How Will You Know If 2025 Is Successful?

A look at "conventional" success.

Good article here from Ron Carucci, who I believe works at some company called Navalent. He might have founded it. I dunno, sue me. I’ll hit you with a pull quote and a screenshot herein. The screenshot is first; it’s not from Carucci, but he borrowed from this Arthur Brooks article in The Atlantic:

Now here’s the pull-quote, which is from Carucci:

Rather than chiding yourself for what you haven’t achieved, or resenting someone for what they have, can you show yourself kindness for even incremental progress? And can you show your perceived rival compassion for whatever it took to achieve what they did? Instead of feeling or trying to entice envy through comparison, a more compassionate response is gratitude — for the privilege of doing the work you do, for the positive experiences you’ve had doing it, and even for the painful setbacks that have made you better.

Both pretty powerful, no?

I’ve thought about this a lot in the last 2–3 years, probably because of my own challenges around infertility, drinking, general purpose, career, etc. The core question: what is “success,” even?

Much smarter people than I have debated this, too:

There’s a few “camps” on this, obviously. I’d vaguely break them down into:

• The observable: Instagram shit. Be rich. Have trappings.

• The community-focused: Have good people, friends, and family around you throughout life.

• The straight material: They don’t flaunt it online, but they’re chasing dollars and bigger homes like a dog in heat.

• The low-key: They just want a good, simple life.

• The challenges: People that fall into addiction, crime, etc. and need second chances at “success” if they’re willing to change.

Those are very broad buckets, but I’d come down on those as some of the bigger areas.

You can get into gender and age here; a woman thinks about “success” differently than a man, even if those two have been married for 20 years. A 77 year-old thinks about “success” differently than a 12 year-old. You can also obviously get into socioeconomic background and neighborhood of raising, which is some Raj Chetty type stuff.

If you’ve seen all the recent media coverage of Robert Waldinger and the longitudinal Harvard study on happiness, you know that most people (at least within that study, if nothing else) define “success” and/or “happiness” through relationships with others. I am not sure if “success” and “happiness” should be considered synonyms there, but I just did it. As for “relationships with others,” I guess you could call that a synonym for “community.” We know that’s generally in decline of late, but … we can fix it.

One simple way is honestly to just go talk to your neighbors.

Very few people seem to chase this, tho. I happen to know two random people in the same neighborhood near me. They don’t know each other (yet?) but one couple moved onto the block of the other couple, about four houses down. The guy who was already living there tells me “Those people have never come over, never really said hi, and sometimes if he’s working the lawn and I wave, he kinda just nods.” Both couples (and their kids) are good, nice, rational people. It’s just that Couple II really has no desire to interact with them, even if it’s four houses away. That’s confusing to me personally, but everyone has their own path through life and what they value, ya know?

Friendship is also more complicated these days with “OMG so busy” and “Next week work?”

It’s also more common than we admit for friends to depart, or drift, during adulthood:

Your core relationships tend to be:

• Immediate family

• Children (obviously a subset of immediate family)

• Work colleagues

• One or two hobby colleagues (country club, workout group, church) — not to say “church” is a “hobby,” but you know, stuff beyond family/work

• Old friends from HS/college/growing up

In reality, your “core” tends to be immediate family and work colleagues. The first one can be fraught (abuse, divorce, etc.) and the second one shouldn’t really be your core relationships.

COVID kinda underscored all this. Because we were thrown together with immediate people and maybe some “Tiger King” episodes, we likely became more insular — and maybe stupider too!

It’s harder for people to form relationships and communities if social skills have indeed eroded, which social science seems to be telling us.

You’ve probably heard all these narratives of late about “most connected time in history, but loneliest time in history too.” It seems paradoxical but it’s really not. Connection is often superficial (think social media, or small talk) and observation from afar (think social media, or driving by someone’s neighborhood, or a Christmas card) tells you nothing about the people inside that house and what their lives and wins and struggles are really like. But we often think it does reveal that, and that’s where we get twisted around “success” and what it all means.

Personally, for a long time I thought “success” would mean a nice-sized family and keeping my eventual daughters off the pole. Not sure if that will ever happen for me, though.

Now I think of it more in terms of sobriety, steady work, and just being a person who’s nice and open and who others want to interact with.

I think of it in terms of a few quality relationships and relative consistency of character and behavior, ya know? Being present and active around those I care about. I actually turn off my phone most of the day right now. It allows you to actually live and enjoy life a bit more.

A lot of the things we deify around conventional success are fleeting and stupid. Hell, that’s why affluent people are often the most fragile bitches you’ll ever meet.

What’s real in the success game is relationships and consistency.

Takes?