The Myth of Making It (2019)
longreads.com> “If everybody else is doing better than you, it is hard to be satisfied with your life conditions, no matter how good they objectively are,” he wrote. “By not displaying, let alone exaggerating, their own happiness, Finns might help each other to make more realistic comparisons, which benefits everybody’s happiness.”
Robert Sapolsky has dedicated a large chunk of his career to study the biological underpinnings for this and has written a great deal on it. His research shows that if you compare health outcomes in countries, accounting for all differences in access and care, relative inequality itself causes significant bodily harm as important as material inequality. The induced stress in a population from the hamster wheel mentality literally changes peoples brains.
It's not surprising that actors and actresses even if successful suffer the same fate because they live in a sort of cauldron where that competitiveness and status seeking is dialed up to 11. The drug use, marriage disasters, meltdowns and constant rehab visits that a non-trivial amount of them go through make a lot of sense in that context.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZrqCFa...
There's a perverse incentive for agents and producers because they typically only make money if the artist makes money, so anything you do to encourage that drive to make new projects nets you more money. If your victim blows all their money on drugs or parties or buying ridiculous things, then they are highly motivated to get back to work.
I don't think that's the issue with agents and producers. It's more complicated than that.
It's probably different in Hollywood in publishing, but the reasons agents are such a weak link in traditional publishing (to the point of nearly ruining the industry) are: (1) inaccessibility (you can't actually query agents who have any pull; you have to know someone even to get read), and (2) locus of power. To be more specific on the latter, the agent knows that connections inside the industry are her power base, whereas authors are basically interchangeable--from a humanistic standpoint, I don't agree; but commercially speaking, it's the case--so she has every incentive to put the publisher's interests ahead of those of her authors, even though her job is the opposite.
Hollywood is probably a bit different because movie stars have a lot more leverage than midlist authors. So, it may be that there's the opposite problem. Literary agents often push authors to lower their expectations and take crappy deals; a Hollywood agent's probably more inclined to push the client toward aggressive decisions while the iron is hot, so to speak.
This is also the foundation behind Mimetic Theory developed by Rene Girard.
I feel like this is going to get downvoted, but the problem, sincerely, is what you believe.
Money and accolades are bullshit ideas that do not objectively exist. Most of us have just bought into the idea of them.
If you strive to obtain something just because others value it (money, power, recognition), you're going to wind up feeling empty and unsatisfied.
Make your own meaning in this life and resist buying into the impoverished ideas of the world you were born into.
Sounds crazy, but no - chasing other people's idea of value is crazy.
While this is nice as a thought exercise, not having at least "enough" money is very painful in my experience. As for power and recognition, recognition comes first and then, I suppose, power in terms of ... importance. I'm not at all sure that power is actually important at all. Are people actively pursuing power? Those that do I suspect already have easy access to money and recognition. I cannot relate.
I think that harsh self evaluation is what allowed humans to experience our current state of existence. Maybe we are entering a new phase where competition can ebb and we can evolve towards something more forgiving towards ourselves, but those of us reading this article are trapped by our biology. In other words, the things that I feel seem largely out of my control.
Honestly I don't know why I'm even writing this. In a year or two when I look back I'm sure to feel embarrassed by what I have written. I usually am.
> While this is nice as a thought exercise, not having at least "enough" money is very painful in my experience.
Of course. Consider this - when you're poor - it's not specifically money you're after. You want the baseline items to survive, and money is a convenient way of obtaining them.
But your end goal is not the money - it's what you need.
But beyond that, especially in society, the money has a tendency to become the end in itself. Just get lots of money - it must be valuable because it appears others value it.
Same with power and recognition. Lots of people fantasize about promotions because of what it'll do to their self worth as perceived by them and their peers.
So ... it's not a thought experiment. It's the stone cold truth - money and power are the thought experiments.
We either barter every transaction or we have a means by which we exchange values. Money is inescapable.
If you believe that without qualification, it's true for you and you'll probably live with the cascading results of thinking that way. If you believe it's a useful societal tool for solving some basic problems but not much more beyond that, the same applies.
I am failing to see the alternative in your comments.
I agree with your comment, and I would like to build on something you said:
> resist buying into the impoverished ideas of the world you were born into.
Instead of “resist”, I might instead say, “see clearly” or “recognise” that these concepts are based on fiction, ultimately (like most concepts). They are useful tools, but we try to make them outlast their purpose. That is when they take over our minds and our lives.
When we observe with absolute attention and awareness, the hollowness of these concepts becomes clear and resisting them won’t even be necessary because we realise there is nothing to resist.
> Instead of “resist”, I might instead say, “see clearly” or “recognise”
Thank you, that's definitely a better way of wording it.
> Money and accolades are bullshit ideas that do not objectively exist.
Here's a different way to look at money. In the 1800's the British were consistently a few decades of everyone else, so that century was also called Pax Britannica. What they had and the rest of the world did not have was a vibrant financial market. London was the banking city of the world. All the money in the world was going through the London banks.
Maybe money does not objectively exist, but it helps tremendously to organize complex societies.
Well, I'm certainly not going to chase your idea of value. Seriously speaking, though: money and accolade are both social abstractions. Humans are animals of social abstraction, so it's kind of silly to state things that matter to us the most, don't objectively exist. Evolution can have a hierarchy, multiple layers of the onion. Faster the memes, faster the organism can reach a position where they can out-compete the environment.
I dunno. I feel pretty confident in my measure of "making it" for myself. I will have made it when I no longer need to work to maintain my lifestyle indefinitely.
Note, that doesn't mean I'll be satisfied. But I will have made it.
I was struck by the author's suggestion that "making it" could mean anything less. "Being able to buy a house without going broke". How could that mean you've made it? If you still have to work, you're still a wage slave.
Do I have to work? I could retire now to a greatly reduced standard of living. By the most absurdly optimistic predictions I could retire to the same standard of living. How will I know when those predictions go from absurd to reasonable to pessimistic?
Part of this is I have no idea how long I will live. Family history gives me anywhere from 3 more years to 50 more, and medical science can improve the upper range.
If you still have to work, you're still a wage slave.
Google, Facebook, etc. employees technically still have to work (if they cannot work from home) but I think they are doing alright. Wage slave is more like retail work.
No, 'flax is right, and wage slave is the right way to put it.
Those Google and Facebook workers are one bad boss from their lives going to shit. And, whether you like to believe it's the case or not, bad references do happen sometimes and, if word (or rumor) gets out that you were fired "for cause" (which doesn't actually mean anything, but sounds bad) you are basically fucked.
"Middle class" is an illusion. The cultural armor you think you have is paper-thin in a real conflict. If you're a worker, you're on the side of the proletariat; there's no honor in persisting in delusion to the contrary.
Tom Cruise and Will Smith are technically workers. I think there are degrees to proletariat status
Naw, we're all pretty much done when the nukes fly.
Interesting problem of competing with your (past) self and having too much hunger for recognition, surely a recipe for a life spent jumping through other peoples hoops. I recall a lovely Alan Watts talk on the "cake is a lie" of "making it", where he asks "What is your greatest work?" and the answer is "Myself", "..including all the mistakes and failures that got me here".
I find most of human behavior is easiest to understand when viewed from this lens: We evolved as a tribal species whose individual members are only able to survive when part of a tribe, and whose primary competitors are other tribes.
I think "making it" really means feeling a sense of certainty that you matter not just to yourself, but to your tribe (however you might define it). It's being needed and valued by them such that you never need fear being left behind to starve to death alone in the jungle.
Everything else is just trappings and indirection.
My life’s goals when I was a child were to get married, raise a kid, and to own the same Ferrari as Magnum PI. Done, done, and done (although the last one was mostly a bad idea). So I guess according to my standards I made it. The rest now is gravy.
>> although the last one was mostly a bad idea
You did it wrong. Magnum didn't own the Ferrari, he just had a rich friend who let him drive it.
A rich "friend". A sweet older man. A ... sugar daddy.
This seems like selection bias. Is somebody who has "made it" going to continue striving every day to be the greatest in their field? Personally, I don't think so, which means anybody making 8 figures is by definition someone who will never feel like they "made it". The people who see a couple million as having finally attained success will have already phoned it in & dropped out, contented.
Indeed, I'd argue it's a little dangerous to declare you've "made it" too early, for this reason. Most of the world would consider a stable six figure job to be success. But many of those jobs are very competitive; if you let it go to your head & start to check out, will you still have that job in five years? Will you still be a success then?
Seems appropriate to quote Bertrand Russell here: “Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.”
If you stop striving towards goals, you die. Your body and mind fall apart.
One of the most boring experiences is traveling around and looking at things.
I'm happiest when I'm working hard trying to achieve a new goal.
> If you stop striving towards goals, you die. Your body and mind fall apart.
This simply isn't true, Walter, and you know it
Are you sure about that? It's well known that there are spikes in deaths among older people:
1. after retirement
2. after the 70th, 80th, and 90th birthdays
3. after a family event that had been long anticipated
and that "keeping active" is necessary to keep living.
One's body falls apart without regular exercise, and the mind does, too.
This article talks about people at the very top. The phenomenon is definitely not modern or American specific.
The people who are winning awards and accolades (aka “making it”) would literally still be doing what they’re doing if they did not get paid for it.
These people aren’t looking for more money or more awards!p, they’re internally driven and will never stop striving to push the boundaries of their art.
LeBron James would still play basketball if NBA stopped paying him.
Nobody who is a regular employee of a company are in the same game of “making it” as these people.
Dunst told Flick. “I’m, you know, intelligent enough to know that and have perspective.” But she’s worked for three decades and what does she have to show for it — $25 million and a few award nods
Which is more than 99.9-99.99% of people. talk about being out of tough. not her, but the concept of the article. There is a big difference between making it and not making it. It's not something vague.
Kirsten Dunst was eventually nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 2022 Oscars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_nominations...
It's the life long pursuit IMO, there is no end just as there is no end to human desire/ambitions.
"The American Dream, that anyone can work hard and ultimately come out on top, is like an anti-happiness plan: A good life is not measured by social support or freedom or empathy, but by material gain."
Last I checked, admittedly a while ago, The American Dream was not about coming out on top, it was about achieving a level of comfort and security.