mutuals, who gets invited to drinks, who gets told about the opening before it is posted.
Clique does not stop. It professionalizes.
And yes, a lot of this machinery exists for Fake Jobs, or at least soft jobs: jobs where the actual work is not making, fixing, calculating, healing, building, shipping, coding, operating, or selling in any hard sense. The job is often managing perceptions around those things. Brand. Strategy. Communications. Partnerships. Development. People Ops. Program Management. Stakeholder Engagement. Corporate Affairs. Innovation. Thought Leadership. Social Impact. Client Solutions.
Not all fake. But many are credentialed adjacency roles. Jobs near real work, not always inside it.
That is why clique matters so much there. In a hard-output job, reality eventually intrudes. The machine runs or it does not. The code deploys or it does not. The widget ships or it does not. The patient lives or does not. The building stands or does not.
In Fake Job land, evaluation is more social. Did you sound smart? Were you polished? Did people like working with you? Did the deck feel executive? Did you manage stakeholders? Did you seem “high potential”? Did you know the tone? Did you dress like the role before you had the role?
That is Clique territory.
The fake-job economy needs social sorting because the outputs are vague. If nobody can easily measure the work, they measure the worker. Face, school, accent, confidence, ease, friends, pedigree, polish. The harder it is to judge production, the more they judge belonging.
So the great lie is not just “cliques end.” The great lie is:
> Once you become an adult, merit becomes clearer.
Often the opposite happens. Merit becomes less clear. In high school, at least the quarterback had to actually play. The hot girl had to actually be hot. The funny guy had to actually be funny. The math kid had to actually be good at math. Crude, but observable.
In adult white-collar life, a person can be “strategic” for ten years and no one can find the strategy. A person can “drive alignment” forever. A person can “own cross-functional initiatives” that leave no fossil record. The clique protects them because the clique is also the audit system.
High school never ended. It got an Outlook calendar.
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