I have done pretty well for myself but I would have to admit that I have largely been a bystander to my own success. People started pouring huge amounts of money into tech and I and my geeky Dungeons and Dragons playing cohort did okay just by being in the right place at the right time.
But we are a decidedly asocial and maladjusted bunch. In any prior generation where technical competence didn't trump nerdiness we would not have fared nearly so well. I learned my craft pulling all nighters, chatting and playing video games. But I can honestly say I would have done that anyway regardless of the financial compensation, so in that sense I am not a striver.
I fear I may vex Freddie just as much in some ways, but I do try to acknowledge the role of luck, contingency, and a privileged background that helped me recover from mistakes in achieving what success I've managed to pull off.
Like if anything I do feel like I do hustle in part to keep up with colleagues that wow me with their intellectual acuity in some categories. Though often they are doing the duck thing of paddling fast underwater while looking graceful above, I suspect.
That symbol specifically is an amulet called a "nazar" which wards against the evil eye. I assume Echo meant "trying to avoid the evil eye" as in "trying to ward off misfortune by downplaying personal success."
I just got my attending post at the hospital I wanted and my life is dope right now. Though, I have to say, within my profession generally NOBODY would envy me, those who work with me are often uncomfortable with just how good I am at what I do, which is diagnostics. They think they’re good at it, till they meet me. I had such a hero catch last week that half my department can’t look me in the eye (they said a 58 year old woman who’d lost the power of speech was depressed- I diagnosed the extremely rare degenerative neurological condition she had based off clinical examination alone and they openly ridiculed me… I was right of course…)
Now, was that fun for anyone to read? Or would you have preferred if I’d pretended to be humble (which I do in real life… I’m not though, I have a massive but carefully hidden ego.)
Most of my colleagues are of above average intelligence but sometimes it requires a standard deviation more than that. Unfortunately that can’t be made a job requirement. It’s too rare.
I’m better than him because I can have a fucking normal conversation with patients and I really hate the implication that it’s either/or. If anything I’d say I’m better at patient communication than I am at diagnostics and I’m REALLY fucking good at diagnostics.
Where were you when I had a sprained ankle that never healed?
Chiropractors, podiatrists, a small army of "excellent" ortho surgeons, not to mention 2 MRI's and an ankle scope, all missed the same thing: psoriasis from a decade ago. I could have saved thousands of dollars and 3 years of my life by going to a simple derm. The derm can't cure it of course, no one can. But at least I'd had an answer before putting myself through all of that.
No offense, but if a good diagnostician is as rare as you say, then the medical field is a friggin joke.
If they know that, then shouldn't they consider the outlier when all else fails? I mean, operating under the assumption that most everything falls within two standard deviations is, like you say, great for most things...except when it's not. I would think a good doctor would understand that and assume the answer may be in that 5%. No one was willing to do that though. It took a random curious chiropractor with a doppler ultrasound to get the ball rolling on it.
As it dragged on and on, my impression was they assumed I was one of those 'problem' patients who just makes shit up. A few doctors would take a look at my chart and their eyes would glaze over. It was almost like they couldn't imagine any of their colleagues missing anything, so it had to be me grandly exaggerating the symptoms. Yeah...I faked needing crutches for 2 months after a half hour ankle scope. It's the level of arrogance that pissed me off, as if they couldn't make a mistake. What a joke.
Sorry for the rant, your post just struck a nerve is all.
The problem is that those patients are real and actually quite common- so it’s easier to sort odd cases into the “nutter” pile than to go in with an open mind some times- even I struggle with that. I have seen more fake seizures than real seizures while working in front door medicine, is the gods honest truth that few clinicians will say out loud for fear of a backlash. Unfortunately this means that people who have real problems but superficially normal test results will be assumed to be cranks by lazy thinkers.
I'm the oddball that prefers the honest you. I work in a profession that has an assortment of your type and I really appreciate the honest ones. But, I get your dilemma, many aren't as comfortable with knowing their place in the hierarchy of skill. And funny enough, I think my ability to not be bothered by this really helps me in my career. But, I would find your weakness and make fun of it, that's for sure.
You’re not going to like this answer but it’s mostly hardcore pattern recognition with backup logical approach for when the pattern recognition isn’t generating much. My main trick is that I have seen a LOT of patients for someone at my stage of the career because I’ve always pushed myself to do so during on calls and hardly ever missed a shift and not ever taken all my annual leave lol so the pattern bank is now pretty loaded- I think I’d conservatively say I’ve seen twice as many patients as colleagues at my level.
You have to pair that with a passionate curiosity for clinical signs and a real skill at history taking- you have to really enjoy talking to people but also kind of be good at judging when they’re talking shit lol and keeping them on track. And you have to be good at recognising signs you’ve never seen before- ie be so familiar with normal that abnormal jumps out at you even when you’ve never seen it before. Then you’ll be on the course!
It’s a really fun job, don’t let the general negativity of our colleagues get you down.
Oh- ALWAYS look at your scans, THEN read the report. See if you can find the abnormality yourself. Familiarising yourself with anatomy in this way makes you a better bedside clinician, ironically enough.
I'd prefer you spoke with a bit more humility given that, as they say, `past performance is no guarantee of future results'. Never know when that diagnostic acumen may decline.
Unless I sustain a head injury, which is possible, I have no more reason to fear that than Magnus Carlson has to fear waking up one day having forgotten how to play chess.
I'm not the engineer I once was: takes me longer to understand a problem, let alone being able to formulate a solution that handles all of the constraints, identifies the key trade-offs, and solves the problem efficiently.
As an actual doctor, may you not be encounter decline!
Studies have shown that the main way to prevent clinical atrophy, is to work in a high volume wide variety setting rather than retreating to one’s own specialty- which is literally my whole job. So until actual cognitive decline sets in, I’m probably safe.
Reminds me of a quote I saw from Amy Wax in the FP yesterday. She mentions all the Penn colleagues scandalized by her op ed about how some cultures in the US are better than others … are card carrying members of the culture she is advocating for. Finishing your education, investing in your professional growth, living within your means and raising children in a two parent household …
Between Freddie and Wax a you can start to see a fundamental dishonesty among the successful class in the US. Lived, played and succeeded by the rules but will say college is a waste, careers are dumb and you’re a racist if you talk about the importance of having a father in the home.
Social justice-y people on the Internet often take the leap from "success requires luck" to "successful people work no harder than we do - they just got lucky." And I struggle a lot with this mindset. As someone who is doing fine in life but is by no means a superstar, I am perfectly comfortable admitting that, at various points, I could have worked harder. Perhaps I should have. But I prioritized other things, and am OK with how things have developed, at least at this age of my life. And when I see very successful peers, even ones who I generally consider morons, they basically all really worked hard to get to where they are. And they deserve kudos for it. Of course they got lucky, of course life is unfair, but they also..worked really hard. For someone like me to dismiss their accomplishments as just unearned luck, when I know I could have worked harder, that feels like the worst kind of sour grapes cope imaginable.
So, you ask of the successful that they don't diminish their efforts and accomplishments. I agree completely. I also ask of those who were not so successful, who are a little envious (like me) whether they really truly put in the work. I think most of the time the answer is no.
Vanishingly few very successful people simply lucked into it like winning a lottery. They work hard, sometimes very hard, like many people do. It’s just as much a mistake to pretend they have done nothing to earn their success as it is to pretend they are entirely responsible for it.
I grew up under straitened circumstances, went through a lot of setbacks, and now I have achieved a certain means and a decent-sized territory. I would like to say that it was all me, all my hard work and determination and talent and all that, but cats are not known for their work ethic, even the most successful.
I suppose that some of it was strategic thinking, but mostly it was luck and ability to bullshit.
This is me. Successful people do many of the things that I just didn't want to do. I'm okay with my choices. And, I'm also okay with theirs. I could've worked harder or made different choices but I wouldn't have what I have now. We need to be honest with ourselves about this.
Yeah, it always gets me when a certain type of person rounds everything off to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune...some people really do work much harder than others, even if it's not always legible "striving" in a Sisyphean grindy fashion. Taking a 30 minute lunch instead of a 45 minute lunch, every day, five days a week, for years...that adds up. The same for clocking in a bit early, clocking out a bit late, staying on-task instead of on-phone...all small habitual improvements on the margin, but improvements nonetheless. One can end up pretty far ahead on such fundamentals, even if actual job skill is merely average. (And I'll happily meta-acknowledge that conscientiousness is something of an unearned bonus, coming from a family that didn't take kindly to slacking off and half-assing. Not everyone gets that upbringing!)
It was kind of embarrassing but revelatory when my current store manager told me that basically no other grunt-level employees ever work extra anymore. Like, they've considered moving the latest shift an hour farther out to better accommodate night owl managers, but I'm the only one who'd actually work it...(managers are supposed to have at least one grunt in the store with them after-hours, for integrity purposes) Used to be the norm, lots of people were happy to stay late and earn more money. Very easy to artificially become more successful when the competition voluntarily concedes.
I believe you live (lived?) in Brooklyn, which must be the world epicenter for affected nonchalance of material success. It sounds dreadful to be surrounded by that.
As a native-resident of said borough: Freddie is just talking about a few neighborhoods of Brooklyn that have, through the mystery of culture, become attractive to ambitious people.
NYC is full of people who were “too big for Boise”. Generally this means they are anxious also.
Freddie is one of them, this is why I subscribe!
Brooklyn amplifies the status competition because it lacks obvious wealth signals of cars/houses. People can live right next to each other on radically different incomes. Also, there is the invisible dimension of “accomplishment”: a poor published author is cooler than a rich banker.
But let’s show them some empathy, they are not evil. They are anxious/ambitious and were trained in the modern liberal pseudo-christian morality, so do a kind of shadow play. Like somebody said, “hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue”.
Yeah, this entire post could just be "I hate aging rich Brooklyn hipsters." You have to be living a pretty charmed life to be around a lot of these people to even be annoyed by them.
I'm in a weird place. Also in my early 40s and due to trying to enter the workforce with a lit degree, for more than a decade my career was objectively shitty. I barely scraped by paycheck to paycheck in Brooklyn, only getting through a year by the skin of my teeth. It sucked, and my 10+ years on the absolute bottom run of corporate America has provided me with a lifetime of resentments and grudges it'll probably take another decade to work through.
Now I'm an accountant, just finishing up my CPA license, and while not successful I'm not exactly doing poorly. It's such a sea change. I used to send out hundreds of resumes and get almost no response. Now it's rare that a week goes by without a recruiter trying to talk me into a job I don't really want. I think my plan worked a little too well. It was something along the lines of "Everyone seems to hate doing accounting and there's a shortage of CPAs. I don't mind it that much and I'm good at it. Every business ever employs accountants so I can change jobs at the drop of a hat and will never have to worry about finding a job again." That's pretty much what happened. An employer does you dirty? To hell with them, with a few phone calls I'll be gone.
Another thing, success is relative. I'm doing sort of okay, my salary is nothing amazing but will probably get a lot better over time. I will admit to working my ass off nonstop for three years to get a second BS in night school, only to basically have no life whatsoever for a year taking the CPA exam all while working full time. I've always had trouble reconciling the stoner/slacker side of my personality with the overachiever. I don't know, maybe it's a kind of Jungian thing.
Accountants are important. The oldest human records (on clay tablet) are often of accountant records. You might join the History of Accounting group and write for their journal...
Accounting History is a specialist, international peer-reviewed journal that encourages critical and interpretative historical research on the nature, roles, uses and impacts of accounting and provides a forum for the publication of high quality manuscripts on the historical development of accounting across all organisational forms.
Thanks for the recommendation. I wish I was that high minded and academic. I was happy I found something I was good at that people will pay me for. That said, I agree, someone always has to keep score and track who owes what to whom. Accounting is more rules than numbers, that's what most people miss. The math is pretty basic, but memorizing the rules...that's the hard part.
I think this must be tied to the old English upper class emphasis on the appearance of effortlessness, that it is gauche to be seen to try too hard. I think of the contempt that shown for Harold Abrams in Chariots of Fire that he dared to hire a coach to help him to run faster.
I think it’s fairly universal. It makes me recall a conversation I had a long time ago with a nerdy guy who couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t find a girlfriend. Long story short he had gotten it into his head that guys shouldn’t care about their appearance. The key is they shouldn’t appear to care. The guy with the dates spent 4 hours shopping for that t-shirt that made the biceps, that represent 100s of hours in the gym, look their best.
This mentality is endemic in tech and my area of engineering (electrical and computer). It's so deep that those who actually care about their appearance are assumed to be unserious.
From the other side of the nerdy table, it constantly frustrates me how many potentially-attractive nerdy guys make this error...it's hard to inculcate (I don't know a less snobby-sounding term for the exact quality) IQ in someone that doesn't already have it, but any schmuck can learn a little about how to shave, put nonzero effort into basic colour and pattern matching, avoid unforced errors like holes and stains, use an appropriate level of (de)odorant...just really table stakes stuff. "If you're so smart, why can't you figure out Men's Fashion 101?" And, sure, overdoing it also comes across poorly as offputtingly foppish...but with the base rates as they are, I'd honestly consider it a smaller mistake. Easier to tone down a skill you already have.
A friend manages a team of engineers and one of them had two giant tufts of nose hair. The obvious questions included, how does he not notice and how do we get him to do something about it?
In terms of relationships - do you think the tufts of nose hair make a girl more or less likely to want to fuck you?
One of the things that always surprised me was how much some men hate wearing a tie. Dude, it takes a second to learn the knots, you wear a shirt that fits, and you can show some real style. But, no. They would do anything not to look half decent when the occasion came up.
At least in California, it would be really eccentric to show up to almost anything other than a law job in a tie. I don’t really understand how a tie is supposed to make you look better either, I guess because you can contrast a fun pattern or something?
It makes you look professional. I lived and worked in CA for 40 years, and wore a tie when I had a job that was public facing and professional. It was anything but eccentric, indeed, it showed that I was the person to talk to, that I took things seriously, and, frankly, it also got me lots of dates.
The more I have peers who have achieved that sort of success, the more I read that "aw shucks" performance about it to be a barely-veiled expression of how meaningless those totems feel once you have them, *particularly* for someone with that white knuckled striver-type personality.
American life has more busy boxes for that sort of person at 20 than at 40.
I guess "midlife crisis" is the thing I'm describing, now that I type it out.
What a delightful braid of observations! My favorite? "It’s continuing the grind by pretending to reject the grind, advancing in meritocracy by denying the legitimacy of meritocracy, striving by insisting that you’re not into that whole striving thing. " from my previous career at ETS, it was frustrating but also darkly amusing that the biggest critics, the loudest complainers, of educational measurement where people who had benefited enormously from... educational measurement in order to rise to their position. The meritocracy notion is a shiny wrapper for the real power source of oligarchy in a way, but has a certain, albeit limited, legitimacy.
But what if you're not impressed by your own success? Alan Sugar, a millionaire businessman who plays Donald Trump's role on The Apprentice in Britain, writes memorably in his autobiography about making millions and going to receive his knighthood from the Queen while feeling an utter failure. What if these self-deprecating high-achievers genuinely feel they should be doing so much better?
That is the most interesting and insightful thing I have ever read. That explains everything about you.
In terms of people you claim are faking not caring. That certainly happens. Some people just have, for lack of a better term, good wiring. As kids they got home from school and, unprompted, said, “I’ll just do my homework now to get it out of the way so I can relax.” And they are good looking and personable and they just naturally are what the world wants them to be and they achieve great success as a result. But it’s not through some great effort against their nature - it is their nature.
Personally, I'm a big fan of ambition. Set goals and work toward them while keeping a healthy understanding of what each of us can and cannot control in life.
For all who were not born into wealth, what's the alternative to ambition?
The question is, what kind of ambition? "Setting goals and working toward them while keeping a healthy understanding of what each of us can and cannot control in life" is great. But the nature of those goals can vary widely.
If someone's ambition is to live a modest life, with enough free time to prioritise their health, family and personal interests (art, hobbies etc.) then that is a very different kind of ambition to wanting to "win" at the kind of elite status game that the people Freddie talks about here are playing.
I think your question is ambition for what? There is nothing wrong with ambition, and, in fact, I think it is a prerequisite for a life with some level of contentment.
If someone sets crappy goals, that's a them problem, not a criticism of ambition in general, right?
I agree. But to take an extreme example, if my goal in life is to get high and play video games, and I pursue that goal with single minded-dedication, I don't think that anyone would call me ambitious, at least not in the conventional sense of the word.
When Freddie says "I'm not a big fan of ambition" I guess he has certain "conventional" goals in mind.
Agreed. And I imagine those goals can be summarized by the euphemism "getting ahead". But is it getting ahead of mere sloth? Or is getting ahead of *other people*? The latter is most often the root goal (including for writers). But, especially wherever the pie is (at least somewhat) fixed, it can result in genuine physical and psychological harm to others.
If so, strange attitude for a socialist, but there are always those virtuous vanguard roles to claw one's way into to satisfy undeniable animal spirits, aren't there? Rather than, say, actually devoting much of one's time devising methods to maximize the number of (different, while meeting intelligibility standards) voices provided to society, and pulling oneself out of the competition nearly altogether.
I don't know that ambition necessarily implies competition with others, but I think it does imply setting yourself goals which are at least a bit challenging, requiring you to (corny phrase incoming) grow as a person
Forgive me if this is an overly personal remark but do you really feel like you've "never been in that position [of being able to openly say that you have been successful]"? I obviously don't know you personally, but you've published several successful books which I imagine you consider to be of good quality, the substack is going well (much better than most substacks, anyhow).
I don't mean this as some kind of "gotcha" or to accuse you of doing the very thing you complain about in this piece, I'm just curious. I'm obviously aware that you've had your fair share of personal and professional problems. Perhaps the "success" that you've found isn't the kind of success you initially aspired to?
Anyway, please feel free to block me or tell me to fuck off, but that line did stick out to me.
FdB has acknowledged his, what I think he would term, modest success openly in the past. He's upper-middle class as a writer! However, when looking at the social and financial hierarchy of media he probably looks towards writers at prestige publications/sites as the definition of `success' in his field though.
Having followed his career for a decade plus, he was once very much on the path to being in the upper echelons of media. This is possibly what he means by that statement?
(Personally just glad that he's been able to keep writing so well for so long, regardless of the venue.)
*Were* they successful books? One of the regularly-checked boxes on my FdBingo card is "laments critical silence and lacklustre sales of published books"; I'm pretty sure he's stated that he did not out-earn the advance for the latest one (and possibly all of them?). Similarly with Substack: yes, it's pretty successful, but at the cost of ~never being offered gigs at The Grey Lady and other august, Serious People(tm) publications anymore. I felt like that's what the "openly" qualifier means - it's not a legible type of success, either within the industry or with society at large*. Tell a random person that you're a bigtime Substacker, and they'll be like, what's Substack? Or if they do know, they'll round it off to "a guy with a blog, lol". (Assuming the whole Substack-is-for-Nazis thing has completely blown over by now, which I don't want to assume.) Very different from being a recognized byline at the NYT, even if the financial remuneration is not dissimilar.
*Cf. Freddie's adventures with mortgage acquisition and explaining the nature of his income stream to dubious bankers.
Let me play devil's advocate for a second. While this is certainly a description of a certain kind of person that is stressed, frantic and striving, but only in private, it is also true that a meaningful percentage of successful people simply do not experience the grind the same way, do not get overwhelmed by stress and pressures. They intuitively prioritize tasks, do the job in the time available, accept that the results will reflect the time available without concern, and then move on to the next task. This is a common trait of successful people. A useful little vignette: supposedly during the GFC, at the start of another long weekend of stressful meetings at the Fed to discuss what is about to fail next, who is about to default next, a young GSCO banker complains that he just can't take another weekend like this. Lloyd Blankfein dismissively responds, "you're stepping out of a limousine to go to a meeting at the FRB, not getting out of a Higgins Boat on Normandy." You might imagine that this is an affectation or bravado. But probably it isn't.
I came here to make basically this point too, so thank you. My own gloss on it is that surely a substantial subset of the "effortlessly successful" crowd are NOT feigning. They ARE hard-working, but they're not "white-knuckling," or relentlessly striving, or desperate or "frantic," or anything like that. Rather, they have a very deep passion for something, and they expend a ton of energy pursuing that passion. It doesn't exactly feel like "striving" to them. They work hard, they enjoy it (and, yes, they no doubt benefit from some good fortune along the way) ... but the success just falls out of their passion and hard work. Like JS Mill said of happiness: if you're aiming for it, you probably won't attain it. Career success is surely often that way as well.
Given what Goldman Sachs did to initiate, catalyze, and ultimately profit from the GFC, I don't doubt that Blankfein would have been so tastelessly blasé. The man knew that his firm would be OK and likely that the entire financial sector would be bailed out by the people and made whole.
Pretty easy to be stoic under those circumstances. What an asshole. (Him, not you!)
I'm 34. In the course of the last two years I've completed my Master's degree and started a job that's not quite at the top of my field (I'm a librarian and now have a senior management position at a County library system) but which is spitting distance from eventually being Director of a system. I'm making Really Decent Money that should be enough for a Really Comfortable Life (if I hadn't taken on crushing debt to get here...) And I have definitely found myself deflecting. I am embarrassed and uncomfortable with where I am. I think some of it is certainly due to the factors Freddie identifies here, but I think there are other reasons as well - reasons equally present among others my-age-ish and equally influential in the "aw shucks" deflection attitude that Freddie's discussing.
One is ambivalence towards hierarchy. I spent most of my life thus far working shit jobs for shit people who got off on authority. Many folks who've worked retail or service industries are rightly skeptical of "management" and dislike the notion of power held over others in the workplace. It took some really impactful words of wisdom from a mentor of mine to reframe my thinking on the matter - otherwise I never would have even applied for the kind of leadership role I have now. Even so, it causes cognitive dissonance to admit that I have authority over other workers.
Two is skepticism of capitalism. Very similar to the above, I and many others of my cohort have bought in to the "capitalism is the root of all evil" meme. While I do stand by the belief that capitalism is a corrosive, deleterious institution that should be abolished, I also think that disapproval of capitalism is a social virtue-signaling method. Aversion to hypocrisy is a factor too. Admitting that you've achieved success in the Great Capitalist Edifice feels like saying you're a very high-ranking guard at a gulag.
Three is embarrassment about finances. As mentioned, the money I'm making now puts me, as an individual, solidly above the median household income in the US... But I still live paycheck to paycheck and am often overdrawn before the end of the month, with slowly but steadily growing personal debt. I rent my home, am unlikely ever to own property, and have no assets or savings. This is a deeply humiliating state of affairs. I make all this money - why am I struggling, if not that I'm simply a spendthrift or bad at managing money? If I'm kinder to myself, I can acknowledge the economic and circumstantial factors that put me here - as mentioned before, huge chunks of that debt came from the education and relocation expenses that got me to where I am, to where I could get the job that I now have. But that feels like making excuses. It's more comfortable to frame myself as just a silly gal who blundered into her position and shouldn't really be expected to be successful.
I teach librarianship. The median age to begin is 35. Almost no one knows at 21 that this is a career. It's important meaningful work. People pay taxes to sustain the institution. And mostly happily. In a leadership role you can shape the library to serve people better and add new ideas. The hierarchy is usually a civil service structure that articulates with whatever government you are in so it's not your fault. There are programs about loan forgiveness for public service people. Many of my former students in public libraries have been able to have their loans forgiven.
Thank you, I appreciate that - and I didn't know that figure about the median age to begin! That genuinely helps me feel better about myself.
Loan forgiveness is definitely something I'm eligible for, but requires ten years of loan payments to qualify... By which point I will have mostly paid them off anyway. My student loan payments are also a smaller factor in my monthly expenses than the personal loans I took out to relocate twice and take the jobs that got me where I am now, and the credit card debt I accumulated in the process. (I've consolidated most of it into one personal loan with lower interest, but it's still rough.)
The mentor I mentioned told me that "the best kinds of leadership don't come from desire for power or authority - they come from expertise." That was hugely impactful to my thinking, and is the kind of leader I want to be.
I'm not sure what you mean by that... I mean yeah, if I had studied hard in high school and got a good scholarship and gone to college and so on, I'd probably be in a much better position. But I did poorly in high school due to lack of support and crushing untreated depression. I failed at my attempt to do community college at 19 because of crushing untreated depression and exhaustion from working nights. For me to have taken an "easier track," I would have had to be an entirely different person with an entirely different life - and it goes without saying that I'd be an entirely different person now.
I'm sorry if that's not what you're asking, I wasn't really sure what your question was after.
That answers it exactly. Naturally happy people are able to accomplish a lot and it so doing cause a lot of happy things to happen. For depressed people it’s the opposite the depression causes bad things to happen which causes more depression in a negative feedback loop. Naturally positive people experience a positive feedback loop.
I have thought about this a lot. With a family and personal history of clinical depression, I've come to the conclusion, it's actually harder for me to be happy than some other, more sunshiny people. So, I've worked hard to become a happier person than I was ten years ago. Or maybe "more satisfied person" is a better way to put it. It does feel like a feedback loop either way, for sure. Being depressed made it harder to have friends, which made my life more depressing...etc. Being more satisfied gives me more energy for personal relationships, which makes me feel more satisfied. I'm just starting to realize that maybe my measure of success is socially anchored. Hmmm....
I was going to write earlier that success is relative. It's a vague term so people are free to fill in the blanks with whatever they find appropriate. It's like those awful editorials the NYTimes sometimes runs about "I don't know how we can make ends meet on $350k household income each year." Most of us, I think if we're honest, feel a small burning pit of fury when we read that, but I have no doubt the people writing those editorials really feel that way. Their social circles are packed full of people doing as well or better than them financially, so it doesn't feel like enough. They understand, in an abstract way, that the guy running a register at the corner bodega inhabits the same space as them and makes a tiny fraction of what they do, but it's...I don't know it doesn't feel real to them.
Not saying they're right or wrong, it's just how the psychology of it works.
“ "I don't know how we can make ends meet on $350k household income each year."”
There is another aspect to this. If you look at the data intergenerational income mobility is fairly low. If your dad is the CFO of Amalgamated Widget you’re very likely to end up in finance or as an anesthesiologist or get your MBA and end up in some executive role. In no small part because you come from a world where you can’t imagine living as an adult on $350k.
What to some is great ambitions is to other just a desire to avoid destitution. A
Someone once said that if you want your kid to go to college, have them make friends with kids who are going to college. In other words, if the standard is X, most people will do X.
Capitalism is the system that makes everything we like possible. From iPhones to colleges, restaurants to books, communism to corporatism, capitalism is the economy of making things happen.
Excellent Sheep.
This kind of sour grapery is why they do it lol
Everyone just out here trying to avoid the 🧿
I have done pretty well for myself but I would have to admit that I have largely been a bystander to my own success. People started pouring huge amounts of money into tech and I and my geeky Dungeons and Dragons playing cohort did okay just by being in the right place at the right time.
But we are a decidedly asocial and maladjusted bunch. In any prior generation where technical competence didn't trump nerdiness we would not have fared nearly so well. I learned my craft pulling all nighters, chatting and playing video games. But I can honestly say I would have done that anyway regardless of the financial compensation, so in that sense I am not a striver.
I fear I may vex Freddie just as much in some ways, but I do try to acknowledge the role of luck, contingency, and a privileged background that helped me recover from mistakes in achieving what success I've managed to pull off.
Like if anything I do feel like I do hustle in part to keep up with colleagues that wow me with their intellectual acuity in some categories. Though often they are doing the duck thing of paddling fast underwater while looking graceful above, I suspect.
What is the 🧿?
That symbol specifically is an amulet called a "nazar" which wards against the evil eye. I assume Echo meant "trying to avoid the evil eye" as in "trying to ward off misfortune by downplaying personal success."
I just got my attending post at the hospital I wanted and my life is dope right now. Though, I have to say, within my profession generally NOBODY would envy me, those who work with me are often uncomfortable with just how good I am at what I do, which is diagnostics. They think they’re good at it, till they meet me. I had such a hero catch last week that half my department can’t look me in the eye (they said a 58 year old woman who’d lost the power of speech was depressed- I diagnosed the extremely rare degenerative neurological condition she had based off clinical examination alone and they openly ridiculed me… I was right of course…)
Now, was that fun for anyone to read? Or would you have preferred if I’d pretended to be humble (which I do in real life… I’m not though, I have a massive but carefully hidden ego.)
The sheer commonality of misdiagnosis in medicine makes me pray my good health continues.
Most of my colleagues are of above average intelligence but sometimes it requires a standard deviation more than that. Unfortunately that can’t be made a job requirement. It’s too rare.
House!
I’m better than him because I can have a fucking normal conversation with patients and I really hate the implication that it’s either/or. If anything I’d say I’m better at patient communication than I am at diagnostics and I’m REALLY fucking good at diagnostics.
(I used to love that show but now it makes me mad lol doing a bajillion tests without taking a history is the definition of a shit diagnostician.)
Where were you when I had a sprained ankle that never healed?
Chiropractors, podiatrists, a small army of "excellent" ortho surgeons, not to mention 2 MRI's and an ankle scope, all missed the same thing: psoriasis from a decade ago. I could have saved thousands of dollars and 3 years of my life by going to a simple derm. The derm can't cure it of course, no one can. But at least I'd had an answer before putting myself through all of that.
No offense, but if a good diagnostician is as rare as you say, then the medical field is a friggin joke.
95% of physicians can solve 95% of diagnostic puzzles. It’s the outliers that get you.
If they know that, then shouldn't they consider the outlier when all else fails? I mean, operating under the assumption that most everything falls within two standard deviations is, like you say, great for most things...except when it's not. I would think a good doctor would understand that and assume the answer may be in that 5%. No one was willing to do that though. It took a random curious chiropractor with a doppler ultrasound to get the ball rolling on it.
As it dragged on and on, my impression was they assumed I was one of those 'problem' patients who just makes shit up. A few doctors would take a look at my chart and their eyes would glaze over. It was almost like they couldn't imagine any of their colleagues missing anything, so it had to be me grandly exaggerating the symptoms. Yeah...I faked needing crutches for 2 months after a half hour ankle scope. It's the level of arrogance that pissed me off, as if they couldn't make a mistake. What a joke.
Sorry for the rant, your post just struck a nerve is all.
The problem is that those patients are real and actually quite common- so it’s easier to sort odd cases into the “nutter” pile than to go in with an open mind some times- even I struggle with that. I have seen more fake seizures than real seizures while working in front door medicine, is the gods honest truth that few clinicians will say out loud for fear of a backlash. Unfortunately this means that people who have real problems but superficially normal test results will be assumed to be cranks by lazy thinkers.
Good for you. Clinical diagnosis in medicine is a vanishing art.
I'm the oddball that prefers the honest you. I work in a profession that has an assortment of your type and I really appreciate the honest ones. But, I get your dilemma, many aren't as comfortable with knowing their place in the hierarchy of skill. And funny enough, I think my ability to not be bothered by this really helps me in my career. But, I would find your weakness and make fun of it, that's for sure.
MS-2 here: how do you train your undifferentiated sick pt ddx? Just knowing the path books backward and forward? Do you have an internal algorithm?
You’re not going to like this answer but it’s mostly hardcore pattern recognition with backup logical approach for when the pattern recognition isn’t generating much. My main trick is that I have seen a LOT of patients for someone at my stage of the career because I’ve always pushed myself to do so during on calls and hardly ever missed a shift and not ever taken all my annual leave lol so the pattern bank is now pretty loaded- I think I’d conservatively say I’ve seen twice as many patients as colleagues at my level.
You have to pair that with a passionate curiosity for clinical signs and a real skill at history taking- you have to really enjoy talking to people but also kind of be good at judging when they’re talking shit lol and keeping them on track. And you have to be good at recognising signs you’ve never seen before- ie be so familiar with normal that abnormal jumps out at you even when you’ve never seen it before. Then you’ll be on the course!
It’s a really fun job, don’t let the general negativity of our colleagues get you down.
Oh- ALWAYS look at your scans, THEN read the report. See if you can find the abnormality yourself. Familiarising yourself with anatomy in this way makes you a better bedside clinician, ironically enough.
I'd prefer you spoke with a bit more humility given that, as they say, `past performance is no guarantee of future results'. Never know when that diagnostic acumen may decline.
Unless I sustain a head injury, which is possible, I have no more reason to fear that than Magnus Carlson has to fear waking up one day having forgotten how to play chess.
Looks like you've got it figured out then!
It’s not like gambling. You build a skillset, it’s not a luck based game. Doesn’t mean I’ll never get it wrong of course.
Skillsets tend to atrophy over time, though.
I'm not the engineer I once was: takes me longer to understand a problem, let alone being able to formulate a solution that handles all of the constraints, identifies the key trade-offs, and solves the problem efficiently.
As an actual doctor, may you not be encounter decline!
Studies have shown that the main way to prevent clinical atrophy, is to work in a high volume wide variety setting rather than retreating to one’s own specialty- which is literally my whole job. So until actual cognitive decline sets in, I’m probably safe.
Reminds me of a quote I saw from Amy Wax in the FP yesterday. She mentions all the Penn colleagues scandalized by her op ed about how some cultures in the US are better than others … are card carrying members of the culture she is advocating for. Finishing your education, investing in your professional growth, living within your means and raising children in a two parent household …
Between Freddie and Wax a you can start to see a fundamental dishonesty among the successful class in the US. Lived, played and succeeded by the rules but will say college is a waste, careers are dumb and you’re a racist if you talk about the importance of having a father in the home.
I'm reminded of Charles Murray's line in this regard: "Progressive elites should preach what they practice."
I think you are indeed atop the achievement heap, no?
Social justice-y people on the Internet often take the leap from "success requires luck" to "successful people work no harder than we do - they just got lucky." And I struggle a lot with this mindset. As someone who is doing fine in life but is by no means a superstar, I am perfectly comfortable admitting that, at various points, I could have worked harder. Perhaps I should have. But I prioritized other things, and am OK with how things have developed, at least at this age of my life. And when I see very successful peers, even ones who I generally consider morons, they basically all really worked hard to get to where they are. And they deserve kudos for it. Of course they got lucky, of course life is unfair, but they also..worked really hard. For someone like me to dismiss their accomplishments as just unearned luck, when I know I could have worked harder, that feels like the worst kind of sour grapes cope imaginable.
So, you ask of the successful that they don't diminish their efforts and accomplishments. I agree completely. I also ask of those who were not so successful, who are a little envious (like me) whether they really truly put in the work. I think most of the time the answer is no.
Vanishingly few very successful people simply lucked into it like winning a lottery. They work hard, sometimes very hard, like many people do. It’s just as much a mistake to pretend they have done nothing to earn their success as it is to pretend they are entirely responsible for it.
I grew up under straitened circumstances, went through a lot of setbacks, and now I have achieved a certain means and a decent-sized territory. I would like to say that it was all me, all my hard work and determination and talent and all that, but cats are not known for their work ethic, even the most successful.
I suppose that some of it was strategic thinking, but mostly it was luck and ability to bullshit.
This is me. Successful people do many of the things that I just didn't want to do. I'm okay with my choices. And, I'm also okay with theirs. I could've worked harder or made different choices but I wouldn't have what I have now. We need to be honest with ourselves about this.
Yeah, it always gets me when a certain type of person rounds everything off to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune...some people really do work much harder than others, even if it's not always legible "striving" in a Sisyphean grindy fashion. Taking a 30 minute lunch instead of a 45 minute lunch, every day, five days a week, for years...that adds up. The same for clocking in a bit early, clocking out a bit late, staying on-task instead of on-phone...all small habitual improvements on the margin, but improvements nonetheless. One can end up pretty far ahead on such fundamentals, even if actual job skill is merely average. (And I'll happily meta-acknowledge that conscientiousness is something of an unearned bonus, coming from a family that didn't take kindly to slacking off and half-assing. Not everyone gets that upbringing!)
It was kind of embarrassing but revelatory when my current store manager told me that basically no other grunt-level employees ever work extra anymore. Like, they've considered moving the latest shift an hour farther out to better accommodate night owl managers, but I'm the only one who'd actually work it...(managers are supposed to have at least one grunt in the store with them after-hours, for integrity purposes) Used to be the norm, lots of people were happy to stay late and earn more money. Very easy to artificially become more successful when the competition voluntarily concedes.
I believe you live (lived?) in Brooklyn, which must be the world epicenter for affected nonchalance of material success. It sounds dreadful to be surrounded by that.
As a native-resident of said borough: Freddie is just talking about a few neighborhoods of Brooklyn that have, through the mystery of culture, become attractive to ambitious people.
NYC is full of people who were “too big for Boise”. Generally this means they are anxious also.
Freddie is one of them, this is why I subscribe!
Brooklyn amplifies the status competition because it lacks obvious wealth signals of cars/houses. People can live right next to each other on radically different incomes. Also, there is the invisible dimension of “accomplishment”: a poor published author is cooler than a rich banker.
But let’s show them some empathy, they are not evil. They are anxious/ambitious and were trained in the modern liberal pseudo-christian morality, so do a kind of shadow play. Like somebody said, “hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue”.
Yeah, this entire post could just be "I hate aging rich Brooklyn hipsters." You have to be living a pretty charmed life to be around a lot of these people to even be annoyed by them.
I'm in a weird place. Also in my early 40s and due to trying to enter the workforce with a lit degree, for more than a decade my career was objectively shitty. I barely scraped by paycheck to paycheck in Brooklyn, only getting through a year by the skin of my teeth. It sucked, and my 10+ years on the absolute bottom run of corporate America has provided me with a lifetime of resentments and grudges it'll probably take another decade to work through.
Now I'm an accountant, just finishing up my CPA license, and while not successful I'm not exactly doing poorly. It's such a sea change. I used to send out hundreds of resumes and get almost no response. Now it's rare that a week goes by without a recruiter trying to talk me into a job I don't really want. I think my plan worked a little too well. It was something along the lines of "Everyone seems to hate doing accounting and there's a shortage of CPAs. I don't mind it that much and I'm good at it. Every business ever employs accountants so I can change jobs at the drop of a hat and will never have to worry about finding a job again." That's pretty much what happened. An employer does you dirty? To hell with them, with a few phone calls I'll be gone.
Another thing, success is relative. I'm doing sort of okay, my salary is nothing amazing but will probably get a lot better over time. I will admit to working my ass off nonstop for three years to get a second BS in night school, only to basically have no life whatsoever for a year taking the CPA exam all while working full time. I've always had trouble reconciling the stoner/slacker side of my personality with the overachiever. I don't know, maybe it's a kind of Jungian thing.
Accountants are important. The oldest human records (on clay tablet) are often of accountant records. You might join the History of Accounting group and write for their journal...
Accounting History is a specialist, international peer-reviewed journal that encourages critical and interpretative historical research on the nature, roles, uses and impacts of accounting and provides a forum for the publication of high quality manuscripts on the historical development of accounting across all organisational forms.
Thanks for the recommendation. I wish I was that high minded and academic. I was happy I found something I was good at that people will pay me for. That said, I agree, someone always has to keep score and track who owes what to whom. Accounting is more rules than numbers, that's what most people miss. The math is pretty basic, but memorizing the rules...that's the hard part.
I think this must be tied to the old English upper class emphasis on the appearance of effortlessness, that it is gauche to be seen to try too hard. I think of the contempt that shown for Harold Abrams in Chariots of Fire that he dared to hire a coach to help him to run faster.
of which most of us are not a part but we read too many books.
I think it’s fairly universal. It makes me recall a conversation I had a long time ago with a nerdy guy who couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t find a girlfriend. Long story short he had gotten it into his head that guys shouldn’t care about their appearance. The key is they shouldn’t appear to care. The guy with the dates spent 4 hours shopping for that t-shirt that made the biceps, that represent 100s of hours in the gym, look their best.
This was a revelation to him.
Yes, the casually indifferent haircut that took a stylist hours, the just right amount of shirt tails hanging out, and so on.
Exactly the Italians have a word for it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprezzatura
`guys shouldn’t care about their appearance'
This mentality is endemic in tech and my area of engineering (electrical and computer). It's so deep that those who actually care about their appearance are assumed to be unserious.
From the other side of the nerdy table, it constantly frustrates me how many potentially-attractive nerdy guys make this error...it's hard to inculcate (I don't know a less snobby-sounding term for the exact quality) IQ in someone that doesn't already have it, but any schmuck can learn a little about how to shave, put nonzero effort into basic colour and pattern matching, avoid unforced errors like holes and stains, use an appropriate level of (de)odorant...just really table stakes stuff. "If you're so smart, why can't you figure out Men's Fashion 101?" And, sure, overdoing it also comes across poorly as offputtingly foppish...but with the base rates as they are, I'd honestly consider it a smaller mistake. Easier to tone down a skill you already have.
A friend manages a team of engineers and one of them had two giant tufts of nose hair. The obvious questions included, how does he not notice and how do we get him to do something about it?
In terms of relationships - do you think the tufts of nose hair make a girl more or less likely to want to fuck you?
One of the things that always surprised me was how much some men hate wearing a tie. Dude, it takes a second to learn the knots, you wear a shirt that fits, and you can show some real style. But, no. They would do anything not to look half decent when the occasion came up.
At least in California, it would be really eccentric to show up to almost anything other than a law job in a tie. I don’t really understand how a tie is supposed to make you look better either, I guess because you can contrast a fun pattern or something?
It makes you look professional. I lived and worked in CA for 40 years, and wore a tie when I had a job that was public facing and professional. It was anything but eccentric, indeed, it showed that I was the person to talk to, that I took things seriously, and, frankly, it also got me lots of dates.
The more I have peers who have achieved that sort of success, the more I read that "aw shucks" performance about it to be a barely-veiled expression of how meaningless those totems feel once you have them, *particularly* for someone with that white knuckled striver-type personality.
American life has more busy boxes for that sort of person at 20 than at 40.
I guess "midlife crisis" is the thing I'm describing, now that I type it out.
Totally agree!
I won Latino Librarian of the Year once and I was very proud of it and told everybody.
What a delightful braid of observations! My favorite? "It’s continuing the grind by pretending to reject the grind, advancing in meritocracy by denying the legitimacy of meritocracy, striving by insisting that you’re not into that whole striving thing. " from my previous career at ETS, it was frustrating but also darkly amusing that the biggest critics, the loudest complainers, of educational measurement where people who had benefited enormously from... educational measurement in order to rise to their position. The meritocracy notion is a shiny wrapper for the real power source of oligarchy in a way, but has a certain, albeit limited, legitimacy.
But what if you're not impressed by your own success? Alan Sugar, a millionaire businessman who plays Donald Trump's role on The Apprentice in Britain, writes memorably in his autobiography about making millions and going to receive his knighthood from the Queen while feeling an utter failure. What if these self-deprecating high-achievers genuinely feel they should be doing so much better?
“ I’m not a fan of ambition, in general”
That is the most interesting and insightful thing I have ever read. That explains everything about you.
In terms of people you claim are faking not caring. That certainly happens. Some people just have, for lack of a better term, good wiring. As kids they got home from school and, unprompted, said, “I’ll just do my homework now to get it out of the way so I can relax.” And they are good looking and personable and they just naturally are what the world wants them to be and they achieve great success as a result. But it’s not through some great effort against their nature - it is their nature.
Personally, I'm a big fan of ambition. Set goals and work toward them while keeping a healthy understanding of what each of us can and cannot control in life.
For all who were not born into wealth, what's the alternative to ambition?
The question is, what kind of ambition? "Setting goals and working toward them while keeping a healthy understanding of what each of us can and cannot control in life" is great. But the nature of those goals can vary widely.
If someone's ambition is to live a modest life, with enough free time to prioritise their health, family and personal interests (art, hobbies etc.) then that is a very different kind of ambition to wanting to "win" at the kind of elite status game that the people Freddie talks about here are playing.
I think your question is ambition for what? There is nothing wrong with ambition, and, in fact, I think it is a prerequisite for a life with some level of contentment.
If someone sets crappy goals, that's a them problem, not a criticism of ambition in general, right?
I agree. But to take an extreme example, if my goal in life is to get high and play video games, and I pursue that goal with single minded-dedication, I don't think that anyone would call me ambitious, at least not in the conventional sense of the word.
When Freddie says "I'm not a big fan of ambition" I guess he has certain "conventional" goals in mind.
"I guess he has certain 'conventional' goals."
Agreed. And I imagine those goals can be summarized by the euphemism "getting ahead". But is it getting ahead of mere sloth? Or is getting ahead of *other people*? The latter is most often the root goal (including for writers). But, especially wherever the pie is (at least somewhat) fixed, it can result in genuine physical and psychological harm to others.
If so, strange attitude for a socialist, but there are always those virtuous vanguard roles to claw one's way into to satisfy undeniable animal spirits, aren't there? Rather than, say, actually devoting much of one's time devising methods to maximize the number of (different, while meeting intelligibility standards) voices provided to society, and pulling oneself out of the competition nearly altogether.
I don't know that ambition necessarily implies competition with others, but I think it does imply setting yourself goals which are at least a bit challenging, requiring you to (corny phrase incoming) grow as a person
Forgive me if this is an overly personal remark but do you really feel like you've "never been in that position [of being able to openly say that you have been successful]"? I obviously don't know you personally, but you've published several successful books which I imagine you consider to be of good quality, the substack is going well (much better than most substacks, anyhow).
I don't mean this as some kind of "gotcha" or to accuse you of doing the very thing you complain about in this piece, I'm just curious. I'm obviously aware that you've had your fair share of personal and professional problems. Perhaps the "success" that you've found isn't the kind of success you initially aspired to?
Anyway, please feel free to block me or tell me to fuck off, but that line did stick out to me.
Agreed: many commenters here probably find Freddie's level of success to be enviable. I certainly admire it!
FdB has acknowledged his, what I think he would term, modest success openly in the past. He's upper-middle class as a writer! However, when looking at the social and financial hierarchy of media he probably looks towards writers at prestige publications/sites as the definition of `success' in his field though.
Having followed his career for a decade plus, he was once very much on the path to being in the upper echelons of media. This is possibly what he means by that statement?
(Personally just glad that he's been able to keep writing so well for so long, regardless of the venue.)
*Were* they successful books? One of the regularly-checked boxes on my FdBingo card is "laments critical silence and lacklustre sales of published books"; I'm pretty sure he's stated that he did not out-earn the advance for the latest one (and possibly all of them?). Similarly with Substack: yes, it's pretty successful, but at the cost of ~never being offered gigs at The Grey Lady and other august, Serious People(tm) publications anymore. I felt like that's what the "openly" qualifier means - it's not a legible type of success, either within the industry or with society at large*. Tell a random person that you're a bigtime Substacker, and they'll be like, what's Substack? Or if they do know, they'll round it off to "a guy with a blog, lol". (Assuming the whole Substack-is-for-Nazis thing has completely blown over by now, which I don't want to assume.) Very different from being a recognized byline at the NYT, even if the financial remuneration is not dissimilar.
*Cf. Freddie's adventures with mortgage acquisition and explaining the nature of his income stream to dubious bankers.
Let me play devil's advocate for a second. While this is certainly a description of a certain kind of person that is stressed, frantic and striving, but only in private, it is also true that a meaningful percentage of successful people simply do not experience the grind the same way, do not get overwhelmed by stress and pressures. They intuitively prioritize tasks, do the job in the time available, accept that the results will reflect the time available without concern, and then move on to the next task. This is a common trait of successful people. A useful little vignette: supposedly during the GFC, at the start of another long weekend of stressful meetings at the Fed to discuss what is about to fail next, who is about to default next, a young GSCO banker complains that he just can't take another weekend like this. Lloyd Blankfein dismissively responds, "you're stepping out of a limousine to go to a meeting at the FRB, not getting out of a Higgins Boat on Normandy." You might imagine that this is an affectation or bravado. But probably it isn't.
I came here to make basically this point too, so thank you. My own gloss on it is that surely a substantial subset of the "effortlessly successful" crowd are NOT feigning. They ARE hard-working, but they're not "white-knuckling," or relentlessly striving, or desperate or "frantic," or anything like that. Rather, they have a very deep passion for something, and they expend a ton of energy pursuing that passion. It doesn't exactly feel like "striving" to them. They work hard, they enjoy it (and, yes, they no doubt benefit from some good fortune along the way) ... but the success just falls out of their passion and hard work. Like JS Mill said of happiness: if you're aiming for it, you probably won't attain it. Career success is surely often that way as well.
No small amount of truth to what Blankfein said.
Given what Goldman Sachs did to initiate, catalyze, and ultimately profit from the GFC, I don't doubt that Blankfein would have been so tastelessly blasé. The man knew that his firm would be OK and likely that the entire financial sector would be bailed out by the people and made whole.
Pretty easy to be stoic under those circumstances. What an asshole. (Him, not you!)
I'm 34. In the course of the last two years I've completed my Master's degree and started a job that's not quite at the top of my field (I'm a librarian and now have a senior management position at a County library system) but which is spitting distance from eventually being Director of a system. I'm making Really Decent Money that should be enough for a Really Comfortable Life (if I hadn't taken on crushing debt to get here...) And I have definitely found myself deflecting. I am embarrassed and uncomfortable with where I am. I think some of it is certainly due to the factors Freddie identifies here, but I think there are other reasons as well - reasons equally present among others my-age-ish and equally influential in the "aw shucks" deflection attitude that Freddie's discussing.
One is ambivalence towards hierarchy. I spent most of my life thus far working shit jobs for shit people who got off on authority. Many folks who've worked retail or service industries are rightly skeptical of "management" and dislike the notion of power held over others in the workplace. It took some really impactful words of wisdom from a mentor of mine to reframe my thinking on the matter - otherwise I never would have even applied for the kind of leadership role I have now. Even so, it causes cognitive dissonance to admit that I have authority over other workers.
Two is skepticism of capitalism. Very similar to the above, I and many others of my cohort have bought in to the "capitalism is the root of all evil" meme. While I do stand by the belief that capitalism is a corrosive, deleterious institution that should be abolished, I also think that disapproval of capitalism is a social virtue-signaling method. Aversion to hypocrisy is a factor too. Admitting that you've achieved success in the Great Capitalist Edifice feels like saying you're a very high-ranking guard at a gulag.
Three is embarrassment about finances. As mentioned, the money I'm making now puts me, as an individual, solidly above the median household income in the US... But I still live paycheck to paycheck and am often overdrawn before the end of the month, with slowly but steadily growing personal debt. I rent my home, am unlikely ever to own property, and have no assets or savings. This is a deeply humiliating state of affairs. I make all this money - why am I struggling, if not that I'm simply a spendthrift or bad at managing money? If I'm kinder to myself, I can acknowledge the economic and circumstantial factors that put me here - as mentioned before, huge chunks of that debt came from the education and relocation expenses that got me to where I am, to where I could get the job that I now have. But that feels like making excuses. It's more comfortable to frame myself as just a silly gal who blundered into her position and shouldn't really be expected to be successful.
I teach librarianship. The median age to begin is 35. Almost no one knows at 21 that this is a career. It's important meaningful work. People pay taxes to sustain the institution. And mostly happily. In a leadership role you can shape the library to serve people better and add new ideas. The hierarchy is usually a civil service structure that articulates with whatever government you are in so it's not your fault. There are programs about loan forgiveness for public service people. Many of my former students in public libraries have been able to have their loans forgiven.
Thank you, I appreciate that - and I didn't know that figure about the median age to begin! That genuinely helps me feel better about myself.
Loan forgiveness is definitely something I'm eligible for, but requires ten years of loan payments to qualify... By which point I will have mostly paid them off anyway. My student loan payments are also a smaller factor in my monthly expenses than the personal loans I took out to relocate twice and take the jobs that got me where I am now, and the credit card debt I accumulated in the process. (I've consolidated most of it into one personal loan with lower interest, but it's still rough.)
The mentor I mentioned told me that "the best kinds of leadership don't come from desire for power or authority - they come from expertise." That was hugely impactful to my thinking, and is the kind of leader I want to be.
I don’t know how to ask this….so I’ll just ask. Looking back, do you think there might have been an easier track? Did it have to be so hard?
I'm not sure what you mean by that... I mean yeah, if I had studied hard in high school and got a good scholarship and gone to college and so on, I'd probably be in a much better position. But I did poorly in high school due to lack of support and crushing untreated depression. I failed at my attempt to do community college at 19 because of crushing untreated depression and exhaustion from working nights. For me to have taken an "easier track," I would have had to be an entirely different person with an entirely different life - and it goes without saying that I'd be an entirely different person now.
I'm sorry if that's not what you're asking, I wasn't really sure what your question was after.
That answers it exactly. Naturally happy people are able to accomplish a lot and it so doing cause a lot of happy things to happen. For depressed people it’s the opposite the depression causes bad things to happen which causes more depression in a negative feedback loop. Naturally positive people experience a positive feedback loop.
I have thought about this a lot. With a family and personal history of clinical depression, I've come to the conclusion, it's actually harder for me to be happy than some other, more sunshiny people. So, I've worked hard to become a happier person than I was ten years ago. Or maybe "more satisfied person" is a better way to put it. It does feel like a feedback loop either way, for sure. Being depressed made it harder to have friends, which made my life more depressing...etc. Being more satisfied gives me more energy for personal relationships, which makes me feel more satisfied. I'm just starting to realize that maybe my measure of success is socially anchored. Hmmm....
I was going to write earlier that success is relative. It's a vague term so people are free to fill in the blanks with whatever they find appropriate. It's like those awful editorials the NYTimes sometimes runs about "I don't know how we can make ends meet on $350k household income each year." Most of us, I think if we're honest, feel a small burning pit of fury when we read that, but I have no doubt the people writing those editorials really feel that way. Their social circles are packed full of people doing as well or better than them financially, so it doesn't feel like enough. They understand, in an abstract way, that the guy running a register at the corner bodega inhabits the same space as them and makes a tiny fraction of what they do, but it's...I don't know it doesn't feel real to them.
Not saying they're right or wrong, it's just how the psychology of it works.
“ "I don't know how we can make ends meet on $350k household income each year."”
There is another aspect to this. If you look at the data intergenerational income mobility is fairly low. If your dad is the CFO of Amalgamated Widget you’re very likely to end up in finance or as an anesthesiologist or get your MBA and end up in some executive role. In no small part because you come from a world where you can’t imagine living as an adult on $350k.
What to some is great ambitions is to other just a desire to avoid destitution. A
Someone once said that if you want your kid to go to college, have them make friends with kids who are going to college. In other words, if the standard is X, most people will do X.
Re: “ I do stand by the belief that capitalism is a corrosive, deleterious institution that should be abolished”
Capitalism is the worst economic system - except for all the others.
Capitalism is the system that makes everything we like possible. From iPhones to colleges, restaurants to books, communism to corporatism, capitalism is the economy of making things happen.
It's also...not an institution, but the result of thousands of small systems that have outperformed all the other alternatives.