Wow. Great post. This line in particular really made me think, and he’s not wrong.
> If you happen to hit the startup jackpot, Paul gets even richer and you might become wealthy too. If you don’t, you’re left with nothing while Paul, already rich, gets to write an essay about your failure.
What exactly are we chasing?
The chance to become rich? Recognition? Status? Or, ultimately, the chance to be admired, perhaps even adored?
Startup hustle culture feels like the American Dream distilled into its purest form. The nerd, once at the bottom of the traditional social pecking order, suddenly has a chance to become the hero. Intelligence becomes power. The outsider becomes the billionaire. The kid nobody wanted to sit with at school gets to buy the whole school, town, state or even the country. Ah heck, if you’re really rich enough you can pointlessly put a car in space and everyone will just think it’s cool.
But are we really escaping that old social hierarchy, or simply finding a different way to climb it?
And perhaps that’s what bugs me most. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that building something useful, earning a comfortable living and having enough time to enjoy life isn’t really success. Success has to be extraordinary. It has to be visible. It has to make other people envious. It is envy culture.
Meanwhile, the people selling us that dream are often the ones best positioned to profit from our pursuit of it like parasites living off their host and moving on to the next once the host dies.
Maybe we should spend less time asking how to become the next billionaire and more time asking why we think we need to.
> If you happen to hit the startup jackpot, Paul gets even richer and you might become wealthy too. If you don’t, you’re left with nothing while Paul, already rich, gets to write an essay about your failure.
What exactly are we chasing?
The chance to become rich? Recognition? Status? Or, ultimately, the chance to be admired, perhaps even adored?
Startup hustle culture feels like the American Dream distilled into its purest form. The nerd, once at the bottom of the traditional social pecking order, suddenly has a chance to become the hero. Intelligence becomes power. The outsider becomes the billionaire. The kid nobody wanted to sit with at school gets to buy the whole school, town, state or even the country. Ah heck, if you’re really rich enough you can pointlessly put a car in space and everyone will just think it’s cool.
But are we really escaping that old social hierarchy, or simply finding a different way to climb it?
And perhaps that’s what bugs me most. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that building something useful, earning a comfortable living and having enough time to enjoy life isn’t really success. Success has to be extraordinary. It has to be visible. It has to make other people envious. It is envy culture.
Meanwhile, the people selling us that dream are often the ones best positioned to profit from our pursuit of it like parasites living off their host and moving on to the next once the host dies.
Maybe we should spend less time asking how to become the next billionaire and more time asking why we think we need to.