Vomiting our daily bread

Christian martyr and Roman statesman Boethius said, “It is not that a man of virtue is honored because of his high office, but rather that the office is honored because of his virtue.” In other words, someone is not made good by a title, but the title and role is made good by the individual, much like Caitlin Clark made women’s basketball interesting by being dominant (come at me).

I wrote in my rationale that America is status-obsessed, celebrity-obsessed, and entrepreneur-obsessed. That mentality is hardly ridiculous for a nation known for the most self-made individuals and industries than any other. Pretty reasonable actually. But I want to argue why this reasonable conclusion has made us do some very unreasonable things.

You probably know a Gen Z / Millennial friend who thinks that if they just find a better job on Indeed or hire the right bookie to place their parlays on PrizePicks or finesse their Patreon SEO algorithm (or crowdfund their blog on Substack), they can walk away happily from the employed theatre quietly into a lifetime of work-from-home luxury with four passive income streams (all while satisfying their soul).

Maybe, like me, in a desperate attempt to attain a new degree of economic freedom, you try to find the loopholes gifted to you by free-market globalization and actualize your DoorDash side hustle or capitalize on a social media giveaway. Some individuals still have faith in the American dream and have accomplished what it takes to become financially free irrespective of the state of their souls (think of your favorite influencer or celebrity in an insurance commercial) but some of our wishes are simply wishes, delusional goals. Because of the opportunity America affords us, where obsession becomes delusion seems unclear.

What we can’t deny is that a societal distaste with corporations and a frenetic search for the “next thing” has brought us crippling insecurity from comparison and overall life dissatisfaction.

I am not immune from this infatuation with instantaneous viral success, and if you’re American, I’m guessing you aren’t either. As I mentioned, I want to write about this infatuation because it has tempted me, it is a crippling source of discontentment, and yet I think it lies at the heart of what it means to be American (which is why the message seems unshakable).

Professor at NYU Stern School of Business, Scott Galloway witnesses this obsession with unrealistic wealth expectations every day amongst his young MBA students and sees the pathology. When he asks students where they expect to be financially after graduation, “the majority believe they will not only be in the top 10% economically, but will be in the top 1% economically.”

I think we can partially blame disproportionate social media monetization and influence on eyes that are too big for our stomachs. It has become infinitely easier to secure the illusion of financial security (and to compare our lives to someone else’s illusion) than to actually secure it. But what is ironic about our country’s monocular focus on making 6 figures is that 1) if you make more than $30k per year, you are already in the 1% of all earners alive today and 2) making more than $150k doesn’t make you objectively happier.

So, Galloway encourages all young adults like me to have a sober conversation with themselves about how much they will make, suggesting

“You can have it all, you just can’t have it all at once.”

Meaning, you can have a high-status position, but you aren’t also going to be giving your kids the attachment and bonding they need. You can have that seven-figure salary dream job where you travel all over the world, but you also aren’t going to enjoy a meaningful relationship with a spouse (or a healthy circadian rhythm).

If we are really honest, it is difficult to name a wealthy person you know who didn’t either inherit money, who didn’t sacrifice a lot relationally and otherwise, who isn’t gifted with incredible capacity, who wasn’t publicly ridiculed for something they did or some combination of those. If someone managed to “obtain” wealth (or the illusion of it) by escaping all of those, it’s likely they are in loads of credit card debt.

What applies to wealth also applies to fame. We want the charm and charisma of Russell Brand or Kevin Hart without their hardships or deficiencies. The reason why this obsession is warped is not just because we are comparing our lives with the best versions of someone else’s, but that we are comparing our lives to the version of this individual that is also marketed to be the best.

If I wanted to start a podcast or write a cookbook, I could compare my first episode to Joe Rogan’s best episode or my first draft of a cookbook to the Pioneer Woman… to my immediate disappointment. If I begin something as a novice and think I am exempt from the humiliation any novice is owed, I will be more daunted and dismayed than if I face ridicule voluntarily. Just because someone famous chooses to hide their bloopers doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

We put brilliant people like Elon Musk on a pedestal as well. Musk recently said on a podcast

“My mind is storm. I don’t think most people would want to be me. They may think they would want to be me, but they don’t. They don’t know, they don’t understand.”

Psychologist Jordan Peterson hypothesizes that Musk’s rate of thinking is so rapid and intense, without remission, that it borders on clinical mania. And mania isn’t something I find myself wishing on anyone. We think we want a job where we send people to space and build bulletproof cybertrucks and own a sexy electric car company, but we don’t want to be the bullied Afrikaaner kid with an absentee father and a hypomanic psyche who is responsible for making geopolitical decisions about Ukrainian satellites.

We like to bring justice to society by protesting the spoils of a CEO’s salary but have difficulty suggesting alternatives and complain when we are given equivalents of a CEO’s responsibility. What we have lost sight of as Millennials complaining about unfair home prices is that advantages hardly ever come without corresponding disadvantage(s): those same Boomers who flipped their homes for thousands 1) had to own those homes for decades 2) probably long for the health and freedom you have now as a young person and 3) may have had a divorce or circumstance where they lost much of their wealth.

What most people (like me) infected with the “get-rich-quick” bug don’t want to hear is what Warren Buffett told a surprised journalist: 99% of wealthy people, himself included, didn’t become wealthy until they were older. Most save consistently over a lifetime. No secrets, no gimmicks, no 7-step entrepreneurial plan. And, once you are wealthy, everyone wants what you got. Mo money, mo problems. Any takers?

Our confused craving for instantaneous wealth is also not helped by the rich middle-aged “entrepreneur” who made his living in iron-ore smelting who leaves attendees at a business school symposium with advice like “follow your passion” and “be true to your feelings” and walks off stage to applause from these in-debt attendees who have rarely given a second thought to how they want to spend their working years.

You may think you have the maturity to have outgrown the “follow-your-passion” model of becoming economically viable. “I don’t want to be a princess or an NBA player or a superhero.” But, if, like me, you hastily become envious of another’s life without considering the drawbacks, the allure of vocation as passion is still there. So, why don’t I let Scott Galloway convince us that hoping for success in professions that are purely passion is contributing to our financial fugue?

First, professions that are “passion” - cinema, theatre, music, artistry, sports, entrepreneurial ventures, food, BLOGGING - are massively over-invested, confined industries. Of the people who are able to enter those fields professionally, a small percentage will actually make a sustainable living. This small percentage is also responsible for approximately 50% of consumable content. Take the time to look up the gritty testimonies of these successful figures and others like them: the Steve Harveys, John Krasinskis, Oprah Winfreys and Shaquille O’Neals.

Even with incredible talent, the path to vault the fortified walls of a confined industry is riddled with hardship (and most artists, athletes, performers are still beholden to a corporate “contract” they have signed). It is very naive or at least very presumptuous, as Millennials have tried, to live as though our work is exempt from any sort of social contract even in a post-pandemic world.

Secondly (and I think slightly more convincingly), what makes us think that “following our passion,” working from home, removing ourselves from participation in the polis, or escaping corporate constraints on our freedom will end in the fulfillment we crave? What happened to most people during the pandemic? Sure, we got more time at home with family. But we got more restless, more mentally ill, lulled to sleep into addictions to the wrong things.

Further, instantaneous acquisition of wealth (or fame or any other worldly metric of success) seems like possibly the worst thing to happen to someone with an unclosed frontal lobe lacking a foundation of healthy financial habits. Look at people like Justin Bieber or Macaulay Culkin or Taylor Swift or any young star whose instant thrust to fame cost them sanity and innocence. Or just ask any physician who got their first paycheck and, instead of paying off their mountain of debt, put a down payment on a Tesla. What makes us think the same won’t occur with our finances? In the words of renowned lyricist, Benny the Butcher, “Money don’t make you solid; it just makes you 10 times more of the person you was before you got it.” Agreed.

So, Galloway proposes an alternative route to finding vocation; invest in abilities that energize you or that don’t seem like “chores,” though they may have chore-like qualities. Much better to do as Seth Godin suggests: “Instead of wondering when your next vacation is … set up a [professional] life you don’t have to escape from.” You then begin to master something you are naturally good at, begin to enjoy it rather than resent it, realize that others see your mastery as worthy of emulation, discover that you are passionate about the process of mastery, rather than the instantaneous gratification of applause, stop caring who gets the credit, and find satisfaction in your contribution to a flourishing society, while continuing to ascend in ability.

Now here is where I differ from Galloway: I don’t think you should take your dreams out back and shoot them in the head. Passion is a crucial element in examining vocation. I love the American urge to dream and believe you can beat the odds (even if sometimes delusional) and I think it is a fundamentally a good one. For every player Kobe Bryant mentored, there were hundreds more who dreamed to emulate his mastery and determination, advancing the way the game of basketball is played.

And yet, I think we are entering an era where “less is more” when it comes to work. More Millennials and young employed seem to be working to live rather than living to work. More people take lower-paying jobs for lower cost of living rather than high-power status jobs where they can’t appreciate their cost of living.

I think it should also be noted that the ability to pursue the American Dream with the freedom and abandon most young people are able to pursue it today is an incredibly recent development. We are in new territory that has never been mapped before. Both sets of my grandparents (to whom I owe so much) would never have dreamed of having the luxury of deliberating for years about an occupation or having a college “advisor.” I think we are all entitled to have a flimsy, American dream hope so long as we eat only our daily bread, our manna, and we aren’t convinced that we can leave our wife and family for Wrestle Mania.

So long as it doesn’t become a delusion, I am ok with our obsession. Americans are afforded these obsessions because we have seen extraordinary, real progress in the advancement of political and economic freedom. But I do want to see us free from discontentment.

In line with the Boethius quote we began with, one of my favorite US Presidents, Harry Truman, said

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

In Luke 14, Jesus tells a narrative that depicts what Truman grasped at

“When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. ⁹ If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. ¹⁰ But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. ¹¹ For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Exalting oneself is a direct result of caring who gets the credit (professionally and otherwise).

And so, I think this wake-up call about financial delusion is simply a pendulum swing in another direction (towards less-is-more, living off-the-grid on a sustainable farm type beat), not an anomalous societal urge that I happened to anticipate. We will be back to loving corporate monotony soon enough like we were in the 1950s.

My personal infatuation with accolade and high office led to my application to several dozen jobs last year that I only wanted for their ability to confer an appearance of success (to get into medical school). When I eventually accepted a job with a laboratory conducting research on end-stage liver disease, I found myself conceptually ready but technically swamped, extraordinarily under-qualified, unequipped to accomplish the work I was assigned, and without any real “colleagues.”

My supervisor and I are on good terms and his expertise was invaluable, but the job was simply not a fit. I got the job I wanted for the accolade, but I was not ready for the office, what the accolade demanded. This resulted in distress that I ended up forcing on other people. In the future, if I become covetous of someone else’s office and have not cultivated the virtue it demands, I will be more careful what I wish for. In the timeless words of Billy Joel “Slow down you crazy child, you can’t be everything you want to be before your time” and I would add you shouldn’t want to be before your time.

A quick apology and explanation: this article was so long because 1) I wanted you to think I’m awesome, of course and 2) I hate seeing (in myself and others) this wicked undercurrent that “Yeah I don’t need wealth or status to be happy. That’s for crazy people. Yet I’m going to go into a profession where I have no balance to get both.”

Wealth and status are great things. Really. But they are easily corrupted. So, I’m literally saying don’t take the promotion you wanted if it’s for the accolade. Don’t sign your kid up for that sports league on Sundays if it interferes and subtracts from meaningful time with friends and sucks the fun out of the game. Don’t start that side hustle if it’s just to nurse a grudge against someone else. Don’t buy the new truck. Don’t buy the 2023 limited edition Ford Raptor. Please. Don’t buy the 52nd new potted plant in your home. Yes, you only get one life. Splurge on that vacation. Pursue professional dreams, even American ones. But don’t lose your soul in an attempt to gain the world.

If you work with young people or are a young person, I want to know: do young people today need to aspire more to big things and have a crazy, delusional dream? Or is the more sober message that passion is killing us the prescription? Also, is the allure of the American Dream crippling our ability to live with contentment or must we learn to be at peace with the natural consequences of living in the freest market in the world? Is contentment even the antidote we need or do we need to consider something else in our diagnosis of status sickness? Let me hear it in the comments below.

Note: I realized that the best illustration of an obsession with power specifically with (almost) disastrous consequences is illustrated immaculately by the character Captain Sobel (David Schwimmer) in the 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers. And maybe the best movie example of a warped obsession with finances and status leading to ruin is Leo DiCap and Tom Hanks’ Catch Me If You Can. We all want to have the perks of being a pilot without doing any of the work it requires. The disturbing part: subtract Hollywood from Leo’s airline escapade and you’ve just killed a few hundred people.