The Failure of Success

In recent times, success has become the measure of all things, and labeling it on a personal, professional, or social level often appears to signal the triumph of the individual over the collective.

Whereas in other moments of our history, much of success was associated with honor, good character, and the reputation of those “knights-errant” who kept their word to the very end, today to speak of success is often to speak of “you are worth as much as you own.”

This mantra, repeated endlessly in our society, has become something more than a slogan; it has taken root in our lives as the foundation of a guiding principle that shapes, moderates, and directs much of individual and collective behavior. So much so that our existence now seems inconceivable outside the elongated shadow of success—partly due to the singular legacy we have inherited, and partly because of our own peculiar way of constructing social reality.

Yes, success is socially constructed. It is the result of a model that, far from being improvised, began to take shape with the Industrial Revolution and was perfected through the development of a capitalist system of production in which everything that failed to grow economically was doomed to inevitable failure.

One way or another, the construct of “success”—which originally crystallized, in good faith, as something allied with prosperity and as a driver of the economic system—ended up becoming a goal in itself, pursued at the expense of serious consequences for the individual, for society, and for all the dimensions that shape them, such as politics, ideology, and ethics, to name only a few.

When, moreover, this productive model is reinforced by ideological and religious aspects—as the sociologist Max Weber pointed out in his work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—we begin to understand how success has become a key notion for grasping what drives our Western consumer society.

Connected to these questions, social scientists continue to engage in the perennial debate between two domains of reality: the economic and the social. Each side seeks to establish the primacy of one over the other as the true driver of the system.

At the risk of oversimplifying, we can identify two “engines” for development. One is based on promoting a set of social measures as the triggers of economic progress. On the opposite end, another engine prioritizes economic growth as the foundation for building a model of social development.

In our social model, success—and consequently failure, the two sides of the same coin—are constantly tied to the idea that if, for some reason, one does not achieve certain levels of accomplishment, progress, recognition, or however one may wish to call it, then (mistakenly) something is deemed to be wrong with that person.

So normalized has this scheme become that it functions as a kind of “roadmap.” For example, if someone has not, by a certain age, finished higher education, entered the job market and obtained stable employment, earned professional promotions, and purchased a home and a vehicle (ideally a luxury one—please allow the irony), that individual may well be branded a second-class citizen or a failure.

This is why the problem is not with striving for personal success, with people’s efforts to improve themselves each day. The problem lies in a misinterpretation that, in a permanent state of competitive alertness, leads individuals to frame life as a process in which their gains—the very ones that supposedly make them “successful winners”—are, in fact, the losses of others, as sketched out in game theory.

One undeniable truth is that success has many definitions—possibly as many as there are individuals—each linked to our personal histories shaped by different contexts and times. Yet it is equally true that, if not managed carefully, the opportunity costs of success may compromise our personal, family, and existential horizons, along with all the other dimensions that give meaning to the life we are called to live and, as much as circumstances allow, to shape.

That is the challenge—and also the opportunity: to become better people. And from there—only in some cases—perhaps to be “successfully” admired.