You make a strong point. Yet there's one crucial difference. In Eliot's time, people didn't have access to a full time series of your professional social statu

You make a strong point. Yet there's one crucial difference. In Eliot's time, people didn't have access to a full time series of your professional social status. I'm sure that it sucked for him to work in a bank basement for 8 years, but he never worried that someone would find that out on LinkedIn and he'd be in the basement permanently. There was a time in which it was much more OK to do low-level work, if only because you could pull a Don Draper and reinvent yourself with a different history.