> <i>“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.”</i><p>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, <i>accounting for all differences in access and care</i>, 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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZrqCFanICwYJ:https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-economic-inequality-inflicts-real-biological-harm/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=de" rel="nofollow">https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZrqCFa...</a>
I feel like this is going to get downvoted, but the problem, sincerely, is what you believe.<p>Money and accolades are bullshit ideas that do not objectively exist. Most of us have just bought into the idea of them.<p>If you strive to obtain something just because others value it (money, power, recognition), you're going to wind up feeling empty and unsatisfied.<p>Make your own meaning in this life and resist buying into the impoverished ideas of the world you were born into.<p>Sounds crazy, but no - chasing other people's idea of value is crazy.
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.<p>Note, that doesn't mean I'll be satisfied. But I will have made it.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>One of the most boring experiences is traveling around and looking at things.<p>I'm happiest when I'm working hard trying to achieve a new goal.
This article talks about people at the very top. The phenomenon is definitely not modern or American specific.<p>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.<p>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.<p>LeBron James would still play basketball if NBA stopped paying him.<p>Nobody who is a regular employee of a company are in the same game of “making it” as these people.
<i>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</i><p>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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_nominations_received_by_Kirsten_Dunst" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_nominations...</a>
"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."<p>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.