7 hours ago
4
Oh no, striving is cool now. “Never stop grinding and listen … Stop doing anything else but working,” as Pharrell Williams told the Grammys audience last month. The Times recently announced that “trying really hard and talking about it” was in, typified by Timothée Chalamet’s continued commitment to the “pursuit of greatness”, which he announced last year, along with being “so fucking locked in” to cinema. We’re all supposed to be paying for our big dreams in sweat again, it seems.
What’s wrong with that? Nothing, really – but an open admission that you’re ambitious, you want something specific and hard to attain from your life, and intend to work single-mindedly for it doesn’t come naturally to me and my gen X brethren (apart from Williams, apparently, aged 52). We internalised an idea of cool that involved the appearance of, if not actual, effortlessness that’s hard to shake.
But maybe, probably, we were wrong. Certainly, there was something disingenuous about our pretending not to care. Of course we had goals and ambitions and lots of people pedalled desperately to achieve them beneath the surface, while maintaining a nonchalant, “no revision” front above the waterline. Creating the illusion that success just happened did anyone who struggled or came up against a succession of closed doors a disservice (possibly some gen X strugglers were also somewhat obtuse – I was sad for years that I wasn’t a writer before eventually realising that successful writers wrote all the time rather than drifting around having vague ideas and not acting on them). This new notion of “showing your working” and being transparent about effort is refreshingly honest: the career equivalent of crediting your cosmetic surgeon, rather than claiming it’s all good genes and water.
It ties to a different attitude to failure too – trying and failing always felt shameful to me, but failure is kind of a flex now. Yes, the juggernaut How to Fail podcast started in 2018, but a scrappier, more relatable version seems to be surfacing now. Content creator, Gabrielle Carr (Instagram bio: “dream BIG”) trying to gather 1,000 rejections has prompted people to catalogue their own knock-backs; the French daily Libération has just run a series called “Vive l’échec” (Yay for failure) where people relate theirs; a “Museum of Personal Failure” exhibition opened in January in Vancouver full of people’s relics of their broken relationships, professional screw-ups and abandoned experiments. Failing frequently and publicly, the theory goes, takes the sting (and shame) away.
So why am I left feeling this shift isn’t just positive proof we’re becoming more evolved and open, but something sadder? Because it feels like making a virtue of necessity. After all, what alternative is there? Failure seems like an economic inevitability at the moment, especially for young people. They are entering the worst job market in a decade, a jobpocalypse that Alan Milburn of the Social Mobility Foundation recently called “a social catastrophe, an economic catastrophe and a political catastrophe”. Anyone who knows school or university leavers can tell you how soul-crushing it is: last year the Financial Times reported that the percentage of economically and socially disengaged young people has doubled in just over a decade.
It’s bigger than just jobs. Strategy agency Starling has just published some really quite bleak research exploring how 16–24-year-olds are in a crisis of optimism (they’re five times more likely to say they are scared about the future than 12-15-year-olds), experiencing a sense of “futurelessness” and lacking faith in the collective. AI, the climate, global instability and the sense they’re losing access to things their grandparents and parents enjoyed unthinkingly (studies that pay off, homes, jobs, families) leave them without positive visions of our planetary future. So what’s left? Apparently, it’s reframing failure – hoping it becomes part of a triumphant narrative arc towards future success – and refocusing energy on DIY self-betterment and striving your individual way out of this collective mess.
It’s cool to have personal goals and work hard to achieve them. It’s utterly admirable to embrace your failures openly. But if you’re doing it because you feel there’s actually no alternative, no safety net, no community to catch you, then something fundamental has failed, and it’s not you.
