We live in a culture where anything short of being great is considered a failure. If you don’t make millions of dollars on a startup, don’t have hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, don’t graduate from three Ivy League schools, don’t follow your dream/passion/bliss/joy, and don’t spend your (strangely abundant) free time on tropical islands, something has gone terribly wrong with you or your life.
In the words of the author and psychotherapist Josh Cohen, “this incessant quest for greatness deprives people of living an ordinarily good life.”
I am as guilty of this as anyone else in my generation. Raised in the vanity startup culture of the 2000s and 2010s, when every boy wanted to be Mark Zuckerberg, and every girl compared herself to the Kardashians (and the likes of them), with tweets and blog posts flying on every corner urging to be “the best possible version of yourself” and “never settle for mediocrity” – mediocrity being anything other than The Absolute and Ultimate Best – I, too, believed for a long time that I was destined for inevitable success.
Hell, deep inside, a part of me still believes so. The success culture is a virus, more pernicious than COVID-19 because it affects the very core of our nature and being, dooming us to a life of disappointment and dissatisfaction.
But wait a minute. What’s so bad about being ordinary? What’s so wrong with living not a great life – with keynote speeches and book deals and millions of dollars in the bank – but an ordinarily good one, where you are not the best at what you do, but merely good? What’s so sad about not comparing yourself to others and making a living while focusing on being a good person, who people and family can rely on, and who derives satisfaction from the day-to-day?
Nothing.
In fact, being merely good is much better than striving to be great, at least stress-wise.
This perspective shift – from being great to merely good – surely won’t win me any friends in Silicon Valley or Wall Street or Hollywood, where anything short of owning a yacht is considered giving up.
But you know what? To hell with it.
A few days ago, my wife and I were on a trip across the island of Bali. Our driver – Chiki, a 30-something Balinese with surprisingly good English – told us about his island’s history and the political system in Indonesia during the two-hour commute. I used the opportunity to interrogate him.
“Why are Balinese so goddamn happy?” I asked. In the two weeks I’ve been here; I am yet to meet a Balinese who wouldn’t give me a full-tooth smile. And it’s not just for tourists; they treat each other with the same unhypocritical affection. Still, most people in Bali don’t have much: they aren’t the wealthiest of folk (with an average salary hovering just above $200), and there aren’t many opportunities on the island besides making money off tourists like me.
“Because we’re social people,” Chiki replied. “We love our family, and we love our friends. What more can you ask for?”
The Balinese will never understand how people in large cities like London can be depressed while having access to stellar education, Amazon Prime, and endless entertainment. They will never get the “I feel I am in a rut” sobs during psychotherapy sessions when your income and social status allow you to spend a month in Bali and blog about it on a Wednesday afternoon from your hotel lobby.
(That would be me.)
The Balinese – not everyone, of course, but the vast majority – work to support their parents because they feel they owe something to the people who gave birth. They live their whole lives surrounded by people they love and never have identity crises. Major economic problems aside, they are happy and fulfilled. Most Balinese I’ve met wouldn’t trade places with Europeans. “You work too much, you think about the future too much,” one toothless man told me, who had never stepped foot off the island. “Bali is my home and my life. I love it here. Why leave?”
But back to our first-world problems.
The problem with growing up with too much visible success in the media (including social media) is that it creates an intensity of ambition with zero roots.
You are ambitious not because you want to provide for your family and ancestors (like Balinese) or because you see a higher purpose in it. You are ambitious simply because. Success is what everyone does, and that’s what you think is supposed to happen for you too.
If you look closely enough, you’ll see that people of my generation (born in the late 1990s) shop identities like clothes on a rack.
You scroll through YouTube and have FOMO.
You could be a novelist like Steven King. Or an entrepreneur like the founders of Airbnb. Or a blogger like that dude from Medium who makes money writing about writing. Hell, you can be a podcaster like Joe Rogan. (If he can, why not you? Right?) A musician like Moby. A cook like Jamie Oliver. An actor like George Clooney. A husband like George Clooney. Hell, you could be George Clooney! Or maybe you could be everything at once and have this fantastic eclectic life of a digital nomad. After all, the world is your oyster!
Ugh.
Caught between competing fantasies of being great, it’s almost impossible to reconcile yourself to being merely good or living an ordinarily good life.
Tthe difference between becoming successful and shopping for success is the price involved. When you cherry-pick your identity by looking at successful examples of others, you ignore the important underlying factor it entails: that success is something you work for. Unlike clothes that you can order on ASOS with a tap of a finger and have delivered to your door the following day (granted, you pay for a premium ultra-fast delivery, of course), success requires more than finding the type of life you like.
It requires hard work.
And even then, it’s not guaranteed.
I am not a particular fan of Mark Manson, but he once wrote something that stuck with me. “The question is not what you want but what you are ready to sacrifice. What price are you willing to pay? That determines what you’ll have.”
Most young people today are brought up reading, watching, and listening to stories of other people’s instant success. As a result, they want too much success for too little a price. They are hardly to blame. When their heroes are asked to share their “secrets to success” on a podcast, they say, “you’ve got to want it very very bad and follow your heart.”
Sadly (or not so much) that’s not the case in the real world.
If you think about it, striving to be merely good vs. being great is nothing more than maturity. At some point (better earlier than later), you’ve got to stop believing what other people say and show online and ask yourself, what’s really important?
Is it flashing a Lamborgini on Instagram or being a decent human being?
Is it living on tropical islands or doing meaningful work and bringing value to someone?
Is it having endless hookups or a deep, nurturing relationship based on mutual trust and understanding?
Is it trying to make a quick buck on shady schemes (crypto, etc.) or being financially responsible for yourself and the people you love?
Is it being famous for blogging online or having respect for your character?
Is it calling yourself an entrepreneur even when you don’t have a company or employees or building skills that other people find valuable?
Is it being a wannabe or being a professional?
Is it the number of followers on social media or the quality of connection with the people you love?
Focusing on being “merely good”, providing value, taking responsibility – you know, all those “boring” things that have constituted The Good Life for centuries – require a person to simply grow the fuck up.
And once you do that, life becomes much easier. Clearer. Less stressful. With more white space and breathing room.
Suddenly, all that baggage of expectation is lifted off your shoulders. You can inhale, exhale, and live for the first time in a long time (maybe ever).
Feel it? Welcome.
It’s called being an adult.
My life in nutshell 😊Good, happy, but certainly not "great" "successful" or wealthy in any financial sense. A family I love, a job I enjoy, a home and lots of animals are, for me anyway, enough and everything to be grateful for. There again I am at the end of the babyboomers so not much exposure or knowledge of social media😆