I remember the first time I heard about Timothée Chalamet (everyone remembers their first time).
He seemed to appear out of nowhere and had somehow been in many of my favourite movies. The first person I spoke to about him instantly replied that he was born with a silver spoon and had world-class acting lessons from a young age.
It was weird because I hadn’t asked about their thoughts on his social mobility. I asked if they liked him as an actor.
But to them it was like the answer was the same, that he was less impressive as both an actor and a person because he came from privilege.
I love an underdog story, we all do. We all want to cheer for the LeBrons of the world who came from nothing and became billionaires.
There is something about the present-day K-shaped economy that has accelerated our love for the underdog and our hatred for the upper-class overperformers.
People can’t seem to describe the success of another human being without using the term nepo-baby. That their success is somehow wrong, that they simply fell out of the womb and onto the stage.
Seduction
The reason this mindset resonates so much with society is that it solves two problems. By believing someone can come from nothing, specifically from a lower social class than your current standing, you retain hope.
It is never too late for you to accomplish the grand dreams you have when you hear things like Morgan Freeman didn’t get a serious acting job until his 50s or that Andrew Carnegie was once a child labourer in a cotton mill.
These are stories that fill you with hope and belief in the capitalist dream. The meritocracy appears real and tangible and yours for the taking.
Conversely, the fuck-you-nepo-babies-mindset solves the other problem. If you are yet to make it, and you believe that you can do so by your own grit and merit, then why have others already achieved things that you haven’t?
The answer is simple, they were handed it, while you have to work your little tush off and the world no longer seems fair. But if you believe that they never had to try at all, you feel comfy again.
Instead of learning from people who have accomplished the things you wish to, you can completely write off their accomplishments. As a matter of fact they didn’t accomplish anything at all, they just inherited it.
Social Mobility
So without the term nepo-baby, how is one to measure success?
To me the answer is social mobility + happiness.
This is the equivalent of assigning weight handicaps to horses before they run a race. We do not all come from the same background and the world is not fair. There is an enormous amount of luck to be found in the journey of every human.
Even those violently typing eat the rich tend to drastically underestimate their own privilege compared to others around the world.
How and where you were born has a high correlation to your relative success. In the US, siblings’ incomes correlate about as strongly as their heights do.
So if we are forced to answer the question of relative success, we should use a relative measuring stick. I think it should be based on how far you have ascended from where you came from.
This means that those who started from higher on the social ladder have a lower ceiling for their relative success, hence the debates in Forbes about the ‘self-made’ title.
This thesis says Timothée is less successful than Mark Wahlberg. Mark grew up the youngest of nine and dropped out of school at fourteen. But they are both deserving of respect and applause.
I looked it up and Chalamet’s upbringing wasn’t even upper class. His mum was a dancer and his dad was a journalist. Turns out you really can just throw nepo-baby at someone without knowing anything about their status.
Money might be able to buy you access to Hollywood but it sure as shit doesn’t put you in the lead role of Dune.
What is Success?
So far in this article I have been talking about a helpful way to measure the success of other people.
When I judge myself I don’t just care about social mobility. I care about whether I’m happy and enjoying my life far more than my tax bracket.
We rarely judge ourselves in the same way we do others. I haven’t heard many people refer to themselves as a nepo-baby or a trust fund kid.
There are people who are far more objectively successful than I am, but by my own definitions are failures.
They are working 80-hour weeks and not seeing their children. I can judge their objective success based on their social mobility, while also knowing that I do not strive to be like that.
In this article I spoke about the most common deathbed regrets, and number one on the list is living a life that was inauthentic.
If we use society’s generic measures of success as the end goal, we never get to find out what makes us happy.
Me (fkn legend)
Now let’s continue the examples with someone we all know and love, me!!!
Now I know, I know. It’s quite rich of me to tell you all last week about my experience with Fuck You Money then ask everyone to empathise with the upper class. So let me share a little about my own story.
I grew up privileged and in a reasonably wealthy family (I knew it!! I hear you scream).
We had a nice house near the coast, until the global financial crisis hit. My dad was over-levered in property and got rekt.
I was just coming into the age where I was able to appreciate my good fortune when it had begun to disappear. I’m not going to pretend we were thrown into poverty, but a small two-bedroom apartment and a new school were quite abrupt changes for a young Jords.
It was my first experience of moving down in social mobility as a family.
Relative to this basis, I have moved upward. More importantly, I’m really fucking happy. I’m grateful for what I have and I don’t have a significant greed for more, which means I can think of myself as successful.
Maybe in this section I was meant to buy your favour with some generic I came from nothing and look at me now kind of buzz words, but alas I prefer an authentic human story.
Relativity
There is a consensus that those who are born into wealth must feel they have an easy life, and those who are not feel they have a difficult one.
But all that I know about the brain would lead me to think that this is not the correct understanding of human experience.
It is simply impossible to understand the inner workings of another’s mind. It’s why doctors ask patients to rate pain on a scale of 1-10, my 8 might be your 3, but it’s all relative.
Being born into wealth then being forced to run the family company might feel as limiting as being born into poverty and being forced to work in the family market stall.
What if they wanted to write sub-par Substacks each week and are instead forced to work in an office? Who will weep for the upper-middle-class-white-guy?
If a billionaire’s day-to-day is frictionless and he is suddenly faced with an unexpected disruption, then his immediate reaction might be despair. Real, genuine, despair.
In that moment there is nothing separating him from any other person who has faced an unwanted change. The working man’s punctured tyre or the child’s broken toy all converge into one shared experience of ‘fuck I don’t want this to be happening’.
Everything we experience is relative to our own baselines, and in those moments of disruption we can find similarity even from a very far distance.
Appreciation
Society is always quick to point and laugh at rich kids who blew it all, or became addicts, or ended their lives.
What if you achieved everything in your wildest dreams, and became a parent to a rich kid?
Maybe this is the lens that would bring us all closer together. If we achieve our upward social mobility and procreate, then we have birthed a tall poppy. A child whose every achievement will be faulted and critiqued, because of your actions.
Your sacrifice and suffering are completely forgotten, only your success is judged. Next time you reach for the term nepo-baby, sit for a moment and ponder whether they were really gifted their success or whether they did their best and moved up in the world.
My dad grew up in the country shooting kangaroos, then he achieved a lot and provided a good life for his family. Then he lost a lot. Then found his own version of a happy life on the other side.
He was always home for his children, present at sports games. Now he’s often found with a big smile on his face and spends absolutely zero time worrying about social mobility.
Yes, I believe that when we are judging the success of others we should use a relative measuring stick, but I also think we shouldn’t waste so much energy caring.
Entire industries exist just because people fucking love to compare and judge others. Your time is far more productively spent focussing on what makes a good life for you and your loved ones. How you define a happy life.
So I say go off Timothée, I can’t wait for Dune 3.
Because if we have convinced ourselves that somebody’s best is somehow less than our own, we are not happy.
Yup, so true. Good fortune can be lucky or inherited, but it is mostly earned by determination, perseverance backed by a solid plan. It is too easy as you get richer to want to upgrade your car, house everything with the need them to make more whilst missing 'life' and the happiness a balanced one can bring. It (money) can never be enough if you are not careful. The people who are uncomfortable/jealous being around a rich person for no other reason than they are rich also need to have a good look at themselves I have found. They can be just as big a dick.
Says a lot that i was expecting a picture of Bronny James somewhere in here...
Another banger Jords.