I never fully bought into the consensus ideas of what constitutes a successful life. Money, power, 2.3 kids, a house in the burbs.
I was an only child and I spent a lot of time around adults as a kid, especially before my teens. Most of them were spending their lives doing things they wouldn’t have done if they didn’t need money, and most of them didn’t seem happy—in some cases happy about their work, in other cases happy about their lives.
I grew up, went to work because I had to eat and keep a roof over my head and heat on in Canadian winters, and I didn’t find much to recommend itself in most jobs. Half the time the work didn’t need to be done, the rest of the time it did need to be done, but we were stopped from doing it properly due to management wanting to increase profits, and often what they did would only increase profits in the short run and hurt them in the long run while alienating customers and employees.
I could have respected my job in life insurance if we’d actually been looking out for those we insured more. There were a few old school underwriters left who did, and I could see my employer had once been run honorably, but by the time I got there all that remained were a few guttering embers. A lot of people got rich under the new regime, but long term profitability went down. (Doing good isn’t always stupid even in terms of greed.)
But the bottom line really was “would I do this if I didn’t need the money?” The only jobs I ever had where that was somewhat true were being the managing editor at FireDogLake and the Agonist, and writing this blog, though even in those three cases I’d have done less if I didn’t need the money.
“I worked all my life and most of it I would never have done if I didn’t want or need more money” doesn’t seem like success to me. (I’m talking only for myself. If it does to you, great. There’s certainly honor in providing for one’s family even in a job one hates, for example.)
There’s a lot of chatter about falling fertility rates and lots of pro-family propaganda these days. I’m not anti-family or pro-family, both stances seem absurd to me. I’m pro-good families and anti-bad families and I’ve sure seen plenty of people have children who fucked their kids up beyond belief and none of them seemed happy in their family life. “I produced 2.3 fucked up kids and was miserable almost all the time” doesn’t smell like success to me. Again, talking only for myself. If it does for you, awesome.
Then there’s power. It seems, in the West, that almost everyone who has power does more evil than good. Corporate or political, this is true. I’m hard pressed to think that “I became President of the US and bombed five countries and killed a million people and made another 5 million homeless in an unnecessary war justified by lies” is success. Or it’s not any success I want and if it’s a success you want, you’re human filth.
Of course, the power is a Western issue (and Africa and a lot of other places, but especially the West in this time period). I have issues with Xi, but I think he can legitimately claim that he uses his power more for good, especially for the Chinese, than evil. FDR could have said something similar. But right now power in the West is poison. Even people like Bernie Sanders and AOC have voted to send Israel weapons while they commit genocide.
I do think that getting power and then doing more good with it than harm is admirable and a life worth living. So I guess there’s that.
But in the end we all share the same fate: death. All the money, all the power, all the wealth, even our families will be lost. I’ve been close to death more than once, a whisper away, and I live my life in the knowledge that everything I have here, in this life, I will one day lose. Perhaps my knowledge is an exception, perhaps I will be reunited with people I love at some point. Perhaps. But for sure the money and power and possessions are all lost.
I don’t have any real answers. I’ve tried, personally, to live a life where I spend as much of my time doing what I want to do as possible, and not what someone else wants me to do. I’ve tried, not always successfully, not to hurt people except to protect others from them and to be kind, because life is often shit and I don’t like it when others make life worse for me and do like it when people are kind to me. I’ve tried to speak the truth as best I can, hoping that the truth is something good. Obviously I’ve failed at times, truth being a slippery thing.
I don’t view myself as successful or as a failure (though I certainly thought of myself as a failure for years). Just as someone stumbling around, trying to live a life I like more than I hate and to not do more harm than good. If I die and can look back and think “yeah, I more or less enjoyed a lot of that and helped more people than I hurt” then I’ll consider my life a success no matter the scale or the stage.
But thank God I never bought fully into what society considers success. The idea of being Obama or Trump or Musk or Zuckerberg or most executives I’ve ever met is nauseating.
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NGG
Ian – know that you are deeply appreciated by those who follow you here. We all live in a dichotomy of working for a living and living our lives. I think the important part of your message – is that we don’t hurt others. Reading the posts from others contributing here – I think that resonates. The difficult part is watching the folks in power – doing what they can to make life as difficult as possible for the great majority of the population. This needs to change. How? Well I am not sure of the outcome, but it seems to me that the majority of the population is beginning to realize that they are getting the short of the end of the stick.
different clue
( I see that the covid post is down. I wonder if the incoming comments were bad enough that it was better to just take it down . . . )
Ian Welsh
I deleted the Covid post as I had misinterpreted the chart, as Carborundum pointed out. Still stand by the overall theme, but that post was inaccurate.
Joan
I don’t come from wealth and am scared to be poor, so I have accepted that I will need to work 40 hrs a week until the age of 65, and I’m saving as much as I can. Since I spend so much time and energy at work, a very large portion of my life, I try to make sure I’m working at a place that does something good in the world.
I felt good about a food service job I had. I was feeding people, and it was regular food, not super deep-fried or anything. I once managed a coffee shop where young adults were ordering drinks that contained 300-400mg of caffeine, which is the daily limit for full-blown adults. I instituted a policy that anything over three shots was decaf. That meant even our huge drinks still maxed out at 225 mg (assuming one shot is 75mg). We also didn’t have “pumps” for syrup so customers couldn’t dictate that we poison them with sugar haha. The vanilla latte meant we gave them a swirl of vanilla and that was it.
I’ve felt good working at universities. I’m proud of the students and glad I could help them. I think everyone making over $200k off the backs of students should be fired though. We don’t need university chancellors, presidents, CEOs, emperors haha.
I am glad that I didn’t go through with the American Dream plan that was set out for me. Some people seem to like it, but I grew up in it and didn’t see the appeal. It was chasing prosperity, but it never resulted in meaning to me.
spud
i vowed in my youth to find a way to be self employed, and be successful at it. i viewed the capitalists as thieves, they steal your life, you toil for them so much, you have no real time for yourself, you are not payed enough to sacrifice all of those days working and going into debt for life, days which you can never get back, just so that those leeches and parasites can even have more.
i got lucky and for 43 years i made enough to stay free. worked much longer hours and days, still working now because some families rely on some extra income from me so that they can eat.
but i came when i wanted to, left when i wanted to, and in many cases took a day off if i wanted to.
took leisurely lunch’s with my wife and family when i wanted to. no clock to punch.
stayed out of debt almost all of the time. when i took on debt, it was paid off pronto.
i am not living the high life, just a life where i make my own decisions.
mago
Poorly quoting Allen Ginsberg:
The purpose of life?
To ease the suffering of others
Everything else a drunken dumb show.
Thanks for all you do for the benefit of others, Ian
NGG
The wealthy need to give back. The infrastructure of the country has provided immense benefits to the corporations, tech corporations, etc. Not that I am a socialist, but both political parties need to focus on working Americans, and improving their lives. Recently, the folks in power are decimating the VA – good lord, our veterans, and cutting all cancer research – not to mention the gutting of the CFPB, that protects citizens from corporate fraud. And, lest I mention, cutting funding for wind power off the coast of Virginia – in the name of National Security. The stupidly is astounding!!
Carborundum
FWIW, I concur with the theme, my disagreement is that the current magnitude is not as great as many are asserting. (And infinitely greater than the denialists are asserting.)
My view, it’s significant enough to be material (as a side note, we’ve lost track of how small a productive capacity change is material – a percent or even a significant fraction of a percent *matters*) and if it turns out to increase with time and/or cuts on the back end in healthcare consumption as the repeated exposure curve builds,* well, that’s exactly how one sleepwalks into disaster.
More directly related to the current post, I wish your metric for success was more widely shared by those in the decision-making class. One of the things that I try to expose all of the people I train is the concept that *all* significant policy decisions come with some level of excess mortality and that our moral responsibility is to be aware of how that mortality is likely to be distributed and what is most likely to minimize it. Having read you for a some fair while now, I’d say you’re batting a lot better than a 50% threshold.
*It’s not well known by those outside the system, but a large proportion of healthcare resources go to caring for a relatively small number of people suffering from a constellation of inter-related chronic and complex health issues. Last time we went through this exercise in Ontario, they came up with something like 15-20 clusters of co-occurring issues (as an example, IIRC, COPD, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease was one of them) involving about 5% to 8% of healthcare users that “consumed” something on the order of 60% of healthcare resources.
Bill H.
I spent most of my working life in metals processing and fabrication. There are a few large buildings, the main Milwaukee Post Office for instance, a bridge over the Chicago River, and thousands of pieces of construction equipment that I can point to and say that, “I contributed to building that.” Better yet, at 82, I am at peace with who I am.
Ian Welsh
Carborundum,
I knew that a minority of patients consumed a majority of resources. I didn’t realize that minority was as small as 5 to 8%.
Policy always at least has opportunity cost, and most policy hurts some people and helps others and all you can try to do is to optimize those numbers and to aim for positive externalities. What gets to me is that so often those making policy don’t seem to aim to maximize “helped-hurt”, for positive externalities or to even minimize unavoidable negative externalities.
Ah well, preaching to the choir.
Bob
Success for me has been surviving well enough whilst avoiding getting embroiled in the society around me. I am still caught up in the insanity though, it seems inescapable.
A benefit of being at the fringes is seeing how utterly insane our civilisation is. Nothing about it is worth holding on to.
Jan Wiklund
I think we should stop blaming politicians and other power people for what they do. We should do like our ancestors – organizing our own power to counter them with. As long we don’t, it’s just whining.
Ian Welsh
Sure. I spent a decent chunk of my life working in politics trying to do just that. Just don’t put all your hopes in organizing, because entire lifetimes go on between successes in many places.
Accurate description of reality has never struck me as whining, but YMMV.
Feral Finster
I grew up poor and was starving for some time.
Now I have a large enough territory, well stocked with rodents, songbirds and rabbits, queens and sunny spots for naps, and my kittens are found all over the county and not only.
I cannot say that I am proud of everything I did to get to where I am, when you live by your wits, moral victories do not count.
Still, I can say that I never abused or mistreated those under my power and refused to do so when it might have been to my advantage. I never killed kittens, even though they might grow up to be my rivals. I never took from those worse off than I was, and I helped them when I could.
As to whether any of this benefits me or anyone else in the grander scheme of things, I do not know.
Like & Subscribe
What constitutes a successful life? The cynical side of me says, who cares? What does it matter? Humans are but a blip in the universe, if that. In a million years, much less in fact, it will be as if humans never even existed so what constitutes a successful life in that context renders it a silly question.
The less cynical side of me says, at best the answer depends. Depends on what? Well, many things but here are two for starters.
1. It depends on the values and/or principles, if they have any, of the person making the assessment. What Donald Trump considers a successful life is very different from what Jane Goodall considered a successful life, I’m sure you’ll agree.
2. It depends on the time in history because values and principles, and thus what constitutes a successful life, changes over time. For example, many would argue George Washington had a successful life despite him being an brutal, incorrigible slave owner. The measures of his day, and for some those measures are still perfectly acceptable, say he was highly successful and part of that success, a large part, was being a proficient, brutal slave owner who kept his slaves in check and hunted them down in perpetuity if they escaped. See Tad Stoermer video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhxivf0gmj8
I don’t even bother to ask myself the question of whether or not I have led a successful life. There is no right answer. It all depends, but I know this. By virtue of the characterization of me at this space, it’s clear I’m a terrible, horrible, worthless person and if I was significantly insecure and took these vitriolic assessments of my character to heart, I would have offed myself already. In fact, I think that is clearly the intent of those assessments and those making these assessments consider that behavior part and parcel of why they have led successful lives. If that’s the measure of whether or not one has led a successful life, well, clearly I have not. In fact, I have been a miserable failure — praise be.
ventzu
Zhuangzi’s answer:
THE TRUE MEN OF OLD were not afraid when they stood alone in their views. No great exploits. No plans. If they failed, no sorrow. No self-congratulation in success.
The true men of old knew no lust for life, no dread of death. Their entrance was without gladness, their exit, yonder, without resistance. Easy come, easy go. They did not forget where from, nor ask where to, nor drive grimly forward fighting their way through life. They took life as it came, gladly; took death as it came, without care; and went away, yonder. Yonder!
They had no mind to fight the Tao. They did not try by their own contriving to help the Tao along. These are the ones we call true men. Minds free, thoughts gone. Brows clear, faces serene.
Goods and possessions are no gain in his eyes. He stays far from wealth and honor. Long life is no ground for joy, nor early death for sorrow. Success is not for him to be proud of, failure is no shame. Had he all the world’s power he would not hold it as his own. If he conquered everything he would not take it to himself. His glory is in knowing that all things come together in One, and life and death are equal.
ibaien
@ jan
this is why trade unions were so valuable, and their demise so catastrophic – you need groups that exist outside the political architecture through all regimes so that when a moment ripe for change comes, the organization is already there. blogging is good on a theoretical level, but how many cadres does our esteemed host have?
spud
NGG,
you cannot reason with parasites. when was the last time you ever saw a wood tick or a mosquito, voluntarily dis-engage and said i have feed enough. they don’t. they feed till the die!
Bill H.
ever hear of minneapolis electric steel casting company, MESCO? i worked there for five years making giant machine tool parts for the iron mines in minnesota, wisconsin, and michigan.
Richard
Excellent, thanks.
mago
Working as a chef and an educator (outside the mainstream) I never made much money or had a retirement plan, so here I am leading a hand to mouth existence, with which I’m well familiar.
I’ve lived on both coasts of the States and in between in addition to Latin America and both Northern and Southern Europe. I’ve known and worked with people of all ages and classes in diverse situations, mostly unconventional. I’m a member of the precariat with one foot on a banana peel at the edge of the abyss and I have no regrets, except for maybe getting an expensive MFA degree, but I’m willing to let that folly slide now.
There’s a price to pay for not playing the mainstream game. So be it. I feel blessed with ineffable riches.
A most cheerful holiday season to all who have the opportunity to enjoy it.
mago
Some people have no one and are alone and unable to relate. Many grieve in states of loss. Caged, scared, dependent and voiceless humans and animals alike suffer without relief. May all cruelty , ignorance and stupidity be pacified. May the minds of all be filled with love for one another.
Off topic, I know. Just wanted to say it on this Christmas Eve.
Eric Anderson
Thanks Ian. Hanging around here has definitely had a positive influence on my life. And your thoughts have allowed me to teach many in my sphere.
To me, you’re an exemplar of of one of my favorite quotes:
“You can’t learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can’t learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can’t learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”
— David McCullough
We become what we do.
Happy yule everyone.
ps … open a terminal and type `ssh tiny.christmas`
different clue
” In a million years, much less in fact, it will be as if humans never even existed . . . ”
Not so. If humans, especially upper class capitalist humans, complete their plans to achieve the 6th Great Extinction, Earth’s range of species will be super-depleted and super-simplified a million years from now. And longer than that, too.
And an ice-cap-free Arctic and Antarctic, too.
Talk about ” having an impact” !
Hopefully the successful life will include a sometimes-lifted-finger in the direction of slowing or arresting the 6th Great Extinction in Mid-Extinction.