Can We Break Free From the Tug of Conventional Ideas of Success?

Many of us desperately long for “success,” however we define it. For one person, it might mean making a record number of sales; for another, making enough sales to be “a respectable salesperson”; for yet another, success might mean having a “high value” romantic partner, or finding any “acceptable” marriage partner, or making a promotion at work, or having 100,000 Twitter followers, or having a dazzling CV. What is less clear is whether being “successful” in this sense can make us happy or confer genuine meaning on our lives.

What all of these ideas of success have in common is that they are strictly performative: There is some sort of external accomplishment or product, something one can present as a public fact, in case anyone suspected that one is a “loser.” There is a publicly knowable fact you can point to, to show that you are indeed “succeeding” along some recognized metric of “success.”

Once you fulfil a criterion, or “tick the box,” you can rest a while to bask in your present “success.” Soon, you will be contemplating your next milestone, the next line to add to your CV. As a friend once remarked to me, having published a book some years ago, he became increasingly anxious to clock up another achievement, and not feel like a failed academic or a “one hit wonder.”