Given that Hollywood has decreed from up on high that it is once again award season, I would like to know what exactly it is we are awarding. Not in some moral or ethical sense per se, but instead what exactly is so valuable about an award. I mean, at the end of the day, an award is just a few cheap chunks of plastic, a length of parchment or maybe, if you’re lucky a little metal. That, a cheap speech, and a couple limp-wristed handshakes to seal the deal and by the day after, it is nothing more than a paperweight for the recipient. So maybe, it is in the interest of avoiding clutter that so many great artists avoid accepting awards or maybe not.

Writer Jean-Paul Sartre once famously declared upon refusing the Nobel Prize for Literature that: “A writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.” In other words, an individual should be treated only as the sum of their individual accomplishments, never as the accomplishment of an institutions. For Sartre, when we do otherwise, when we pat people on the back and put them on pedestals, we work against this philosophy.

It is this notion of awarding people for their accomplishments that Sartre was arguing against, and it is this notion that still proves problematic today. The issue with all of these award ceremonies is not in that they laud people for their achievements, that’s all fine and dandy, but instead in how they crystallize these achievements in the eyes of others. By “privileging” someone with the incidental honour of receiving an institution-backed award, what we are in effect doing is making their merit tantamount to that award. So, from the perspective of the outside party, merit becomes equivalent with awards and vice versa.

Thus, we come to appraise people’s individual worth based off the number of trophies, medals, and other such shiny trinkets that they have accumulated over the years. This outlook on achievement is most prevalent ad nauseum in academia and professional life. All too often in the incessant number of committees for scholarships, positions, grants and so on that plague the milieu of the Western world is the number of awards a person has received treated as the deciding factor in who gets what. Hence, the cliché – “titles do seem to breed titles.”

Now, of course, at first glance, this all seems relatively customary and exceedingly ordinary. After all, people who tend to deserve awards for their achievements tend to receive them accordingly and no one would dispute that in some sense, accomplished people deserve to be recognized for their accomplishments. Having said that though, it is this expectation that accomplished people should be awarded people that is exactly the pathology Sartre sought to treat with his public stance.

When we push this line of thought to its extreme, it becomes readily apparent that people gauge the depth of the accomplishment by the award over the accomplishment in and of itself. Not in a conscious sense, but in more of a symbolic sense – in that, if you are somebody who has accomplished something, the expectation goes that you are someone who has an award or is, at least, deserving thereof. If you lack awards, this logic thereby dictates that it is because you have failed to accomplish anything of consequence. 

Hence why many in our society prioritize praise over passion. We come to strive towards goals not out of altruistic ambition, but out of an internalized want for recognition; the hope that we may be awarded for our feats. This methodology of meritocracy that many adopt comes at the price of altruism and genuine ambition. So, while it may serve them well, their soul suffers for it.

In this way, many professionals are turned into institutions against their will – exactly as Sartre so loathed. It is all too common a tale in universities where professors’ worth amounts to how well received their publications are. Such scenarios can be extrapolated to a million other individual situations and positions, but that is besides the point. Quite simply put, the problem is this – if we continue with our award ceremonies, we perpetuate an institution of valuation in professional and personal life premised on awards and acknowledgements. That sucks.