I am the prototypical American success story. Not quite a hedge fund billionaire or rock-star politician, but comfortably in the first percentile. I live in a million-dollar home with eighty-mile views in a top-ranking little knowledge-economy town of meticulously restored brick federals, nickel hardware and granite countertops. I do venture capital and real estate deals. My family and I just returned from a not atypical vacation of private charter flights, organic meals on white linen and a private bungalow nestled between wilderness rainforest and Pacific beach sand.
I have bathed in camera light during press conferences, political opponents skulking in the rear of ballrooms, forced to tolerate my applause lines, sycophants and well-wishers beaming and waiting in line to shake my hand or offer their help. I chair multiple worthwhile volunteer organizations. I keynote on subjects of my choice and get awards at annual meetings. Like millions of my baby boomer generation, I am gifted with a pampered and stimulating life. My toughest challenges are questions as to what creative, fulfilling and meaningful things to do next. My physical needs and wishes thoroughly satisfied, I am the grateful beneficiary of the staggeringly immense gift of human progress and the American culture which has so well fostered it.
But after a couple of decades racking up successes, they morphed into my personal yardsticks of failure. My million dollar house, investment portfolios and political achievements became microscopic and pointless. Rather than finding comfort in abundance and personal autonomy, I found myself wallowing in unattainable obsessions, things beyond my reach, what I could not be. Rather than taking joy in the simple pleasures of a stone wall well-built or my son’s delight in learning to ride his bike, I mooned over the National Press Club speech I would never give, the industry rollup I would never pull off.
Was the cause some defect in my philosophy, faith or brain chemistry? Was this just another boomer facing mortality and the irrelevance of no longer being young? Or is there something poisonous in the American success story? I wanted answers, not pharmaceuticals. So I embarked on a five year research project that took me deep into neuroscience, social epidemiology and school shooters – and to yet more questions.
Why are one-in-three American adults pervasively dissatisfied with their lives? Why is major depression seven times more likely among those born after 1970 than their grandparents? Why are one-in-four of us addicted to at least one substance or behavior? Why is America drowning in record personal and public debt? Why do people whose annual earnings average half a million dollars describe the American economy as “unfair?” Why did over 100,000 people humiliate themselves this year auditioning for Fox’s American Idol? Why are eighty percent of women unhappy with their bodies?
What is it about contemporary America that connects the swelling incidence of depression, behavioral addictions, eating disorders, debt, materialism, sleep deprivation, family breakdown, rudeness, fame fixation, ethical collapse, mistrust and appalling acts of personal violence?
I probe these questions, explanations and individual and societal remediations in my new book, OverSuccess: Healing the American Obsession with Wealth, Fame, Power, and Perfection. You buy the book in paper or digital form on Amazon here.