Define Success

I suppose I ought to comment on Bad Bunny’s Superbowl performance earlier this week. I confess I haven’t seen it in its entirety just yet – give me a few more days and then we’ll be on half term, and I’ll give it the attention it justly deserves. Instead, I thought I’d explore something else I saw on my newsfeed today.

Let’s talk about success and what it looks like. According to a survey conducted a few months ago by NBC’s News Decision Desk Poll on Gen Z – a generation from which I am removed by only a few years – the parameters for what constitutes success vary wildly between men and women on opposite ends of the political spectrum. I tend to do a bit of digging when I see stories like this, since you can’t take any news items at face value these days, but the results are certainly very believable.

The fact that neither children nor marital status were a priority for any demographic other than Trump-voting men is not really a surprise. When I asked my debating team to rank the success factors this afternoon, all three groups had children as their least important, and they are the demographic in the survey.

It’s equally unsurprising to see money concerns so high up the list for both male and female responses in both the Trump and Harris camps. There’s no dodging the fact that we’re living through a cost of living crisis in the West right now, and that Gen Z – and, it should be said, the tail end of the millennial generation, like myself – have been screwed over in a number of wicked ways: the rise of the smartphone, the surge in housing prices and university tuition and the creeping dread of AI, not to mention the anxiety crisis that has taken root in the fertile soil left behind by an almost total absence of conflict in the Western world and the genuine terror that has inspired for much of human history. When I was a kid and had yet to give the matter all that much thought, I remember wondering whether what the world needed was another damned good scrap just to let off some steam. Now that I’m older and potentially wiser, I’m not sure if I have entirely shaken that belief, though my reasoning may have changed somewhat.

If I have read the rubric correctly, those surveyed were asked to select the three factors that most aligned with their personal definition of success. Out of curiosity to see how I square with the generation below, I thought I’d rank them myself.

Having a job or a career you find fulfilling
Having children
Being married
Using your talents and resources to help others
Having enough money to do the things you want to do
Making your family or community proud
Achieving financial independence
Being spiritually grounded
Having emotional stability
Owning your own home
Having no debt
Fame and Influence
Being able to retire early

Now, it’s not an entirely fair test, as I am neither a true Gen Z-er, nor am I American, nor did I vote in the US election. But it does throw up a number of concerns – namely, that my responses to the survey align more closely with the average male Trump voter. My students have often described me as one of the most liberal-minded teachers in the school – so do these responses say more about their world view or my ability to mask my true beliefs?

I’m not sure. To me, success is not something that can be quantified in wealth or status. It is inextricably tied up with the pursuit of destiny. Life is nothing but a cycle without a quest, and quests are all about success. If at first you don’t succeed, you simply pick yourself up and try again.

In two of my three success factors, I confess I am failing miserably. Despite my (apparently) outwardly liberal persona, I am deeply traditional at heart, and it should come as no surprise to any in my circle that I want nothing more from life than a wife and children someday. That would be the ultimate success. Love, companionship and parenthood – these are surely the greatest quests of all. Everything else is a gift.

My generation seems to have always been at odds with the idea of raising a family, continually bumping it down the to-do list until it has fallen into the dark gap behind the sofa, somewhere beneath going on holiday more than once a year and running the London Marathon. Perhaps that explains why the birth rate here in the UK is at its lowest point since records began, averaging around 1.4 children to each woman. In an increasingly faithless world, we have put personal success (with the emphasis on the silent letter “I” in personal) on a pedestal and worshipped it to excess, and now we are paying the price for it. Being the contrarian that I am, it is all I can do to fight a current that is doing its very best to drown me.

So while I have the rare privilege of finding my job endlessly fulfilling (I only considered leaving it once, and that was at the height of COVID’s online learning period), I must admit that, by my own definitions of success, I am – for the present – relatively unsuccessful.

But there are plenty of reasons to be happy in my success.

I love my job. It allows me to spend almost all of my waking hours using my knowledge and resources to help others.

By carrying the torch as a teacher for the fifth generation, I know that I am making my family proud, and that gives me an enormous sense of fulfilment.

For all the churches and services I have attended throughout my life, I may not have found a spiritual community that speaks to me just yet – not even along the Camino – but then, my faith has always been a very personal thing, and I do feel grounded under the aegis of la Virgen del Rocio, whose mark I have borne on my wrist for the best part of a year.

I don’t own my own home – I can’t think of many in my generation who do, besides a few of the privately-educated folks I was at university with – but again, I’m not an American, and I suspect that level of privacy and property has a lot more currency across the pond.

Debt is simply a fact of life for my generation, so I’m not even sure why that’s on the list, and while I have little time for fame or influence, I care even less for the idea of retiring early when the job I have to do is so important, so I’m quite happy for it to languish at the bottom of the list. Maybe my thoughts on that will change when I am older. I hope not.