There’s an old joke about a guy going to a fancy party. The party was attended by only the richest and most famous Americans, from Hollywood stars to CEOs of companies to national politicians, so the guy wasn’t sure he really belonged. He voiced his concern to another guy he met at the party saying “I’m not sure what I’ve done to be invited to this, I mean unlike most folks here I didn’t do anything myself, I was only doing what they told me to do.” The other guy says to him “well sure Neil, but most of us never walked on the Moon.”

It’s an old joke but it gets to the heart of what’s been called “imposter syndrome,” people thinking that they aren’t as special or as capable or as important as they really are, people who despite their long list of achievements feel like “imposters” when people congratulate them or talk glowingly about them. It’s been said that this is especially common in Academia, but I don’t know if I buy that since I’ve only been told that factoid by Academics. Every industry thinks they’re special and unique, and I don’t know if a poll or study would find imposter syndrome to be any more common in Academia than in Journalism, Tech, or any other white collar field.

But what if you really are an imposter? What if you really aren’t as good as people think you are, your work isn’t as deserving of praise as what it gets, and you’re just hanging on with the certainty that any deep look at your work would show you for what you really are. I know for a fact that Academics aren’t usually of the ability of looking closely at each others’ work, the sheer number of retracted papers each year speaks to the fact that even the journals and committees that are paid to keep out imposters don’t work all the time. And beyond retractions there’s always a truism that you don’t know someone else’s work as well as you do your own. So when I feel like my work just isn’t good enough and feel helpless not knowing how to improve that, platitudes about “well everyone feels imposter syndrome” aren’t necessarily the solution.

When something fails in science, you can either overturn the hypothesis or conclude that you did the experiment wrong. When something fails again and again in science, you either have strong evidence that the hypothesis is wrong or strong evidence that you’re really bad at doing the experiment. If everyone but you is able to do the experiment and get the results, then the hypothesis is probably correct. That’s what it feels like sometimes in the lab, I have no reason to believe that my experiment is wrong because I see others have been able to do it flawlessly. And so I can only conclude that I’m really bad at doing the experiment, meaning maybe I’m not cut out for doing this “science” thing.

I just don’t know what I could be doing wrong. If I had some idea then I could design some experiment to determine if I’m doing it wrong or if my sample is wrong or if my hypothesis is wrong. But I have no reason to doubt the hypothesis, little reason to doubt the sample, and all the reason in the world to doubt my own abilities. I know I have my flaws, I’m lacking in manual dexterity and attention span, I have poor motivation when things don’t work and this sometimes leads me to doing more bad work because the work I did just prior was bad. So I’m not sure if I’m the problem or if something else is the problem, and I’m not sure what that says about me in science.