Competency kinks

The Pitt is back, bolstered by two Golden Globes for best drama television series and best performance by a male actor for Noah Wyle, obviously.

The show’s return has naturally led to a series of pieces attempting to unravel the mystery of why a well paced medical show with a desirable male lead is so popular.

The prevailing perspective appears to be that The Pitt scratches an itch for proficiency, tapping into a broader cultural trend of competency p*rn (no prudishness, just email filters).

Because the world is on fire, everywhere, all the time, competency is now considered so outside our daily norms that it is considered a form of escapism. 

Incompetence is now so accepted, it’s being weaponised. 

Donald Trump is threatening to sue Jay Powell, the Chair of the Federal Reserve, over incompetence, which is both the height of hypocrisy and may have something to do with his previous proclamations that he’d “love to fire” the US’s top central banker.

Some men are using their own incompetence to avoid household chores, a tendency which is both ending marriages and probably means the next hit TV show will simply be a bloke with a beard doing the weekly shop.

It appears that rather than develop some level of competence, some workers are simply trying to mask their incompetence. Researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing found that showing off on LinkedIn can compensate for performing badly at work and lead to a promotion.

It’s a grim reality of the modern world, but in the land of the incompetent anyone who can barely clear the bar is king.