Generation Zero: Standing on Nobody's Shoulders

The conversation was friendly, the kind you have late, when the work is done and people start comparing where they came from. Someone said they were first generation, and the table nodded with respect, and they explained: first in the family to get a degree, parents never went past high school. Someone else matched it, first generation too, parents finished university but never went further, and everyone understood that each of these was a real climb. I sat there quietly doing the arithmetic of my own family, and somewhere in that minute I understood that we were not telling versions of the same story. The ladder they were describing starts above my head. Their first rung is a floor nobody in my family had ever stood on.

There is a famous line everyone in research loves, about seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants. It is a beautiful line and I believe it. I just want to describe what the view is like when you arrive at the same field and there are no shoulders, when the people behind you are not lifting you but holding on, and the word for what you are doing has not been invented yet, because “first generation” quietly assumes that a generation zero already happened.

The floor below first generation#

I am generation zero. First in my family to finish elementary school. Not university, not high school. Elementary school. And I am not rare: Morocco is full of us, a whole cohort who are the first of their bloodline to hold any diploma at all, walking around inside a global conversation that thinks the hard version of this story is having parents without degrees.

Being generation zero is not the absence of shoulders. I want to be precise about this, because absence would have been easier. Absence is neutral. What you actually get is headwind. Nobody in the family had ever seen education pay, so nobody believed in it, and it is hard to blame them: belief is evidence plus hope, and they had no evidence. School was the thing that took a working pair of hands out of the household for years and returned nothing they could see. So the reasonable people around me, and they were reasonable, kept arriving at the reasonable conclusion, and kept sharing it with me: stop. In middle school, stop, you can work. In high school, stop, this has gone on long enough. At university, stop, you are chasing something no one we know has ever caught. Each time it was said with love, which is the part that makes it heavy. A stranger telling you to quit is noise. Your own people telling you to quit, for your own good, in a house where every dirham is counted, is an argument, and it is a good argument, and you have nothing to answer it with except a feeling.

And even if you refuse the argument, you refuse it without a map. A map is the thing the shoulders actually give you, more than money, more than doors. A kid whose mother went to university walks a path that exists, marked, with someone a phone call away who has seen the next bend. My path was hidden, not because it was secret but because nobody around me could see it. There was no one to ask whether a school was good, whether a field had a future, whether a form mattered, whether an exam was the important one. Every bend was solved from scratch, alone, usually late and by accident. When people ask me now how I planned any of it, the answer is that I did not plan, I groped, and I am describing the grope in past tense with the confidence of someone who happened to come out the other side.

So what got me out? I count four things.

What raises you when nobody does#

Not all of them are flattering, only one of them was a choice, and the last one was not mine.

The first was curiosity. It was never a discipline for me, it was an appetite, the thing that made a boy read anything with print on it and take apart anything with screws in it. Curiosity does not care whether your family believes in education. It is pre-institutional. It was there before school and it would have survived school ending, and in the years when nothing else made sense, it was the only voice in the room that ever said keep going.

The second was stubbornness, and stubbornness is not noble. Up close, mine was made of pride as much as vision, a boy’s refusal to let the people who said stop be right about him. I have read enough survivor stories since to know how this works: the survivor calls it determination, frames it, hangs it on the wall. In truth it was closer to a mule planting its feet. It happened to plant them in the right direction. I get credit for the direction at most; the planting was temperament, and temperament is luck.

The third thing is the one I chose, and it is the only decision in this story I will take full credit for: the environment. When your family cannot believe in the path and your school is triage, there is exactly one educational input left that is yours to pick, and it is the people you stand near. I picked mine the only way available, by walking toward anyone who seemed to know something real and staying close enough to watch. I think of them as my unnamed mentors, because none of them ever knew they were mentoring me and I never asked them to; people who, just by doing their work where I could see it, kept redefining words I thought I already knew. Engineering was one of those words. Where I come from, engineer meant civil engineer, the one branch of the word anyone had seen with their own eyes. It took a community I was not born into to show me the actual size of the word: that engineering was not one job at the end of one corridor but a whole way of building the world with mathematics, and that the corridor had more doors than anyone in my family knew existed. Nobody tells you this young, so I will say it plainly: choosing the people around you matters more than choosing your school, more than choosing your teachers. My school was assigned to me. My teachers were assigned to me. The community was the one thing I got to choose, and nearly every door in this story was first shown to me by someone standing in it.

The fourth thing was a sentence, and it outranks the other three.

I said nobody in the family believed in education. That was almost true. My grandmother was dying the year of my baccalaureate, and in her last days, battling death and losing, she told me to follow my studies to the end. That was the whole instruction. She did not say which end. Not a diploma, not a degree, not a title; she never defined it, and then she was gone, and an instruction whose end is undefined cannot be completed. It can only be abandoned. That is what saved me. I thought of giving up at every stage of this story, and I do not mean idly, I mean I came to the edge of it more than once with the papers practically in my hand. Each time, the same small arithmetic stopped me: quitting would mean deciding that this, here, was the end she meant, and that was the one decision I had no right to make on her behalf. So I kept going, not always out of hope, some years out of nothing but the sentence. That thought kept my mind alive. That memory kept it looking. It still does. I am many years and several countries past that room now, and I have not found the end yet, which I have slowly come to understand is what she was actually giving me. Not a goal. A direction with no stopping condition. In a family with no evidence that education paid, she could not leave me a map or money or a name to call. What she had, at the very end, was one sentence’s worth of belief, and she spent all of it on me.

The ones who were smarter, and the rooms we sat in#

Here is the part I actually wrote this story for.

I was not the smartest person in those classrooms. I was smart, there is no point being coy about it, but there were always others as sharp or sharper in the room, and that plural is the important word. A room with several smart kids in it is the one asset a poor school has, because minds grow against other minds, and everyone in the room rises with the argument. That is what we could have been offered. What we were offered instead was each other as rivals: ranked, examined, sorted, pointed at one another and told the room had winners.

And the rooms themselves. Forty-five, fifty of us to a class. Teachers who were not there to teach, most of them, but to judge: hold the exam, hand down the ranking, move on. I say that with less anger than I used to, because no human being can build fifty students at once, and the system knew it and never intended them to. A class of fifty is not a classroom, it is triage. Nobody is grown in triage. You are sorted in it, and what you are sorted by is not intelligence. It is obedience, memorization, stamina, and how quiet your life outside the room happens to be. Survival of the fittest, where fitness had almost nothing to do with the thing school claims to measure.

The pedagogy matched. Copy what the teacher writes, reproduce it on the exam, do not decorate it with your own thinking, and above all do not check it. Reasoning was not the curriculum; reasoning was insubordination. I nearly got expelled in high school for correcting my physics teacher, with math, about physics. I was right, which made it worse. The lesson on offer that day was not physics. It was the real syllabus of the whole system: the exam is the truth, the teacher is its prophet, and a student’s job is transcription.

So when I say I knew kids sharper than me, faster than me, kids who understood in one pass what took me three, understand what I am saying about them. They were sharper than me inside rooms that punished sharpness, and some of them are not in this story’s ending because their version of the reasonable argument won. Not because they were weak. Because they did the math honestly. School in Morocco is public and free; nobody was paying tuition. What school costs is the student. Every year in a classroom is a year of working hands the family cannot use and wages nobody collects, paid now, for a maybe that sits ten years out, while the school teaches you nothing but transcription in the meantime. Quitting is not surrender, it is love with a calculator. Some of us got one believing parent, one teacher who pushed at the right moment, one lucky year, one grandmother’s sentence, and that thin margin was the whole difference. I carry their counterfactuals around with me. Any full account of generation zero is a group photo where most of the faces are missing, and the missing were not the weak ones. The rooms were built to lose them, and the rooms worked.

Falling without a net#

Those of us who stayed did not escape that arithmetic. We just carried it to the next page, because staying means you now hold a position you were advised against, and a position like that changes what failure costs.

People born on the shoulders give advice I have learned to translate. Just try it. Take the risk. Fail fast, fail often, failure is how you learn. All of this is true, and all of it silently assumes a net. When they fall, they land on family money, family houses, family networks, a father’s patience, a mother’s degree, and the fall is renamed a pivot. The system that raised them treats their failure as tuition.

When you are generation zero, failure has a different shape, because you failed at a thing you were told not to do. You did not just lose the years and the wages those years could have been, you lost the argument. Every stop you refused becomes an I told you so with compound interest, and the people who would have caught you are the same people whose judgment you overruled to get here. You fall alone, onto concrete, in front of an audience that predicted it. So no, I could not fail fast. I could not really fail at all. Every decision had to be calculated like it was the last one, every risk priced twice, every opportunity turned over and inspected for the trap, because one real mistake does not teach you a lesson, it ends the experiment and proves the family right. People sometimes read that constant calculation as coldness or as fear. It is neither. It is what careful looks like when you are the only collateral you have.

Extortion, dressed as opportunity#

That inspection habit exists because the traps are real, and the worst of them do not look like traps. They look like help.

When you have no advisors, no uncle who has seen this movie, you learn that every extended hand has to be checked for a hook, and you learn it from the hands. More than once in my life, someone with power over my path has offered me an opportunity whose fine print was my future, and presented it warmly, as guidance, as concern. The one I will never forget was a professor, and I can still hear the sentence: stay in Morocco and do a PhD with me, it is better for your future, you will just waste your time in the USA. That was the whole offer. Look at what came with it: no funding, no lab, no salary, no environment, nothing. At the time I was already doing research out of my own empty pockets, paying for the work myself because nobody around was funding it. So decode the offer. Stay, keep paying for your own research for years, under my name, and be grateful, because that is better for your future than the country that would actually fund you. If you want to keep someone, there is a minimum, and it is not even generosity, it is infrastructure: an environment where they can work and pay so they can live while they do it. The offer contained neither. The only resource in it was me. For a long time I told myself he meant well, because that was the more comfortable story. He did not. What he saw was an asset: me, and the years of unfunded work I would keep pouring into a foundation he would sit on top of. Keep me in Morocco, on my own dime, building the lab and the results and the standing, and he would be the name attached when the funding those things attract finally arrived. My future was not what he was protecting; it was what he was harvesting. The warmth was never the motive, it was the wrapping. “Better for your future” is what “better for mine” learns to say when it needs you to agree to it.

I have since learned the test, and it is the same test I use for praise and for paperwork: what does this cost them? An opportunity that costs the offerer nothing and you everything is not an opportunity, whatever it is wearing. The giants whose shoulders people stand on do one thing reliably: they lift, at cost to themselves, and they point away from themselves, toward somewhere they cannot follow. Anyone pointing you back toward their own shadow is not a giant. He is a landlord.

Was it me?#

Here is the question I have not been able to put down, and I would rather put it on the page than pretend I am above it. After the third time, or the fourth, a thing that keeps happening to you stops looking like bad luck and starts looking like something about you. Different people, different rooms, the same offer with my future in the fine print. At some point you stop asking what is wrong with them and start asking what is wrong with you. Did I invite it? Was I the one who left the door open, who never drew the line hard enough or early enough to make the audacity unthinkable? A person with boundaries does not get asked to hand over his future, the theory goes, so if I kept getting asked, the missing boundary must have been mine.

Some of it was me, and I want to name that part first, because a story that puts the whole thing on the rooms is a flattering lie, and I did not get this far by telling myself flattering lies. I wanted to be chosen badly enough that I let a person’s interest in my work feel like belief in me, which it never was. I overvalued every door because I had built no others, and a man with one door will agree to almost anything to keep it from shutting. I saw the early signs more than once and argued myself out of them, because asking the blunt question felt like ingratitude, and some part of me would rather have been used than be the one who counted the furniture at the wedding. None of that is the position. That is character, and the account was mine.

It is also true, and this is the part it took me years to separate from an excuse, that a boundary is not a sentence you say, it is a sentence you can afford to mean. A no only has teeth if you can walk, and walking needs somewhere else to stand. The person born on the shoulders has a dozen somewhere-elses, another lab, another offer, a family that floats him through the gap, and his no costs him nothing, so it holds, and he mistakes the holding for character the same way I once mistook my lack of options for a defect in mine. My position made the mistake cheaper to make and far more expensive to refuse. But that explains why I kept walking into the same room. It does not undo the walking. Structure is an explanation, and a real one. It is never an alibi.

So the answer to the question is yes, partly, in exactly the part that was mine to change. And once you say it that way, the argument about whose fault it was stops being the interesting one, because both sides point at the same move. The position says build an alternative so that a no costs you less. The character says build an alternative so that you stop needing to be chosen. Same instruction, and it was mine to carry out.

What to do when you cannot afford to lose#

Because if the boundary follows from the alternative, then the move is not to be braver in the room. It is to build the alternative before you ever walk into it. This is the one thing in this writeup I would put directly into the hands of someone still inside the maze, and it is not “stand your ground,” which is advice for people who already own ground. It is: manufacture a second door, on purpose, before you need it. Keep the other application alive. Keep the other conversation warm. Do the unfunded work in a way that accrues to you and not only to the room you are standing in. The second door is not the point; you may never walk through it. The point is that its existence puts teeth in your no. I learned to negotiate the day I had somewhere else to go and not one day sooner, and the negotiation was almost boring when it came, because the real fight had already been won offstage by the existence of an option.

The rest is smaller and grows from the same root. Answer the ownership question while it is still cheap and still feels rude to ask, because the only person it burns is the one whose plan needed it un-asked. Run every warm offer through the test that has never failed me: what does this cost the person offering it? An opportunity that costs them nothing and you everything is not an opportunity, no matter how much it says it loves you. And once you have squarely owned your share, stop paying rent on theirs. Another person’s nerve is information about them; it is not the rest of the verdict on you. Owning what was yours and refusing what was never yours are the same discipline, not opposite ones.

None of this is armor, and I am not selling armor. The openness is the thing that made my work worth taking in the first place, and I would not close up even if I could, because closed people do not build anything worth stealing. The argument is narrower, and it is the only one I trust: you get to keep your openness exactly to the degree that you have somewhere else to stand. So build the somewhere-else first. The boundary arrives with it, free, the way a shadow arrives with a wall.

Becoming the shoulders#

I think about that conversation with my friends a lot, and I want to be clear that there was no bitterness at that table. Their climbs were real. A ladder with a low first rung is still a ladder, and their parents’ degrees were somebody’s generation zero once. That is actually the point, the only point big enough to justify the whole expensive stubborn experiment of my life. The shoulders of giants are not found, they are built, one generation kneeling so the next can see over the wall, and somebody has to be the first to kneel with nothing under them.

So that is what generation zero is for. Not to see further. I will spend my whole life seeing less far than people who started on the second rung, and I have made my peace with that; I was never told to arrive anyway, only to follow, and the end my grandmother pointed me toward has still not come, and I have stopped expecting it to. Generation zero is for something else: to exist, so that the phrase “first generation” has a floor to stand on. The child who comes after me will be first generation something, first to a doctorate, first to a field that does not have a name yet, and when the reasonable voices tell her to stop, she will have something I never had: one person in the family who went, and came back, and can say from evidence and not from hope that the path is real. She will stand on shoulders. I know, because I am building them, and I know what they cost, because for one generation, mine, the shoulders and the wall were the same thing.

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