Two Steps from the Street

On Fragility, Fortune, and the Invisible Scaffolding of a Life

I was twenty-four years old, and I thought I already understood homelessness.

Not from experience, mind you. But from the news. I had read about it, was exposed to it somewhat through cases in my first two years of law school, and had observed it by walking the streets of downtown Toronto. I understood it the way you understand a country you’ve never visited: from maps and descriptions, with a confident familiarity that has never been tested by lived experience. And with that misunderstanding firmly in place, I walked into a community clinic one evening to meet my friend Ken, a medical student finishing with his last patient before we could go to dinner.

The patient had agreed to let me sit in on the intake. Ken began asking the standard questions. I, being constitutionally incapable of quiet, passive observation, started asking my own.

The man was in his forties. He was homeless. I asked him how he had come to be homeless—not from pity, not from judgment, but from the genuine curiosity of someone who had never had reason to think about the answer to that particular question.

He told me he hadn’t always been homeless. He had had a home, a wife, a job. I waited for the catastrophe, the dramatic unraveling, the moment of spectacularly poor judgment that would explain the distance between his life and mine. What came instead was something far more unsettling in its ordinariness.

He lost his job. A layoff. That happens to people all the time, I thought. His wife, under the mounting pressure of a household without income, eventually filed for divorce. That also happens, I thought, more often than it should. In the divorce settlement, he lost the house. And then, without income, without a home, without a marriage, he found himself on the street.

I sat with the enormity of that for a moment. Three events. But really, once I stripped the story back to its essentials, it was two steps. A job and a marriage—two things that can feel, when you have them, like permanent features of a life rather than contingent ones. The chasm I had assumed existed between his life and mine, that vast social and material distance I had carried into the room without noticing, quietly and completely vanished.

The Distance We Construct

There is a psychological comfort in believing that misfortune is earned.

Not consciously—most of us would recoil from the explicit claim that people deserve what happens to them. Yet this implicit belief operates beneath the surface, shaping how we read the faces of the people we pass on the street, how we process the news of a neighbor’s bankruptcy or a colleague’s divorce. We sort people, instinctively, into categories: the stable and the fallen, the prudent and the reckless, the successful and the not-so-successful. And then we tell ourselves a story about why each person ended up where they are.

This sorting isn’t cruelty. It’s something closer to self-preservation. Because the painful truth is this. If failure is random, if it is not the product of bad choices but of bad luck and bad timing and the wrong crisis arriving at the wrong moment, then none of us are truly safe. That is an uncomfortable reality to live with. So we construct a distance. We insist on a reason. We find, somewhere in the story of another person’s ruin, some decision we would not have made, some weakness we do not share.

The philosopher Michael Sandel, in his 2020 book The Tyranny of Merit, gave this tendency both a name and a genealogy. Sandel’s central argument is that meritocracy, the organizing faith of modern liberal societies and the belief that success flows from talent and effort and therefore belongs to those who earn it, has curdled into something morally corrosive. Not because the principle of merit is wrong in itself, but because of what it silently implies about everyone the system leaves behind.

If success is deserved, then failure must be too.

This is the logic that meritocracy, at its most hubristic, quietly produces. Those who succeed within it—the credentialed, the prosperous, the professionally secure—are encouraged to believe that their position reflects their worth. And if their worth produced their position, then those without position must, by the same reasoning, lack worth. The system doesn’t announce this conclusion. It doesn’t need to. The logic follows from the premise, working its way into how we see people long before we have stopped to examine whether we actually believe it.

Sandel calls this meritocratic hubris: the tendency of the successful to regard their good fortune as purely their own achievement, to forget the circumstances and the luck and the invisible infrastructure that contributed to it, and to look at those who fell short with something that is not quite contempt but is not quite compassion either. The winners have been encouraged to believe they made it on their own. Having internalized that, it becomes almost impossible not to wonder, when confronted with someone who didn’t make it, what exactly they failed to do.

Sitting in that clinic a version of this logic was beginning to dissolve in real time. I had arrived with an implicit meritocratic reading of the man across the table: he was homeless, therefore something had gone wrong with him. My questions were, without my realizing it, a search for that specific wrong thing—the addiction, the poor judgment, the identifiable moment of weakness that would explain the gap between his life and mine and restore the comfortable distance I had arrived with.

What I found instead was the structural story that meritocracy reliably obscures. His job hadn’t disappeared because of anything he did. His marriage hadn’t ended because of a character flaw visible in retrospect. His homelessness wasn’t the legible verdict of a life poorly managed. It was the compounding consequence of an ordinary sequence of events, made catastrophic rather than merely difficult by the absence of a private safety net; a safety net that people in more fortunate circumstances tend to regard as simply the backdrop of being alive.

Merit's Shadow

Sandel makes a distinction that deserves careful reflection: the difference between what we deserve and what we happen to get. These are not the same, even in a system designed to conflate them. Talent itself is partly a gift, the product of genetics and early environment and parents, teachers and mentors who happened to notice it. The work ethic that drives achievement is also, to a significant degree, shaped by conditions the individual did not choose: the stability of a childhood home, the modeling of parents, the presence or absence of early adversity, the neighborhood that either opened or foreclosed possibility before a person was old enough to make a single deliberate decision. To insist, in the face of all this, that outcomes are purely a reflection of merit is not a moral principle. It is a form of moral amnesia, a forgetting of everything that was given in order to claim full credit for everything that was built.

Aristotle, writing in the Nicomachean Ethics long before meritocracy had a name, offered a framework that Sandel’s argument implicitly relies on. Aristotle argued that deep friendship—what he called philia, the reciprocal bonds formed between people who genuinely care for one another’s flourishing—is not a luxury of the good life but a structural component of it. The three tiers he describes, friendships of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue, function very differently under pressure. The first two tend to dissolve precisely when the utility or pleasure disappears. It is the third kind, formed through shared commitment to something larger than convenience, that can actually support a person when everything else gives way.

The man in the clinic hadn’t simply lost material resources. He had lost, or perhaps had never fully built, that third kind of bond. Not because he was unworthy of it, but because those bonds require cultivation and community structures that support them, and when those structures falter, the bonds falter with them. This is what the meritocratic framing cannot see: it attributes the absence of a safety net to personal failure while remaining blind to the social conditions that determine whether such nets exist at all.

John Rawls, whose political philosophy stands as perhaps the most rigorous counter-tradition to meritocratic thinking, asked us to imagine designing the rules of a society from behind a “veil of ignorance”, without knowing what position in that society we would occupy. We wouldn’t know if we would be born into wealth or poverty, health or illness, surrounded by family and community or essentially alone. From behind that veil, Rawls argued, rational people would choose principles that protected the worst-off, because they could not be certain they would not be among them. It is a thought experiment with real bite. Most of us did not choose our families, our neighborhoods, our inherited networks of support and connection. These things arrived with us, or they didn’t. The philosopher Thomas Nagel extended this line of thinking into what he called moral luck, observing that we routinely praise and blame people for outcomes that are, in significant part, a function of factors entirely beyond their control. This is not merely a philosophical puzzle. It is a distortion that runs through our everyday moral judgments, quietly and continuously.

When the Scaffolding Falls

These are not abstract concerns. The decades since Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone in 2000 have seen his central finding—the measurable collapse of civic associations, neighborhood ties, religious communities, and the informal networks of mutual support they once provided—accelerate rather than reverse. What replaced those collective structures were largely private resources: savings accounts, professional networks, the social capital that accumulates in good schools and stable neighborhoods and secure careers. The problem is that private resources cluster. They flow toward people who already have them and flow away from everywhere else. People with extensive social networks tend to acquire more of them, because networks generate opportunity, and opportunity generates more network. People without them find that recovery from setbacks is slower and harder, not because they are less capable of resilience, but because resilience, in practice, almost never operates alone. Resilience is relational and structural before it is individual.

The years following the pandemic illustrated this with unusual clarity. An extraordinary number of people lost jobs, marriages, and stability in a compressed period, and what most determined whether they recovered or not, was not, simply because of character or determination. It was if they had people around them, if their safety net was intact, if the informal scaffolding held. We now live amid what public health officials have begun calling a loneliness epidemic, with social isolation producing measurable effects on physical health, cognitive decline, and shortened life expectancy. And yet the dominant cultural response is to treat this as a personal problem, something to be solved through better individual habits and greater personal effort. We have privatized the problem, just as we have privatized so much else, which is precisely what Sandel’s critique would predict.

Conversely, it can be argued that many people face profound hardship, including the loss of jobs, marriages, and homes, and rebuild. Resilience is real. Human agency is real, and any honest account of human life has to make room for this. There is a version of structural thinking that tips into a determinism where individuals become purely the products of their conditions, stripped of moral agency, and that is neither true nor useful.

But the argument I am making is not that agency doesn’t exist. It is that we systematically and habitually over-attribute outcomes to individual character while systematically under-attributing them to circumstance, luck, and social capital. These are not incompatible observations. A person can make choices and also be shaped, in ways both visible and invisible, by conditions they did not choose. Sandel’s point is not that achievement doesn’t matter but that the meritocratic celebration of achievement has cultivated a kind of moral blindness in those who succeed, a blindness to how much they were given, and a corresponding harshness toward those who were given less. Acknowledging the unevenness of the conditions is not an argument against accountability. It is a deepening of it, because it shifts the moral question from what is wrong with them to what do we owe each other. That is a harder question. It requires considerably more of us. But it is the right one.

I still think about that clinic room sometimes. Two young men, a future lawyer and a future doctor, full of optimism and unexamined assumptions, sitting across from a man who had once been full of the same things. The three of us were not as different as I had thought, and the story he told me was not the story I had expected to find.

What separated us, I have come to believe, was not virtue or intelligence or even, in the end, our decisions. What separated us was that safety net. The informal, invisible scaffolding of people and relationships, and of institutions that most of us rely on without ever examining closely—until the moment we fall through the cracks.

Sandel argues that the great task before us is to relearn what he calls “a more chastened understanding of success”, one that makes room for the role of fortune and community and circumstance rather than insisting on the mythology of pure individual achievement. That relearning begins, I think, not in policy or politics but in moments exactly like the one in that clinic: the moment when the comfortable distance collapses, when the story you expected to hear turns out to be a story about two steps rather than a life of failure, and you realize, with something between relief and unease, that you are not looking at a chasm at all.

Gratitude, in the self-help tradition, is framed as a personal practice, a habit of mind that improves wellbeing and sharpens perspective. Perhaps it does those things. But the deeper form of gratitude is moral rather than therapeutic. It is the recognition that much of what we call our success, our stability, our capacity to recover when things go wrong, rests on foundations we did not build alone and cannot entirely claim as our own.

The man in that clinic did not fail to be resilient. He failed to have anyone to be resilient with. That distinction, once seen clearly, is difficult to forget. It changes how you read the face of a person sleeping on the sidewalk, how you respond to a colleague quietly coming apart, and how you understand the relationship between your own good fortune and the invisible network of people who made it possible. It turns the question back, quietly and insistently, on yourself. Not how did he fall so far, but who are you catching when they fall.

In a culture that has made self-reliance into a virtue so total it has become nearly mythological, that may be the most necessary question a good person can ask.

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