The writer touched on this point when she mentioned him analysing the physical world and her analysing social structures. It seemed that he approached this as merely a technical problem he needed to fix rather than analysing the underlying structures.
I’m into speculation here, but perhaps he lacked the intellectual breadth to consider other angles to what was going on. I find that technically successful people often think that complex social issues can be reduced to and solved as technical problems. That in my opinion misses huge amounts of complexity and nuance.
I don’t think it is correct to say he critically appraised the situation, at least sufficiently. Would we think the same if eg a black person sees that white people were more successful professionally and therefore resolved to whiten their skin? Would we all just say “sure, that’s what you’ve got to do!” and not wonder why they need to in the first place? Where should the change come from?
Of course, that said many people feel to need to conform to a situation while wanting it to be different. It’s messy. Height is a particularly odd case as it’s on the border of being an unchangeable physical characteristic. Maybe the real reason he wasn’t taken seriously was because of his race but he knew he couldn’t change that?
Oh no, not at all. I just mean questioning why he felt the need to be taller, rather than accepting the need and moving straight to the technical “how” part of what operation to get.
Was he? He critically appraised the evidence: height is proportional to various forms of success, and made a plan to get taller.
Sure one could convince themselves that it’s not a problem and be less successful for it on the metrics one cares about.
But that’s easier to do if you don’t have some void in life that seems hard to fill.