Why the Internet Makes Success Feel Impossible
Don’t Get Lost in the Levels of the Game
I normally don’t do this, but I want to take a moment to brag. Well, sort of. You’ll see what I mean.
Did you know that I’ve run a half-marathon before? That’s right. 13.1 miles – although in all fairness, a doctor did literally come up to me as I crossed the line and ask if I needed medical attention, which seems like an indication I was looking rough at the end. Of course, it’s worth noting that nearly a million people finish a marathon in the US each year, there are ultra-marathons that go 100 miles, and someone named Hugo Farias ran a marathon every day for just over a year.
Furthermore, I’ve walked across about 15 ft. on 1,200°F hot coals in my bare feet not once, but TWICE in my life. Bad ass, right? Except, know what the world record is for that? 656 feet. So, congrats to me for doing 1/43 of the world record length, I guess.
Additionally, if you follow me on X, you know I have 27.7k followers. Sound impressive? Well, IT IS. According to X’s Grok AI, “approximately 0.005% of X users have more than 27,700 followers.” In other words, I am like SUPER POPULAR… except, I also recently did a list of the 100 most popular conservative X accounts recently and the LOWEST account on the list had 1.6 million followers. So, it’s really more like:
It’s also worth noting that my book, 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know, was in the top 50 in self-help books on Amazon for a while. Pretty good, huh? I mean, it is as long as you don’t know JK Rowling exists. She’s sold 600 million copies of her books. So far.
Financially, I haven’t done badly for myself either. I live on the coast, and although I don’t have a mansion or a Lambo, I really could just sit on the beach every day if I felt like it. On the other hand, if I made my current net worth every year for the next 1,000 years, Elon Musk still wouldn’t break off a game of Diablo if he lost that much in the stock market.
There’s a point to all of this, and it’s not to crap on this small slice of the things I’ve done in my life; it’s that social media and the modern world have a way of making us all feel like we’re losing, even if we’re winning. We spend all day looking at the ragged edges of human accomplishment, and then we start to subconsciously feel bad about ourselves because, compared to these people we’re seeing, we’re no big deal.
Like, this has been floating around on X a lot lately:
The implication is that you can look like this, but the reality is that you can’t look like him at his age, no matter how much you train, unless you have freakishly good genetics and take large amounts of dangerous drugs.
Want to be one of the roughly 450 players in the NBA this year? It’s certainly not impossible, right? But the average height of an American man is 5’9, while the average height of an NBA player is 6’6. Only about .3% of American men are that tall in the first place, and very few of them have the requisite athleticism to go along with it that would allow them the slightest chance of playing professionally. Pretty much all of the big sports in the US are like this. The same goes for Hollywood. There are practically an unlimited number of people who want those big opportunities, but only a teeny, tiny percentage of people ever even have a chance of making it, and almost all of them will fail.
Similarly, we hear an awful lot about “billionaires.” We’re told we can supposedly fund everything by taxing them. We hear interviews with them on podcasts. We read about them in the news when they make big moves, big purchases, and spend crazy amounts of money:
From all we hear about billionaires, you’d think they were everywhere, yet there are only roughly 800 of them in the United States out of a population of roughly 348 million people.
We can go on and on with these examples, but the point is that we’re constantly being presented with extraordinarily rare human beings in the media, and because we see them constantly, it’s warping what we think of as “success.”
You can see this in the endless complaints from women that they can’t find any “good men,” the fact that social media depresses so many people, and in numbers like these:
Granted, some of those numbers depend on where you live and how that wealth is broken down. If all your wealth is in the value of your home or you live somewhere like NYC, Seattle, or San Francisco, you probably are going to need more than a million to “feel successful.” On the other hand, if you have a simple lifestyle and make some smart investments, there are plenty of places in the United States where a million dollars is enough to retire on. Not having to go to a day job? That certainly seems like a sign of success to me.
That’s just the thing, though, isn’t it? As we’ve gotten more-and-more-online and have started judging success against the whole world instead of a relatively small area, it has had an increasing impact on what we think of as “success,” and the people that are held up as “successes” online are almost inevitably incredible outliers.
It’s not just a “beautiful woman,” it’s one of the most beautiful women among tens of millions of people, who is photographed hundreds of times so the best shots can be used, then photoshopped by experts to look even better. Then, we use that as our standard of beauty.
It’s a tall, wealthy, charming, handsome, 6’4’, mystery man who could have come right off the cover of a women’s romance book, being held up as what women should be trying to lock down.
It’s the successful female CEO who found time to get married at 35 and have three kids. It’s the kid who started his own business and is now worth 40 million at 26. It’s the charismatic Internet sensation with 10 million diehard fans having that, “lifestyles of the rich and famous” experience for an audience every day.
This becomes the ideal people judge themselves and others by.
Setting aside the fact that, again, these tend to be very rare people, you’re also usually looking at a curated image that they want you to look at. You rarely get to see what they’re really like, how their life plays out, and what they had to give up to get where they are. We may admire the end result, but we seldom get to see how the sausage is made:
For example, a couple of days ago, I watched a fairly entertaining documentary called “Dirtbag: The Legend of Fred Beckey”:
Beckey was legitimately one of the greatest climbers that ever lived – maybe THE GREATEST. Some people credit him with as many as 1,000 first ascents of mountains, which is such an enormous number it’s hard to believe it’s real. He also continued climbing until he was 92 years old, which again seems almost impossible to believe.
The flip side of that was that he was extremely obsessive about climbing, had trouble holding a conversation about anything else, dressed like a bum, had disgusting eating habits, (beans with maggots in it got mentioned), was obviously upset about his declining ability to climb in his later years, and had a tendency to alienate people, which ruined his relationship with his brother, probably cost him the first ascent up Everest, and led to him never marrying or having children despite the fact he was amazing with women when he was younger.
Maybe you look at all that and go, “it was worth it,” and maybe you don’t, but when you get the real and complete picture for anybody, it will look a lot different than the image they present on Instagram or some YouTube video designed to hype them up.
Instead of trying to compare yourself to people who have gotten incredibly lucky, are incredibly gifted, have incredible timing, or have been incredibly obsessive, compare yourself to what would make a great life FOR YOU. Are you happy? Do you have good relationships? Do you have your health? Do you have a purpose? Do you have “enough?” Enough what? Maybe freedom, money, achievement, contribution – whatever it takes to get you where you feel like you need to go. If not, how can you get those things?
Those are the kind of real questions that keep you going in the right direction, instead of feeling bad about yourself or other people because they’re not living up to some standard that only exists as long as you don’t look too closely behind the facade they put up online.
I'm old enough to remember when the left was all-in for getting all the taxes we needed from "millionaires." When I was a lad, the word "billionaire," though presumably it existed, was not heard in the common discourse. I'm fairly sure the first time I became aware of its existence was in 1972, when George McGovern waxed eloquent in his disdain for "John Connolly and his Texas billionaire friends." At the time, Bill Buckley puckishly commented "...all three of them."
A few months before my father died in 1999, he took me to meet the family lawyer and the family financial advisors. At the end of the briefing, my father smilingly turned to me and said, "You see? You're going to be a millionaire after I die!" Then he paused and said, *sotto voce*, "...Of course, a million dollars isn't what it used to be..."
Oh, how true. And this is much of what the current “affordability” debate is about. Young people look around and say why can’t I have that, and that, and that, and money left over because that’s how they think everyone else lives.