As someone who just graduated college, I have spent the last year learning what lots of people on here probably already know: if you can't get a job/education lined up, society (especially in the US) will do everything it can to make you feel like a pathetic failure. I applied for PhD positions and got in nowhere because academia in the US is unbelievably cooked (a whole other rant). Anecdotal evidence says that schools were accepting literally ~5 people out of an applicant pool of ~300 because of funding cuts, and the situation before funding cuts wasn't much better. But anyways, not getting into a PhD position is very far from the end of the world; I can just take a gap year and reapply.
However, I feel like my experience and the experiences of those around me (both of rejection and success) have really reinforced just how "connections" seem to be damn near the only thing that can get you a position at this point. I already knew how important connections were in the job search; I've heard all the sayings like "your network is your net worth" and "it's not about what you know, it's about who you know." That shit sucks. But I naïvely thought that somehow academics would be more insulated from this type of stuff. I knew that PhD applications were personal affairs on some level; you're applying to work with someone more than you're applying to a school as a whole. But people around me would talk about how they would talk to potential advisors at conferences and get lunch with their current research advisors. It felt like there was a social aspect to being in academia that I didn't know you had to participate in and that I just kinda didn't grasp. I like my advisors, but I usually kept my relationship with them to research and I have no idea how I'm supposed to get to know them better so they can write better rec letters for me and blah blah blah. I don't know if I'm over-analyzing my rejections (given that acceptance rates are literally 2%) but it feels like the fact that I didn't go out of my way to "network" hurt my chances. Anyways I now get another chance to apply to either an absolutely cooked higher education system or an absolutely cooked job market 
tl;dr: complaining about how I graduated college and didn't get into any PhD programs and do not have a job rn and I think the fact that I have a hard time "making connections" and "networking" probably hurt my chances
Meritocracy is bullshit anyway.
i saw somebody on this site say about a year ago "i don't believe a meritocracy is possible, but i do believe we live in the opposite of one" and i'll be damned if it doesn't feel truer every day
Meritocracy, like the concept of 'pulling oneself up by one's own boot straps' was originally coinced as a farcical criticism of the supposed system that rewards talent.
From Wikipedia:
So the comrade who shared that comment was on the money
I mean I guess there's a reason why basically every union ends up defaulting to "opt-in seniority." If you need someone in charge that's probably the fairest way to do it - although reorganizing so that you don't "need someone in charge" is probably an even better system. Then again, there is also the "tyranny of structurelessness", so the system that replaces the old leadership system needs to be carefully considered, democratic, with clearly defined rules etc to prevent a web of unspoken agreements and social clout from simply filling the void and bringing us right back to the nepotism.
Yep, seniority def has flaws, but it sure beats the alternative system of "let the boss decide everything unilaterally"
Huh, I never knew that. Makes sense though!
Meritocracy is funny because every system is a meritocracy under some definition of "merit."