Success disaster

Unlucky and smart

Quick update: The latest podcast episode can be found here. Give it a listen!

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I just started reading “Designing Your Life¹” for a book club. I read this book back in 2019 but I don’t remember the content, probably because I didn’t do any of the exercises. This part of chapter one stood out to me:

“People waste a lot of time working on the wrong problem. If they are lucky, they will fail miserably quickly and get forced by circumstance into working on better problems. If they are unlucky and smart, they’ll succeed—we call it the success disaster—and wake up ten years later wondering how the hell they got to wherever they are, and why they are so unhappy.”

“Success disaster” is essentially the “Region-Beta Paradox,” which states that “people can sometimes recover more quickly from more distressing experiences than from less distressing ones.” I am starting to think that I have been “unlucky and smart” for a long time.

“How often do we fall in love with our first idea and then refuse to let it go? No matter how badly it turns out. More important, do we really think it is a good idea to let our earnest but misguided seventeen-year-old self determine where we work for the rest of our lives? And what about now? How often do we go with our first idea and think we know answers to questions we’ve never really investigated? How often do we check in with ourselves to see if we are really working on the right problem?”

I was “good enough” at finance, so I stayed in roles I hated for almost 10 years.

I didn’t get here alone. Achievement culture² is definitely partly to blame. I wanted to go to the University of Washington but Berkeley was more prestigious (and more affordable). I wanted to major in Sociology but I was told I needed to major in something I could get a job in. My internships in college were all in social services but I needed to make money, so I pursued finance.

Finance was my first idea, although I did tinker within the finance umbrella. I started out working for a small consulting firm. Looking back, I can now say that my first job, a paid internship, was actually the most interesting. I was only there for 6 months but I worked on a project analyzing how companies market complex products (like annuities) online. I loved the research process. I would call fintech companies, pretending to be an undergrad (which wasn’t entirely false) writing a paper for a business class. However, I was put on a different project that was insanely dull (comparing fee structures), and my enthusiasm waned.

I wanted to leave the Bay Area and I told myself I could find “something better.” My next role was definitely something but it was absolutely not better. I took a glorified customer service role at an investment management firm outside of Portland. I quit after 10 months. I could not believe that all of my hard work had led me to this point.

I started volunteering for the World Affairs Council because I knew I was passionate about international relations. However, I quickly remembered that although it feels better to align with the mission of a non-profit, the day-to-day operations mirror a for-profit business. I don’t know how people work for non-profits. Sadly, it seems like you have to have a partner in the corporate world to subsidize you.

I was approached by a financial consulting/auditing firm that was offering higher pay and better hours than the investment management firm. I stayed there for 2.5 years because it was very comfortable and predictable. However, as

Michelle Varghoose

writes in “The Lure of Mediocrity,” settling comes at a cost.

This led me back to the Bay for my “dream job” as an equity research associate. This resulted in so much stress that I had my first panic attack and my hands morphed into unusable claws. It felt like a waste to work Wall Street hours in San Francisco. All of my peers were working (seemingly very little) at tech startups. I decided to pivot to working in finance for a tech-adjacent company.

My quality of life improved. I was able to go to yoga before work. But the day-to-day was a grind. I hated spreadsheets. I would look around and see my colleagues spend hours online shopping. Why was I working so hard to stay in finance? Maybe business operations would be better.

I was ready to get out of San Francisco before Covid hit, but lockdown was the catalyst that pushed me to move to San Diego for a new job in tech. This role had nothing to do with finance. Now instead of spreadsheets, I spent time in Jira and Salesforce. My stress level went down to zero. Again, I stayed over 2 years because the job was good “enough.”

I realize now that I oscillated between settling (numbing) and pushing (degrading) myself. I feel like Goldilocks. I have never found a job that has felt “just right.”

This leads me to:

What does it mean if I’m not a “career person”??

[Long pause]

A few weeks ago, I stood outside Bend’s concert venue and listened to Dave Matthews. Between songs he said,

“Sometimes I get so anxious.”

[Long pause]

“That’s all.”

[Even longer pause]

“So I wrote a song about it.”

…

What if I am not a career person?

That’s all.

Funny the way it is

1. “Designing Your Life” suggests readers put together a “Health / Work / Play / Love Dashboard.” I think this is a great idea. It’s important to assess where you are starting from before trying to implement changes. However, this section made me cringe:

“To be a successful, high-performance entrepreneur, particularly under the extreme stress of a start-up, I can’t afford to get sick. I need to manage my health, even more now that I’m in a start-up.’ Fred made some changes: he hired a personal trainer, started working out three times a week, and committed to listening to one audio book a week on a challenging intellectual or spiritual subject during his commute. He reported more efficiency at work and a much higher job and life satisfaction with this new mix.”

So much yuck! The impetus to taking care of your health is only so that you don’t miss work!! Be sure to listen to your audiobook at 2x speed so that you can absorb as much self-help knowledge as possible instead of decompressing on the train! I lived this ethos for SO long.

2. I want to have a kid but I am really scared. I am scared because kids are very impressionable. I don’t want to saddle my kids with my own baggage and force them to live out my own unrealized hopes and dreams.

“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents”

- Carl Jung

I want to be an amazing role model, a pillar of compassion and emotional intelligence. Unfortunately, this is not my reality. But Mills Baker left a comment on

Alex Dobrenko`

s Both Are True post, “i want to be good but i am bad - help?” that made me feel better:

“This is a trivial and tangential thing to mention, but: you don’t need to be a good person or a good parent to reproduce, and e.g. I am glad my parents didn’t try to work out all their (rather severe) problems before having me: they never could have or would have. My childhood was sort of fucked but I am damned glad I’m alive, so who cares?! My advice: find a fellow freak who can tolerate how much you suck, then breed to give a new person a free ticket to the only ride we know of; do your best, work on yourself of course, but don’t agonize over being a fuckup too much. Most of the ride your kid takes isn’t about you anyway!!!”

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Other odds and ends:

Boygenius came to Bend this summer. I didn’t go to the concert because I am not hip. But I have become fascinated by Phoebe Bridgers. She is supposedly dating Bo Burnham. I was doom scrolling and came across the excellent interview and was triggered by this quote about social media rotting our brains:

“But that is the danger of social media to me, is not the BS, the cyberbullying ... It’s such a surface-level thing to go, “The problem is like cyberbullying or you’re going to send your naked pictures to the wrong person or to any person.” It’s something way weirder than that, which is there is you and then there is the other you. There is the idea of you. There is the story of you and it’s not ... The danger is not that we’re going to treat the internet like it’s real, the danger is that we’re treating the real world like it’s the internet and you’re walking through an experience as a kid and you’re also hovering over yourself watching your experience from afar because that’s how people will consume it. You watch people watch your experience. You watch other people in the room watch you watch them. You’re nostalgic for the experience as you’re in it because you’re thinking of how it’ll be processed after the fact. It’s dissociative and strange and weird, and that leads to anxiety and weird feelings.”

This led me to his bit, "The Me Generation" from his 2016 special "Make Happy."

“They say it's like the 'me' generation. It's not. The arrogance is taught, or it was cultivated. It's self-conscious. That's what it is. It's conscious of self. Social media - it's just the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform so the market said, here- perform everything to each other, all the time for no reason. It's prison - its horrific. It's performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member. I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.”

Feeling very attacked.

This rabbit hole led me to the WTF with Marc Maron Podcast episode with Bo Burnham / David Sedaris. Here’s David talking about his dad:

How does he feel in general about your life?

You know, I, my dad is, I did a show in Paris one year at the embassy in Paris.

I was invited to do a reading at the embassy.

And so I said to my dad, you want to come?

Because it seemed like the kind of thing he'd like.

So I flew him over there.

And then I heard him saying after the reading, I heard him say, well, David's a better reader than he is a writer.

Feeling very seen.

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Tags - Art, Books, Fear, Motherhood, Work