Jameson Lopp on Nostr: The American Dream is a harmful narrative. The traditional expectation in American ...

The American Dream is a harmful narrative.

The traditional expectation in American society is that if you put in a basic level of effort, you will be successful. You go to school, you study, you graduate, and you go to college. You don't do drugs, you stay out of trouble. You start at an entry-level job and get promoted every few years. Financial success is supposed to follow. Not extreme success, but a stable job that pays well, marriage, kids, owning a house, vacations, etc.

Those things are supposed to happen because you followed the rules.

When you follow all the rules and are not successful, it creates a psychological disconnect, and people react in different ways to that disconnect.

Some people react by rejecting the traditional expectations and redefining success. So you get things like minimalism and child-free lifestyles and the sort of Bohemian hipster ideal that it's okay to not settle down. A generation ago it was hippies and communes.

On the other hand, some people react to this psychological shift by forming the belief that they were not successful because they failed to follow the rules sufficiently strictly.

So they become fundamentalists. They lean into following the rules and they make following the rules a core part of their identity. The whole grindset thing is not about work, it's about an identity. It is doubling down on the idea that if you work hard and relentlessly improve yourself, you will achieve success. Along with it comes the idea that people who have failed did so because they did not work sufficiently hard.

The people who post endlessly about the grindset mentality are trumpeting their own moral purity. They are successful because they are following the rules. And they know that they are successful because they talk about how much they are successful.

The flip side of this phenomenon is that some people will encounter this psychological disconnect and form the mindset that the rules are bullshit and people only achieve success if they are willing to break the rules. Thus there is nothing morally wrong about it because everyone else must be doing it too. It opens the door and creates a motivation for criminal behavior because there was no success achieved from following the rules.

There is no formula for success. Nor is success even an objective goal. Folks should seek validation from within rather than Keeping Up With the Joneses.