Success Hurts
We have been indoctrinated with the Great American Lie, steeped in Capitalism, that we can do anything we put our minds to.
In some respects, this can be true. For some, America has been a haven where class barriers are less of an obstacle than elsewhere in the world. Our Statue of Liberty coos a siren’s call to newcomers: if you yearn to be free, bring that ass to our shores. Our forefathers wrote that the pursuit of happiness was an unalienable right of all citizens, and our freedoms were protected by a sacred text, ratified in ink and blood, slaughter and sacrifice. America is the home of the free. We have the strongest economy in the world; several states even boast some of the highest GDP of all nations if we counted them as sovereign. The dollar, the English language, the flag,the eagle, McDonalds and baseball. Freedom.
But Lady Liberty was a gift, we didn’t construct it ourselves. Ellis Island and the rush of immigrants that have passed through it have faced racism, erasure, and expulsion. Our forefathers excluded women, and we shed more blood over emancipating slaves than we did to emancipate ourselves from England. Freedom, meaning economic success, has been afforded lavishly to a few select groups in America, with ever-shrinking hierarchies approaching the most wealthy.
Being an entrepreneur, and a solopreneur at that, is the height of American exceptionalism. Our Manifest Destiny, our American Birthright, gives us everything from coast to coast, and we do it on our own. American corporate history is story after story of a white man capitalizing on a need- railroads, wheat, electricity, oil, cell phones- and building an empire from his entrepreneurial spirit into a monolith that swallows the competition and subjugates its customers.
How many Americans conflate the stock market with the actual economy? Who watched agog as Amazon gained billions in revenue in 2020 while millions lost their jobs? How can the DOW soar while the unemployment figure tanks?
Capitalism is inherently toxic. It preys on and manipulates markets. But the Invisible Haaaaannndddd!!!! You cry! Let me tell you something. In senior year of high school, the video I made for my macroeconomic class was filmed as a Keynesian fever dream set to the soundtrack of Shaggy’s at-the-time-just-released “It Wasn’t Me”, with a classmate feigning sleep and muttering “Keynes…Keynes…Keynes…” over and over again. It was a masterpiece of pretentious teenage surrealisme, but y’all don’t sound any more coherent when trying to explain how the market corrects itself. The gag is it don’t, sorry babe.
On to the titular thesis of this piece, and I offer a half-assed apology for my wanton abandonment of the three-part-thesis structure here: Success Hurts. One could argue that those who are born into family wealth or Havishamian benefactresses are suffering in their own right, and after watching Paris Hilton’s recent documentary, I’ll concede some ground there; but on the whole, trying to create something out of your sheer moxie is rough as hell.
That said, the grossly pervasive narrative in the world, whether it’s today’s Instagram story swipe up coaching course, or the door to door salesmen of yesteryear, is that with enough gumption and know-how, you’ll be aces, kid. Pie in the sky. My father was born in the Great Depression and nigh on 90 years later the most brilliant, hard working and charismatic man died penniless in nowhere fucking Florida.
Anecdotal and empirical evidence shows time and again that pulling yourself up from your bootstraps doesn’t uniformly apply. If you never had boots to begin with, you’re fucked. If those straps break, you’re fucked. If you lose your boots or have to barter them for, say, healthcare, you’re fucked. If they’re women’s boots or if those boots belong to a person of color or a queer person or a trans person or someone with a mental illness, y’all fuuuuucked.
Yes, there are plenty of people who make something out of nothing. Their talent propels them to success from their garage or YouTube or a book deal or some other mode of public recognition, but for every Jobs or Beiber or Gilbert, there are millions who are trying to make it day to day. Is their worth less than those who “made it big”? Nope. They just didn’t hit the target in the great game of whack-a-mole.
When you try to be successful, when you launch a business, and not in a fresh-from-business-school situation, but your average person trying to do a thing, you’re immediately inundated with advice, good and infuriating, But you’re so conditioned to think that business owners have the Secret Sauce that you listen to everything. From visualizing your success to thousand dollar coaching programs to radical compassion, you try everything. Every intoxicating shortcut is passed under your nose like you’re drifting through Wonka’s factory. And none of them work and you wonder whether you’re broken, why closing deals is hard, why you aren’t landing six-figure clients in six weeks.
Why? Whyyyy, you ask?? Here’s the fuck why: because success hurts (AHA! THESIS!) Success requires a measure of sacrifice, and a big dose of creating something that hasn’t been done before. It takes vision and adherence to goals, discipline, formula, imagination, innovation, guts and gusto. It requires you to go against every fiber of your human nature that clings to comfort and say NOT TODAY, SOFA . It requires you to endure rejection after rejection. It requires you to face dead-on what you don’t know and learn it by yesterday. It requires you to eschew cozy evenings and happy hours and going to the gym just so you can check off the never ending list, if you’re even organized enough to have a list. Creating something out of nothing might have taken Yahweh seven days, but look at the snake-ridden-forgot-to-add-the-second-family-tree-incestual SHITSHOW that ensued. You know why Lucifer really fell from heaven? He actually jumped because he was sick of the programmatic retreads. Dude needed his own thing, and as far as I’ve read, Hell operates fairly smoothly. Just saying.
I’m not saying don’t do your own thing. I do my own thing and 99% of the time I wouldn’t choose anything else. No, 100% of the time. All percentages of the time I would choose to do this over dragging my ass to a fluorescent lit cubicle to do something someone else wants before guiltily leaving for an overpriced wilted salad from some fluorescent lit hipster joint down the street before counting the hours to my fluorescent lit workout class I hate but I’m going because the app I used to schedule will charge me money if I don’t before I drag my ass home to guzzle gas station wine and swipe away the dick pics I’ve been sent on a toxic dating app before I pass out with tepid dreams before I get up and do it again. Hundo. P.
So. Bringing it all back together. For all of the aforementioned reasons, the truth of American entrepreneurship being a birthright, an easy achievement if only you follow a few easy steps, swipe up, buy this book, and visualize your success every day, is just a lie. This country was built on inequality and runs on inequality and the offshoot of that is if you aren’t on the equal sire, you’re on the unequal side. That doesn’t mean you should quit, but it means we need to stop forcing this pablum of easy acceptance of class capitalism down the throats of those who are trying to build something here.
