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The Myth of Making It (2019)

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Re: The Myth of Making It (2019)

#3
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".

Re: The Myth of Making It (2019)

#5
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.

Re: The Myth of Making It (2019)

#6
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.

Re: The Myth of Making It (2019)

#7
> “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...

Re: The Myth of Making It (2019)

#8
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.

Re: The Myth of Making It (2019)

#9
post #5

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…

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.

Re: The Myth of Making It (2019)

#10
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.

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